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There's a difference though: If it were politically feasible, a marginally higher gas tax could fund all road construction & maintenance. People might drive a l

There's a difference though: If it were politically feasible, a marginally higher gas tax could fund all road construction & maintenance. People might drive a little less, but the system wouldn't go into a death spiral. If mass transit riders had to fund the system purely through user fees, the result for most systems would be a collapse, as fewer riders would require higher prices leading to fewer riders...

CalRobert 11y ago
At least in the US, the gas tax would need to be substantially higher. If we accounted for the externalities (dead people hit by cars, mostly, and perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable) the gas tax would rise even more. If anyone asks I'll dig up the math because citation is important (and I'm not sure I did it right years ago), but I remember doing some calculation a while back that we could pay to remove the carbon emitted by gasoline with a tax that made it around $15 a gallon. That doesn't seem bad, really. Perfectly happy societies function with $8-$11 a gallon gas, and not destroying civilization seems worth it. Edit - though I realize that by the latter argument, reducing the population is, in a horribly macabre way, a positive externality. It's not one I support, though.
- pdonis 11y ago
  > perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable The problem with trying to base taxes on something like this is that you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable. I certainly am not convinced that climate science is accurate enough to support such a claim (or economics, for that matter, since part of the claim is really about the economics of adaptation to climate change vs. mitigation of climate change).
  - CalRobert 11y ago
    "you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable" Why? Wouldn't we actually need to be really, really sure this consequence was extremely unlikely? If an asteroid had only a 50/50 chance of hitting Earth would we be wise to disregard it?
    - pdonis 11y ago
      > Wouldn't we actually need to be really, really sure this consequence was extremely unlikely? No, because that would imply a level of predictive power that we do not have in climate science and economics. Basically, with the accuracy of prediction we currently have in those fields, it is impossible to be sure that the impact of climate change will be extremely unlikely to cause severe disruption of our civilization. And the key point is that that is true regardless of whether or not we spend trillions of dollars on trying to mitigate climate change. So the only real choice we have is adaptation; any resources we spend on getting better at adapting to climate change will at least move us in a positive direction, whereas we can't be sure of that with regard to resources spent on attempts at mitigation. In order for adaptation to not be a rational response, we would have to be so sure that climate change was going to cause severe disruption that it was worth trying to mitigate the change even though we can't predict what specific actions would do that. In other words, we would have to be so desperate that it was worth trying whatever mitigations we could think of without even trying to predict their effects. Climate change alarmists would like us all to believe that we are that desperate, but the case for that does not stand up to scrutiny. > If an asteroid had only a 50/50 chance of hitting Earth would we be wise to disregard it? If an asteroid had a 50/50 chance of hitting the Earth, we would be able to predict that specific actions we could take could reduce that probability to something negligible, because we have very accurate predictive power with regard to the orbits of astronomical bodies, at least on the relevant timescales (years to decades). Given that, of course we would not be wise to disregard the prediction. But, as above, that argument does not apply to the climate, because we can't predict the effects of any specific actions well enough to know how, or even if, they will reduce the probability of a severe disruption to our civilization.
pdonis 11y ago
> If mass transit riders had to fund the system purely through user fees, the result for most systems would be a collapse If this is true, doesn't it imply that mass transit is not economically viable?

CalRobert 11y ago

At least in the US, the gas tax would need to be substantially higher. If we accounted for the externalities (dead people hit by cars, mostly, and perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable) the gas tax would rise even more. If anyone asks I'll dig up the math because citation is important (and I'm not sure I did it right years ago), but I remember doing some calculation a while back that we could pay to remove the carbon emitted by gasoline with a tax that made it around $15 a gallon. That doesn't seem bad, really. Perfectly happy societies function with $8-$11 a gallon gas, and not destroying civilization seems worth it. Edit - though I realize that by the latter argument, reducing the population is, in a horribly macabre way, a positive externality. It's not one I support, though.

pdonis 11y ago
> perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable The problem with trying to base taxes on something like this is that you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable. I certainly am not convinced that climate science is accurate enough to support such a claim (or economics, for that matter, since part of the claim is really about the economics of adaptation to climate change vs. mitigation of climate change).
- CalRobert 11y ago
  "you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable" Why? Wouldn't we actually need to be really, really sure this consequence was extremely unlikely? If an asteroid had only a 50/50 chance of hitting Earth would we be wise to disregard it?
  - pdonis 11y ago
    > Wouldn't we actually need to be really, really sure this consequence was extremely unlikely? No, because that would imply a level of predictive power that we do not have in climate science and economics. Basically, with the accuracy of prediction we currently have in those fields, it is impossible to be sure that the impact of climate change will be extremely unlikely to cause severe disruption of our civilization. And the key point is that that is true regardless of whether or not we spend trillions of dollars on trying to mitigate climate change. So the only real choice we have is adaptation; any resources we spend on getting better at adapting to climate change will at least move us in a positive direction, whereas we can't be sure of that with regard to resources spent on attempts at mitigation. In order for adaptation to not be a rational response, we would have to be so sure that climate change was going to cause severe disruption that it was worth trying to mitigate the change even though we can't predict what specific actions would do that. In other words, we would have to be so desperate that it was worth trying whatever mitigations we could think of without even trying to predict their effects. Climate change alarmists would like us all to believe that we are that desperate, but the case for that does not stand up to scrutiny. > If an asteroid had only a 50/50 chance of hitting Earth would we be wise to disregard it? If an asteroid had a 50/50 chance of hitting the Earth, we would be able to predict that specific actions we could take could reduce that probability to something negligible, because we have very accurate predictive power with regard to the orbits of astronomical bodies, at least on the relevant timescales (years to decades). Given that, of course we would not be wise to disregard the prediction. But, as above, that argument does not apply to the climate, because we can't predict the effects of any specific actions well enough to know how, or even if, they will reduce the probability of a severe disruption to our civilization.

pdonis 11y ago

> If mass transit riders had to fund the system purely through user fees, the result for most systems would be a collapse If this is true, doesn't it imply that mass transit is not economically viable?