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> As a free market proponent, I assume you support including the externalities of pollution from fossil fuels into their costs? How do you even calculate that?
by maratd 10y ago
> As a free market proponent, I assume you support including the externalities of pollution from fossil fuels into their costs?
How do you even calculate that?
For you to calculate externalities, you'd need to be able to assign costs. What's the cost of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? You can't calculate something like that.
So let me answer with a simple NO. We don't need anything like that. Cleaner technologies are overtaking and will replace fossil fuels. Our energy generation technology has never been stagnant and it won't be now. We'll move on to the next thing soon enough.
- chrischen 10y agoThe cost is how much people would pay to prevent you for emitting it into their air.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 10y ago> For you to calculate externalities, you'd need to be able to assign costs. What's the cost of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? You can't calculate something like that. You are wrong. http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/pricing-carbon http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/pricing-carbon
- darawk 10y agoYou can absolutely calculate that. There is an entire sub-field of economics devoted to doing just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_economics And it is pretty obviously the right way to think about the problem, if you spend two seconds considering it: The environment is a public good. Which means that it is owned by all of us. Which means that when it is harmed, we have all lost something of value. Therefore, the people doing the harm owe us money in the same way that Subway owes you money if they accidentally put arsenic in their meatballs. Why do places like Subway so rarely have arsenic in their meatballs? Because it imposes an enormous cost on them, so they optimize their business to avoid that cost. If environmental pollution entailed similar costs, businesses would optimize those costs away (to the extent possible). This is ultimately a far more effective solution than any regulation ever could be. It's just a matter of choosing the right price. Because then what you have is the ability for private individuals to make a living for themselves rooting out cheaters and suing them in court. The system becomes self-policing because everyone's monetary incentives are aligned with the environment, and it is all mediated by one very simple, elegant idea: property rights. The environment is our collective property and right now private individuals and entities are destroying it for free. That is simple theft, and fixing the enforcement of those rights is the solution.
- tomp 10y agoThis is why I oppose free trade to some extent. Chine isn't only competing on the price of their labor; they're also competing on the price of their environment - pollution is simply cheaper there than in the US or EU. However, the difference is, their environment is our environment! Personally, I would install transparent tariffs for the whole world - they would be based on the estimated cost of externalities depending on the laws in the country of origin, and go down as soon as said countries adopt (and credibly enforce) better environment protection laws.
- nickik 10y agoYour solution will never actually work. Fact is, that so far in human history, if you want to get from poverty to being rich, you need to have significant pollution. But your solution it not really needed in the long run. Luckily, the amount of pollution generally goes down as countries grow richer. China is doing it cleaner then Britain or the US did it back in the day. We need Free Trade so that we can grow, growth will lead (on avg) to a cleaner environment. The next society can then maybe do it completely with clean energy.
- nickik 10y ago> The environment is a public good. Which means that it is owned by all of us. That not strictly speaking true. We all have a stake in it but we don't own it. Also 'the environment' is not a singular thing, lots of people own lots of different parts. > Therefore, the people doing the harm owe us money in the same way that Subway owes you money if they accidentally put arsenic in their meatballs. That might be true, but if their tiny bit of a harmful substance in every single sub, they do not have to pay reparations to each person. The amount of damage done, is so small that it does not it would not be enforced. The same problem exists with environmental economics. > It's just a matter of choosing the right price. Prices are never a choice. The need to emerge from human interaction and property rights. I do however agree with me. The problem is how to slice up the environment in different property rights that can be enforced. This problem can often be solved on a local level, such as forest pollution. It is however far harder to do for things that are far larger, like oceans or the stratosphere. However, such approaches if possible are to be preferred. Sadly the typical environmentalist (and Nonprofits) are anti-market and that is holding everybody back.
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- mikeash 10y agoCoal is killing a million people a year right now. Is it really "soon enough"? You can't precisely calculate the costs of the externalities, but you can estimate it decently. A tax based on a decent estimate would be far better than just saying "zero cost, everybody gets to pollute for free" and then trying to patch it up with regulations as we do now.
- back_beyond 10y agoWithout cheap energy in the form of coal, how many would die each year?
- mikeash 10y agoDo you mean compared to an alternative where people's energy comes from burning wood and dung, or one where energy comes from widespread solar, wind, and storage?
- back_beyond 10y agoI mean the alternative that would exist today, absent coal.
- mikeash 10y agoAs in, if coal had never been used for energy in human history? How is that relevant?
- back_beyond 10y agoYou misunderstand.
- mikeash 10y agoYou could, I dunno... explain? I guess you mean a world just like today, but coal power instantly evaporated? There would be mass chaos and death, but again I don't see the relevance.
- elihu 10y agoCalculating harm is difficult (what price do you put on a refugee displaced from some now-unlivable region?), but one could instead calculate the cost of removing that CO2 from the atmosphere by whatever is currently the most economical means (aside from natural processes that happen without human intervention). Realistically, though, it's more likely that the value of any carbon tax will not be calculated by some formula, but rather by what a handful of democratically-elected leaders deem is reasonable. Which might not be completely satisfying from a fairness point of view, but I think it's greatly preferable to not having a carbon tax at all (which is equivalent to saying, "quantifying harm is hard to determine, so we'll just pretend it's zero").
- leohutson 10y agoThe way I'd calculate it is to decide on a target for emissions, and progressively raise the tax until that target is hit.
- vintermann 10y agoIgnoring things because you can't measure them well or negotiate a price on them, isn't bad capitalism. It's just all round bad thinking.