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Every energy source should pull its own weight, including the costs of its negative externalities. We should not be subsidizing electric cars or solar or nucle

Every energy source should pull its own weight, including the costs of its negative externalities. We should not be subsidizing electric cars or solar or nuclear. The success of a solution should not depend on convincing 51% of the legislature of its benefits. Plenty of people disagree about the dangers of carbon dioxide, but we tax many things that are beneficial. Can't we tax something that might be very dangerous instead of something we KNOW is beneficial? Like hard work. Why do we tax people at a higher rate if they work 10 hours in a day instead of 6? I'd rather tax CO2 more and hard work a little bit less. But that is just one positive thing we could tax less to balance any tax on CO2. One possible tradeoff. Couldn't such a tradeoff help sell this to people who object to taxing CO2? Or is taxing hard work as much as possible MORE important than reducing this risk to Earth?

bilbo0s 8y ago
We need to separate the idea of taxing CO2 from the idea of making nuclear viable. There are many, many good reasons to tax CO2. It's just that even if you do, it's likely that nuclear will still not fare very well in the overall generation picture. If you consider China, which kneecaps CO2 generating technologies in fairly draconian fashion, those technologies still dominate China's generation sources. Nuclear comes in way behind sources like hydroelectric and wind. (And that's even with the Chinese government propping it up.) Nuclear is simply a very costly technology to implement compared to throwing up some windmills in Texas and Oklahoma or something. It's just much cheaper. And the infrastructure is already in place for a lot of the CO2 generating sources, so investments don't have to be as large. I suspect you would need a fairly huge tax to make nuclear beat natural gas for instance. And even if it did, what about all the other sources? Wind/pumped storage hydro? Solar where appropriate? Geothermal or hydroelectric? It's just not as easy a thing as it seems. But taxing CO2 has numerous other benefits, even if saving nuclear is not one of them.
Latteland 8y ago
We incentivize a lot of things (like, billions for farmers, to keep the price of food lower and availability stable; we incentivize hedge fund billionaires by the carried interest deduction). Doing this for new industries that have promise and benefit, for a limited time, seems like a good idea to me. The incentives are reduced over time. For example, Tesla will soon reach 200k cars in the us and then their ev reduction will be cut in half and then go away after that. I'm not aware we tax by the hour, can you explain? We tax by income.
Latteland 8y ago
We incentivize a lot of things (like, billions for farmers, to keep the price of food lower and availability stable; we incentivize hedge fund billionaires by the carried interest deduction). Doing this for new industries that have promise and benefit, for a limited time, seems like a good idea to me. The incentives are reduced over time. For example, Tesla will soon reach 200k cars in the us and then their ev reduction will be cut in half and then go away after that. I'm not aware we tax by the hour, can you explain? We tax by income.

bilbo0s 8y ago

We need to separate the idea of taxing CO2 from the idea of making nuclear viable. There are many, many good reasons to tax CO2. It's just that even if you do, it's likely that nuclear will still not fare very well in the overall generation picture. If you consider China, which kneecaps CO2 generating technologies in fairly draconian fashion, those technologies still dominate China's generation sources. Nuclear comes in way behind sources like hydroelectric and wind. (And that's even with the Chinese government propping it up.) Nuclear is simply a very costly technology to implement compared to throwing up some windmills in Texas and Oklahoma or something. It's just much cheaper. And the infrastructure is already in place for a lot of the CO2 generating sources, so investments don't have to be as large. I suspect you would need a fairly huge tax to make nuclear beat natural gas for instance. And even if it did, what about all the other sources? Wind/pumped storage hydro? Solar where appropriate? Geothermal or hydroelectric? It's just not as easy a thing as it seems. But taxing CO2 has numerous other benefits, even if saving nuclear is not one of them.

Latteland 8y ago

We incentivize a lot of things (like, billions for farmers, to keep the price of food lower and availability stable; we incentivize hedge fund billionaires by the carried interest deduction). Doing this for new industries that have promise and benefit, for a limited time, seems like a good idea to me. The incentives are reduced over time. For example, Tesla will soon reach 200k cars in the us and then their ev reduction will be cut in half and then go away after that. I'm not aware we tax by the hour, can you explain? We tax by income.

Latteland 8y ago