Seems fine as long as they pay to clean up their mess, which means that their costs will be higher which they pass on.

The next time I see a farmer I'll pass along that it is "fine" that he continue growing the food people eat. He will appreciate having permission so to do.

I don't think you understand what I was saying "fine" too.

But people need to pay for the damage they inflict on the world. Nobody is so "special" or snowflake that they get exempted. Farmers are adults, they can be treated like any other adult in our society.

It seems that we are redefining things such that the only way to cause "damage" to the world is via carbon emissions (humans are very good at focusing on one metric to the exclusion of all others). Is there any "damage" done in having greater numbers of the world's poor die of starvation since we've reduced agricultural output in our quest to reduce carbon emissions? Perhaps we can dabble in fertilizer reduction after we've exhausted carbon capture from coal fired electricity plants (particularly in China and the US who are the largest emitters and still use a lot of coal) or at least converted those to natural gas. Messing with agriculture, particularly right now with the current geopolitical situation is very stupid.

For that to work we'd need both a carbon tax (or something equivalent) and a heavy tariff on goods that are imported from countries without such a tax. As long as both of those things can be enacted at once, I'm in favor.

The point is that the farmer and miner become the saints doing penance on our behalf - we all benefit from the work they do, then insist that they handle all the costs of the negative externalities their work produces.

Sure, I suppose that could be priced into what they charge for their products. That may be a nontrivial challenge to work out, though, and it's possible they'll no longer be able to make a sustainable product after doing so.

Life is complicated and easy answers are often wrong.

> The point is that the farmer and miner become the saints doing penance on our behalf - we all benefit from the work they do

Seems more like this kind of take is an attempt to canonize them.

They're economic actors. Their work is very important, but that's why they, you know, take money in exchange for their output.

Excusing externalities is how we get corporate structures where officers and shareholders are richly rewarded and tax payers get to pay for (and often live in) the SuperFund site after the company leaves.

The cost will just be passed to you anyway.

> which means that their costs will be higher which they pass on.

There are better optimisations for emissions than chasing farmers and miners.

Such as?

I'm generally anti-carbon tax because it's the solution to the problem that is obvious, simple, and wrong. But when there are no other solutions, charging for cleanup is the way to go.

Farmers and miners pay for their costs. They can continue to do so and pass their costs on. Some farmers, at least in the US, we massively subsidize to a ridiculous extent in a make-work program for massive amounts of soy and corn. But this is an economic choice that is relatively recent in the history of the US, and we can decide at any moment to improve the efficiency of the economy by making externalized costs internal.

Why is a carbon tax wrong? It seems very similar in principle to your proposal?

I think a tax on certain sectors can work fine. Especially those sectors with no other options, and that must simply pay to extract the CO2 from the atmosphere that they put into it. However, an economy-wide tax ignores the differing amounts of technological development difficulty, access to capital, and political influence that varies so widely between sectors.

So a carbon tax on electricity generation sources works ok to incentivize a switch and internalize the externalities, but it's pretty equivalent to the general ITC/PTC subsidies that have recently been passed, with the exception that they are sector specific.

An economy wide carbon tax does almost nothing to incentivize decarbonization of steel or concrete, as the tech isn't there, nobody has spare money to invest in a solution, and the tax wouldn't necessarily increase the price of end products much. They need very specific industrial policy in these sectors to develop alternatives and put them into production.

Finally a carbon tax creates an entirely unified political coalition, across many sectors of the economy, to oppose the tax. So setting the tax at a level that is right to incentivize change is guaranteed to be nearly impossible, because od the breadth and political strength of the opposition to it. Specific carrots and sticks for each sector are what can drive real change in each sector.

If it was 1980, I'd be supporting a carbon tax. But we need to move far more quickly now to change our economic production systems than a carbon tax could ever conceivably achieve.

I think a blanket carbon tax at least creates a situation where everyone is paying , in some way, for the externalities they're causing. If some industries don't want to decarbonize because the tax is rounding error to them, then maybe you'd need additional rules or regulations, or maybe we need public investment in some new technology.

I can't think of a case where exempting some group from a carbon tax would be good policy. There is a pretty good argument though that a carbon tax would be regressive, and probably should be compensated for in some way so that poor people don't come out worse off, such as by reducing income tax in the lower brackets.

I think the hardest sector to decarbonize is going to be the military (with the exception of some small percentage of navy ships that are nuclear powered). I could see plug-in hybrid army vehicles eventually being a thing, though. Being able to run off of either diesel or electricity provides a lot of logistical flexibility. You can save the petroleum for when you really need to move long distances.