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The current situation is largely caused by artificially low prices of fossil fuels. We are borrowing from the future to fuel our consumption. If we agreed to i

by jwr 9y ago

The current situation is largely caused by artificially low prices of fossil fuels. We are borrowing from the future to fuel our consumption. If we agreed to increase those prices by, say, 5 to 10 times and used the money to fund research towards removing carbon from the atmosphere, the world would become a much better place. Problem is, everybody is afraid of the shock this would cause and everybody thinks only about his little square of the woods.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
In Poland, the government recently announced they want to add +0.25 PLN ($0.07, or ~6% of current gasoline prices) of tax for gasoline. The stated reason is increasing the budgets for maintenance of local roads. Regardless of the issues of stated vs. real reasons, the reaction of people in the country was totally predictable: people are enraged. How dares the government raise the fuel price? You get a similar reaction if you try to suggest an emission tax to any driver. With this mindset, sadly, we won't get anywhere.
- sampo 9y ago
  Europe already has gasoline prices that are 2x to 2.5x higher than in the US. So compared to US, Europe has already gotten somewhere.
scythe 9y ago
Carbon taxes are the way to go. Why? Because they allow governments to set policy empirically. You can raise the tax a little, bit-by-bit, until you start seeing negative effects. Carbon taxes allow a legislature of non-economists to procedurally find the maximum reduction that the economy can bear, which is good, because obviously you don't want more than that, and given the nature of the situation you probably don't want less. The difference between this and a cap-and-trade model is that with cap-and-trade, there's a lot of money tied up in the carbon shares allocated, so lowering the cap is politically impossible. Big corporations like it because they have an easier time acquiring carbon credits than small companies, because they have political influence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading#Incentives_and_allocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading#Incent... Cap-and-trade worked with other kinds of emissions because those emissions are less common and come only from certain industries, whereas carbon comes from everywhere. As such, it wasn't possible for the acid rain producers to lobby Congress to raise the cap on NOx. Or to not lower it. Furthermore, the market is small enough that it was possible for charitable organizations to make a dent by buying emissions allowances and "retiring" them -- which is extremely unlikely to matter for carbon given the size of the carbon market. Carbon taxes are fairer and simpler, and it's harder for a company to weasel out. Some observers have suggested that an industry could lobby to be exempt, but this seems unlikely: how many industries have successfully exempted themselves from income tax? From VAT? By contrast, this happened: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-credits-system-tarnished-wikileaks/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-credits-sy... > a diplomatic cable published last month by the WikiLeaks website reveals that most of the CDM projects in India should not have been certified because they did not reduce emissions beyond those that would have been achieved without foreign investment. Indian officials have apparently known about the problem for at least two years. >[...] Today, more than 720 Indian projects have been approved and have gained some 120 million tonnes' worth of carbon credits, a large fraction of the 750 million tonnes issued since 2005 (see 'Cleaning up'). > Yet on the evidence of discussions at the meeting, most of the carbon-offset projects in India fail to meet the CDM requirements set by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

by jwr 9y ago

TeMPOraL 9y ago

In Poland, the government recently announced they want to add +0.25 PLN ($0.07, or ~6% of current gasoline prices) of tax for gasoline. The stated reason is increasing the budgets for maintenance of local roads. Regardless of the issues of stated vs. real reasons, the reaction of people in the country was totally predictable: people are enraged. How dares the government raise the fuel price? You get a similar reaction if you try to suggest an emission tax to any driver. With this mindset, sadly, we won't get anywhere.

sampo 9y ago
Europe already has gasoline prices that are 2x to 2.5x higher than in the US. So compared to US, Europe has already gotten somewhere.

scythe 9y ago

Carbon taxes are the way to go. Why? Because they allow governments to set policy empirically. You can raise the tax a little, bit-by-bit, until you start seeing negative effects. Carbon taxes allow a legislature of non-economists to procedurally find the maximum reduction that the economy can bear, which is good, because obviously you don't want more than that, and given the nature of the situation you probably don't want less. The difference between this and a cap-and-trade model is that with cap-and-trade, there's a lot of money tied up in the carbon shares allocated, so lowering the cap is politically impossible. Big corporations like it because they have an easier time acquiring carbon credits than small companies, because they have political influence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading#Incentives_and_allocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading#Incent... Cap-and-trade worked with other kinds of emissions because those emissions are less common and come only from certain industries, whereas carbon comes from everywhere. As such, it wasn't possible for the acid rain producers to lobby Congress to raise the cap on NOx. Or to not lower it. Furthermore, the market is small enough that it was possible for charitable organizations to make a dent by buying emissions allowances and "retiring" them -- which is extremely unlikely to matter for carbon given the size of the carbon market. Carbon taxes are fairer and simpler, and it's harder for a company to weasel out. Some observers have suggested that an industry could lobby to be exempt, but this seems unlikely: how many industries have successfully exempted themselves from income tax? From VAT? By contrast, this happened: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-credits-system-tarnished-wikileaks/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-credits-sy... > a diplomatic cable published last month by the WikiLeaks website reveals that most of the CDM projects in India should not have been certified because they did not reduce emissions beyond those that would have been achieved without foreign investment. Indian officials have apparently known about the problem for at least two years. >[...] Today, more than 720 Indian projects have been approved and have gained some 120 million tonnes' worth of carbon credits, a large fraction of the 750 million tonnes issued since 2005 (see 'Cleaning up'). > Yet on the evidence of discussions at the meeting, most of the carbon-offset projects in India fail to meet the CDM requirements set by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.