4 ms·

How would anyone implement this internationally? Without that, this strategy is pointless. How do you get India, China, all of Africa to stop producing CO2?

• toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Cross border carbon tariffs.
• throwaway894345 5y ago
  It turns out you aren't the first person to have considered this problem, and the answer is well-understood: border adjustments. Basically, these are tariffs on imports from countries which don't have an adequate price on carbon. If you want to do business with the West (probably 70+% of the global economy), you need to clean up your economy.
  • rsj_hn 5y ago
    > border adjustments. Don't we already have tariffs on China? I am a little hazy as to whether Trump's were repealed or not. IIRC, the political opposition was from all those companies manufacturing there -- e.g. Apple, Tesla, etc. It's certainly something I would support more of, but the problem here is that targeting tariffs to specific countries has shown to be ineffective, as there are global supply chains, so goods are shipped from China to Vietnam to Taiwan to some other place and finally to the U.S. So it's not simple as to say impose a tariff just on Chinese goods coming into America. IIRC, after Trump's China tariffs were announced, Vietnam suddenly became a huge exporter of the most targeted items, and it was pretty clear they were just relabelling items from China as "made in Vietnam". This is covered in this WSJ story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-tariffs-on-china-are-being-blunted-by-trade-cheats-11561546806 https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-tariffs-on-china-are-b... Global trade and capital flows are not really bilateral. It is very much a US vs Rest-Of-World, or at best US versus Regions. So one option to reduce cheating might be to segmenting the world into zones: US - Canada US - Latin America (add everything south of the border) US - Europe US - Asia (throw Africa here, due to China/Africa ties) US - Russia/Middle East/North Africa Then apply tariffs just based on the zones, rather than specific countries. Of course I am speculating, but I do know that country-specific tariffs are very, very leaky, and even in this system, there is a lot of incentive for China to pay some nation in North Africa or Latin America to import stuff and put its label on it, then export to the U.S. For a big tariff, it would certainly be worth it. That's why I prefer interventions in the capital account rather than in the current account. The US has much better control over the global dollar system than over the global trade system. > probably 70+% of the global economy US + EU GDP is 36 Trillion, Global Economy is 76 Trillion, so about 40% of Global GDP. But probably US + EU is one party to a good 70% of Global Trade. Not sure for how much longer. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=EU-US-CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location... https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/ https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/