It would be simpler to write broad legislation to (a) tax all CO2 sources and then (b) give the tax revenue back to the people, similar to the child tax credit.

Call it the "American Carbon Dividend" or the "Advancing America Dividend".

Done quickly enough, it might be enough to keep Congress from falling back under control of the insurrectionists, come mid-terms.

Use the tax to offset the other taxes at lower income levels. It should be profit neutral for the government.

The tax will probably need to go to carbon capture at this point.

"Carbon dividend" makes Carbon Tax progressive.

Poor people are exactly who will be hurt by a move away from fossil fuels. The problem isn't that someone is burning fossil fuels, it's that everyone is.

Or instead of going after pot growers, maybe your effort could go towards making my neighbor stop BBQing every weekend?

Your neighbor has the right to BBQ, there’s a point where we need to live our lives and stop advocating for denial of comfort.

I mean, a $15/tonne carbon(dioxide) tax would raise the cost of a 20lb bag of charcoal by $0.50, or about 3% based on a quick search. So the BBQing itself is probably not prohibitively expensive.

The price of the beef burgers would go up by 7% according to Beef Magazine, 150% according to vegnews.com, and 40% according to NY Times.

Charcoal is carbon neutral, it's simply releasing the CO2 absorbed from the atmosphere by the trees that made the charcoal. So there shouldn't be a carbon tax on charcoal.

The production of charcoal itself emits a lot of CO2

Source? Isn't it basically the same process as biochar, which has been proposed as a carbon capture technology (the idea being that you bury the resulting charcoal instead of burning it)?

Yes, as far as I can tell the footprint of pyrolysis portion is basically the same (various wild seeming claims notwithstanding) though I haven't dug into this deeply, and specifically haven't looked into it in over a decade.

However on a full cycle basis the difference is biochar is typically made from local material (mostly the leftover waste from the prior year's harvest) which is right there (zero transport) and would otherwise rot and release methane and CO2 on its own, even if plowed into the field.

Charcoal is made from trees, typically cut down and transported to a factory and then transported to the customer.

In general I am not in favor of burning trees, enjoyable as it is on a cold night out in the forest.

For context, here's a news article from March of this year:

"The biggest food price hikes are in meats, with pork and beef up 14% to 20% compared with a year ago."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meat-prices-pandemic-inflation-...

This is an interesting point but I can't see any way that we create a sustainable system that works like this. Carbon dioxide is an unaccounted part of the system. Inevitably, whether it's now or in 1,000 years, a functional society will need to account for these kinds of externalities.

"The bill for magical thinking arrives with unpredictable timing but thunderous force." -pmarca

> Your neighbor has the right to BBQ

Not constitutionally. I demand that people stop advocating for general solutions and instead focus their action on my petty personal grievances for a marginal return.

Well, yes, the federal constitution provides no rights including to bbq. It is a negative document which details restrictions on government.

That's a big woosh right there. The parent was making a an arbitrary comparison to another arbitrary and trolling comment regarding indoor plant cultivation.