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That type of taxation of externalities is really a no-brainer in the West too, but there’s just not democratic majority for implementing it. A tragedy. Tragedy
by marvin 8y ago
That type of taxation of externalities is really a no-brainer in the West too, but there’s just not democratic majority for implementing it. A tragedy. Tragedy of the commons, really, on a spectacular scale.
A general CO2 tax wouldn’t be hard to implement if we were a dictatorship.
- njarboe 8y agoIt might be if your most powerful general owned the national oil company.
- jacobush 8y agoYou mean like in the US? Oh wait...
- davedx 8y agoIn the Netherlands they’ve just reversed subsidies for electric vehicles, increasing bijtelling for them which makes them a lot more expensive for business purchases and leases. It’s a step backwards.
- rapnie 8y agoYes, it is very frustrating. The Dutch are exceptionally good at talking the talk, when it comes to renewable energy transition, having years-long talk about the opportunity to become the best, most innovative player (e.g. in solar), and then not walking the walk. Suddenly stopping subsidies because of 'unprecedented success' is the norm, leaving all businesses who had invested out in the cold. Netherlands is now a laggard in sustainable energy in the EU. I guess we have 'pro-business' liberal-democratic ruling party (VVD) and greenwashing-only companies such as Shell to thank for that. They prefer 'lobbycracy' above democracy.
- avar 8y agoElectric vehicles are excempt from the road tax in The Netherlands. E.g. in Nord-Holland you'd pay 1400 EUR/yr just in road tolls for a Tesla Model S (according to my searching around 2,250 kg), but you pay 0 EUR because it's an EV under the current policy. Over a period of some years this easily adds up to what other countries such as the US have been paying out in EV subsidies, add to that that fossil fuels are much more expensive than say the US and it's a very significant subsidy.
- CalRobert 8y agoGiven that the thought of the Netherlands conjures images of happy families in bakfiets {and jealousy on my part) I was startled to learn their per capita greenhouse gas emissions are among the worst in the EU.
- ovi256 8y agoThey're an almost completely urban population with a high standard of living. Of course that needs energy and greenshouse emissions to make happen.
- isostatic 8y agoUrburnites claim that city living is cleaner (co2 wise) that living in the country
- CalRobert 8y agoLiving near the people and things you need, walking, cycling, and taking electrified public transport to said things, and multi-family dwellings allowing the use of district heating (or heat pumps powered by renewable energy) can drastically reduce your carbon footprint compared to living in the burbs and driving to everything. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/mar/23/city-dwellers-smaller-carbon-footprints https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/mar/23/city-dwe... Of course, you _can_ have a low carbon footprint in the country, but it's really hard, because those places are hostile to cycling and walking.
- MagnumOpus 8y agoAn urban population should emit less GHG than the same population being spread out. And standard of living is not that much different from Denmark (20% less) or the UK (30% less).
- ovi256 8y agoYou're right for the Netherlands and the developped countries, of course. I confused this rural pop with developping countries' rural pop, which of course is a lot less energy intensive. As for the standard of living differences, are those numbers similar to the energy-per-capita differences between the same countries ?
- cmrdporcupine 8y agoSame in Ontario, our generous EV subsidy was killed by the new right-wing-populist provincial gov't, cap'n'trade eliminated (leaving a $3b hole in the budget), and various green programmes turfed. Then they had the gall to turn around and promote the fact that Ontario has dropped its CO2 emissions by 25% in the last 10 years. All due to the actions of the previous government that they railed against with "lock her up" type chants.
- evandijk70 8y agoThe reversal is only for cars priced over 50 000 euro (~ 57000 usd). Even for those cars, you can still get the subsidy for the amount up to 50 000 euro. The subsidy mostly helped people get a Tesla Model S as a company car. And it is still subsidized for about 17% of 50k, which is 8000 euro a year. While the Tesla Model S is more environmentally friendly than a similar sized gasoline car, buying of smaller electric cars (like the volkswagen e-golf, tesla model 3, etc) should be encouraged more. I don't think it was a bad idea to cap the subsidy at 50 000 euro.
- davedx 8y agoFair point, I forgot about the cap. The Model 3 is arriving just in time for Tesla sales.
- mtgx 8y agoSo do you think Saudi Arabia will introduce a carbon tax anytime soon?
- starbeast 8y agoMight be wise for them to do so - https://phys.org/news/2010-05-future-temperatures-livable-limits.html https://phys.org/news/2010-05-future-temperatures-livable-li...
- dmurray 8y agoLots of Western countries have heavy tax on gasoline. This passes the cost for the externality on to the taxi owner instead of the customer, but comes to pretty much the same thing.
- Tepix 8y agoYet none (?) have a tax on kerosine. Which is arguably worse for the environment for multiple reasons. Airplanes are a lot less efficient than buses, ships or trains. Also airplanes release their exhausts up in the atmosphere which is worse for global warming.
- dmurray 8y agoThere are lots of taxes (and subsidies) on air transport, and no real alternative to fossil fuels for powering planes. Adding a kerosene tax - instead of, say, a "landing tax" or a grant of land to build an airport - would just slosh the money around a bit, it wouldn't create an incentive for people to take electric planes.
- hamilyon2 8y agoSome alternatives are skyping, VR and bullet trains.
- pjc50 8y agoThere's a problem in that it's effectively banned by international treaty as part of the ICAO. I believe people are working on changing this but it will be slow going.
- benj111 8y agoThe UK has the Air Passenger Duty. Which is kind of similar (you are charged more for flying a farther distance). So there are ways of structuring it legally.
- 8y ago
- vixen99 8y agoThere seems to be an 'if only' tone to your stating the obvious.
- antaviana 8y agoThis. Just see the "Yellow Vests" riots in France because of the tax raise on fuel.
- RugnirViking 8y agoWorth mentioning that while that is indeed how that movement started, its difficult to say that it's about just that nowadays. More a general culture war between cosmopolitan and rural/less fortunate france if I understand correctly
- mschuster91 8y ago> Just see the "Yellow Vests" riots in France because of the tax raise on fuel. Problem with the French protests is that the fuel tax raise didn't take care of poor-ish people. Most "eco" politics doesn't care about these people either - no matter the country - and that's the reason why Trump and other right-wingers can hate so successfully against anything environmentally-friendly.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoThe problem is that getting off of fossil fuels (or solving pretty much any other large politically charged problem) will cost a lot of money and in society it's always the people who have the least power and influence who are left with the bill so until the middle and upper classes can figure out how to stop screwing poor people at every turn there will always be opportunity for populist leaders to gain power by promising to actually solve people's problems, drain the swamp, etc, etc. It's not a left vs right thing. It's a the people calling the shots are out of touch with what the day to day problems of the masses are thing.
- mschuster91 8y ago> It's not a left vs right thing. It very much is. Take a look at ANY right-wing political party and look who gets screwed over: always the lowest class people first. Women, PoC, migrants, poor persons. The right-wing strategy is to distract the masses with "it's the fault of the foreigners/the Muslims/Deep State/Swamp" while at the same time enacting policies that benefit only the ultra rich.
- ctdonath 8y agoA general CO2 tax wouldn’t be hard to implement if we were a dictatorship. It's ideas like this why Americans are heavily armed. Nobody can explain how a "co2 tax" would actually do good, yet you implicitly advocate killing people to enact it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- adrianN 8y agoA CO2 tax would do good because it would reduce demand for goods and services that cause the release of CO2, proportional to how much they release, while also providing the funds necessary to clean CO2 from the atmosphere. Not that hard to explain.
- francisofascii 8y agoA CO2 tax would reduce the following: pollution, resource depletion, suburban sprawl, commute times, obesity, loneliness, traffic related deaths. So there will be less people killed with a C02 tax.
- mijamo 8y agoI don't see how heavily armed Americans change anything. Personnal weapons would not change a dictatorship. If anything it would just justify killing opponents for armed rebellion/terrorism. It's not like your gun will stop tanks...
- ams6110 8y agoTaxes are hard to implement in many countries, including the USA, because people have seen that the tax money is not spent on what proponents say it will be spent on. You'd have a hard time getting a CO2 tax passed because it would just end up going into the general fund and get spent on pet projects, not on anything that really addressed CO2 emissions, or helped with the cost of alternative fuels or vehicles.
- 794CD01 8y agoEven more good could be done if the money were spent well, but the fact that the tax must be paid at all serves as the incentive that pushes behavior in a more environmentally friendly direction.
- kodablah 8y agoThere are less regressive ways to incentivize change. Taking money from people hurts the people that rely on money more. Rather, investment and encouragement of particular industries is less punitive, but again goes back to valuable spending of public funds.
- mbostleman 8y agoIt would be great if someday those who want to "make a change" or "progress" society understood that succeeding at actually changing their neighbors' minds is more effective than succeeding at getting laws passed that confiscate their neighbors' wealth so that some government program may or may not end up being effective at getting to their end goal. The effort to defend political tribes is so high - imagine if it was used to help create a natural demand in various markets to achieve a given outcome.
- mlinksva 8y agoThat's the genius of a carbon tax that returns 100% of the collections as a citizen dividend, like the bipartisan bill recently introduced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Innovation_and_Carbon_Dividend_Act_of_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Innovation_and_Carbon_D...
- moduspol 8y agoWhy stop at a CO2 tax? All kinds of problems could be solved with a dictatorship.
- cmrdporcupine 8y agoIt's not having a dictatorship -- it's having a national economic strategy and a popular will to make decisions without letting very particular selfish interests get in the way. It does not require an authoritarian central leadership. But it does require stopping and rolling back the capture of political bodies and the public sphere generally by private interests.
- moduspol 8y agoRespectfully, it's a pipe dream. If gas, energy, or home heating prices double, whoever's in power is going to be voted out. It's not the capture of political bodies that drives that--it's normal people. It'll take a suspension of democracy or a long time to make a measurable impact on climate change.
- MagnumOpus 8y agoNot if the tax revenues get distributed back as a carbon dividend - then the only people against it are heavy polluters who lose out. (And since emissions are not distributed linearly, the losers from a cost-neutral carbon-tax with per-capita-dividend will always be a minority.)
- moduspol 8y agoMaybe I'm misunderstanding, but: From what I'm being told, fundamental changes need to occur in our consumption to have a measurable impact on climate change. That won't happen with normal people continuing to consume at the same rates they have. Could a carbon tax be designed such that normal people are effectively reimbursed and heavy emitters pay more? Yes. But you're not going to measurably impact climate change without somehow incentivizing people to use less. At some point, people need to use less, and when you force them to (through taxes or restrictions), it won't be popular politically.