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A carbon price only works if it is high enough to fund equal carbon offset projects AND the money is actually spend on carbon offset projects. Personally, I ad

by phire 5y ago

A carbon price only works if it is high enough to fund equal carbon offset projects AND the money is actually spend on carbon offset projects. Personally, I advocate for a "carbon market" type system, where any company, is required to buy carbon credits equal to the amount of carbon they produce. You can't grandfather companies into a given amount of carbon credits, every carbon credit must be created by another entity capturing and storing carbon. This carbon market should find the correct price for carbon, and create growth in the carbon offset industry. Some industries might decide the correct solution is reducing their emissions to zero, others might decide it's cheaper to just buy carbon credits. The government also gets a useful knob to force market into carbon negative territory, by forcing companies to buy 1.1 carbon credits for every unit of carbon they emit.

tfehring 5y ago
If you tax gasoline to $1,000/gallon (and other emissions to the same price per CO2e) it doesn't matter if the money gets spent on carbon offsets or not, the deterrent effect would dwarf the removal effect. Revenue-neutral tax+dividend programs like the one described in TFA seem far more politically viable than tax+spend alternatives.
- phire 5y ago
  The problem with tax+dividend is that it makes net-zero near impossible to achieve. Not unless you tax absolutely everything which produces carbon, which would be highly damaging to the economy and therefore politically unpopular. And if we actually want to reverse some of the damage we have already caused, we need to go massively net-negative. I'm not a fan of tax+spend either, which is why I support a carbon market solution.
  - abraae 5y ago
    We need to go massively net-negative - agreed. But it doesn't follow that we need to e.g. reduce petrol consumption to zero. Squeezing out that last one or two percent is going to be much harder than just moving on and looking for gains elsewhere.
wmf 5y ago
Buying offsets isn't the point of carbon pricing. There aren't nearly enough available offsets to reach net zero.
- phire 5y ago
  Not yet. Currently the demand for carbon offsets is tiny, so the supply is correspondingly low. You would have to bootstrap the system by inserting a large number of 'phantom offsets' into the market at the start. These fake offsets will be retired on a schedule or formula so that companies deciding to enter the carbon offset industry have a good idea about demand during their planning stages.
  - wmf 5y ago
    This still makes no sense to me. Instead of emitting and offsetting carbon, let's emit less.
    - phire 5y ago
      A carbon market encourages both. Whenever possible, the carbon market will encourage industries to produce less, it should always be the cheaper option. But reducing carbon emissions is harder in some industries, and the carbon market gives those industries an alternative option. Also, it's impossible to reach net-zero emissions by just emitting less. Plus, the latest papers make it clear that we are far past the point were we can limit damage by simply going net-zero. We need to go massively net-negative. If we want to go net-negative, we need a robust carbon offset industry, and a carbon market is one way of encouraging growth in that industry. Besides, as far as the global environment is concerned, there is zero difference between not emitting CO2 and emitting CO2 in one place and sequestering it in another.
      - PaulHoule 5y ago
        Except all the "cheap" forms of carbon sequestration are scams. Put carbon in the soil or trees and it is just a fire away from being released again. Crush olvine on the the beach and you will never know how much carbon was captured, if any. If you compress it to 1500 psi and inject it underground you can measure it going in the same way you measured oil and gas coming out. That's real, but it is a lot more expensive. Nobody should be paying for any of the other things.
baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> should find the correct price for carbon The trouble is that we don't know the true cost of the externalities of carbon emissions until it's far to late. If carbon leads to climate feed backs that ultimately lead to an extinction event on the scale of the End-Permian (which is a real possibility) then it's clear that the "price" of carbon, factoring in all it's externalities, should make using hydrocarbons so expernsive we never would have propped our civilization (and species) up with them. If climate change and the other externalities of carbon emissions only mean the collapse of industrial civilization, we would find an equally prohibitive price. I'm in agreement with GP that this is mostly a failed policy. Until we see carbon emissions drop fairly dramatically this will just be shuffling around money to different people while we watch the planet heat up.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It will be the end of neoliberalism if not of everything. When mass casualty events become common by 2030, political and financial elites will face angry crowds and death over this failed policy. It's never too early to start doing the right hing.
klyrs 5y ago
> A carbon price only works if it is high enough to fund equal carbon offset projects AND the money is actually spend on carbon offset projects. Then comes the political reality where one party will propose enough money for all that, then it gets wheedled down to half, then half of that goes to pork and then a half of the remainder is overhead, so consultants get that 1/8 to draw up an estimate and the budget's gone

by phire 5y ago

tfehring 5y ago

If you tax gasoline to $1,000/gallon (and other emissions to the same price per CO2e) it doesn't matter if the money gets spent on carbon offsets or not, the deterrent effect would dwarf the removal effect. Revenue-neutral tax+dividend programs like the one described in TFA seem far more politically viable than tax+spend alternatives.

phire 5y ago
The problem with tax+dividend is that it makes net-zero near impossible to achieve. Not unless you tax absolutely everything which produces carbon, which would be highly damaging to the economy and therefore politically unpopular. And if we actually want to reverse some of the damage we have already caused, we need to go massively net-negative. I'm not a fan of tax+spend either, which is why I support a carbon market solution.
- abraae 5y ago
  We need to go massively net-negative - agreed. But it doesn't follow that we need to e.g. reduce petrol consumption to zero. Squeezing out that last one or two percent is going to be much harder than just moving on and looking for gains elsewhere.

wmf 5y ago

Buying offsets isn't the point of carbon pricing. There aren't nearly enough available offsets to reach net zero.

phire 5y ago
Not yet. Currently the demand for carbon offsets is tiny, so the supply is correspondingly low. You would have to bootstrap the system by inserting a large number of 'phantom offsets' into the market at the start. These fake offsets will be retired on a schedule or formula so that companies deciding to enter the carbon offset industry have a good idea about demand during their planning stages.
- wmf 5y ago
  This still makes no sense to me. Instead of emitting and offsetting carbon, let's emit less.
  - phire 5y ago
    A carbon market encourages both. Whenever possible, the carbon market will encourage industries to produce less, it should always be the cheaper option. But reducing carbon emissions is harder in some industries, and the carbon market gives those industries an alternative option. Also, it's impossible to reach net-zero emissions by just emitting less. Plus, the latest papers make it clear that we are far past the point were we can limit damage by simply going net-zero. We need to go massively net-negative. If we want to go net-negative, we need a robust carbon offset industry, and a carbon market is one way of encouraging growth in that industry. Besides, as far as the global environment is concerned, there is zero difference between not emitting CO2 and emitting CO2 in one place and sequestering it in another.
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      Except all the "cheap" forms of carbon sequestration are scams. Put carbon in the soil or trees and it is just a fire away from being released again. Crush olvine on the the beach and you will never know how much carbon was captured, if any. If you compress it to 1500 psi and inject it underground you can measure it going in the same way you measured oil and gas coming out. That's real, but it is a lot more expensive. Nobody should be paying for any of the other things.

baron_harkonnen 5y ago

> should find the correct price for carbon The trouble is that we don't know the true cost of the externalities of carbon emissions until it's far to late. If carbon leads to climate feed backs that ultimately lead to an extinction event on the scale of the End-Permian (which is a real possibility) then it's clear that the "price" of carbon, factoring in all it's externalities, should make using hydrocarbons so expernsive we never would have propped our civilization (and species) up with them. If climate change and the other externalities of carbon emissions only mean the collapse of industrial civilization, we would find an equally prohibitive price. I'm in agreement with GP that this is mostly a failed policy. Until we see carbon emissions drop fairly dramatically this will just be shuffling around money to different people while we watch the planet heat up.

PaulHoule 5y ago
It will be the end of neoliberalism if not of everything. When mass casualty events become common by 2030, political and financial elites will face angry crowds and death over this failed policy. It's never too early to start doing the right hing.

klyrs 5y ago

> A carbon price only works if it is high enough to fund equal carbon offset projects AND the money is actually spend on carbon offset projects. Then comes the political reality where one party will propose enough money for all that, then it gets wheedled down to half, then half of that goes to pork and then a half of the remainder is overhead, so consultants get that 1/8 to draw up an estimate and the budget's gone