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Tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, and if a country isn't signed up to this, tax all their imports the same amount, overest
by mavhc 4y ago
Tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, and if a country isn't signed up to this, tax all their imports the same amount, overestimate.
Then use that tax money to clean up the pollution.
Side effects: people will invent cheaper ways to clean up pollution
- goodpoint 4y agoAlso side effects: people will invent less polluting ways to produce goods and services. It's shocking how environmental impact and taxation are completely disconnected at the moment.
- protontypes 4y agoThe question is how to measure the environmental impact of companies and their supply chains in a global and traceable way. Here there are first exciting approaches like Geospatial ESG Geospatical Finance. Here are more links on the topic: https://www.cgfi.ac.uk/ https://www.cgfi.ac.uk/ https://www.wwf.org.uk/what-we-do/projects/nature-and-spatial-finance https://www.wwf.org.uk/what-we-do/projects/nature-and-spatia...
- endisneigh 4y agoreal side effect: countries stop importing, instead they start producing their own stuff inefficiently leading up to more pollution.
- wiz21c 4y agodon't think so. - producing concrete, steel, (including mining) etc is no more polluting in other countries - producing vegetables, bananas and other stuff is interesting because you want to have them in countries that don't have them => eat local stuff - water is the same in every country - clothes are not less difficult to produce efficiently etc. so yes, we could stop importing and building stuff right here. Now this would have two very educational effects: - mining stuff makes your nice countryside, well, not nice. Lesson learned: yeah, you do have some footprint and you must accept it. - building stuff paying workers at your country's rate may make things more expensive to you. Lesson learned: you must value work. We're talking about future generations here. If it means changing our core values, then, we'll have to change them.
- hnbad 4y agoDo you have a source for that claim? Outsourcing doesn't seem to have to led to less pollution. Most heavy industry that has been outsourced has been outsourced to companies with looser environmental regulations and labor protections and most reporting conveniently ignores a lot of the offshore pollution (which is often hidden behind several layers of indirection to avoid accountability) when measuring the pollution caused by domestic companies. I also wouldn't call the shredding and landfilling of consumer goods efficient and those practices seem to have largely arisen from the ability to mass produce goods cheaply making discounting them further less profitable than simply destroying them. This also ignores the inefficiencies promoted by global manufacturing that involves shipping half-finished products around the world many times over because shipping is effectively free compared to paying for all the manufacturing to happen in one place (and handling the finishing touches domestically allows marketing the product as domestically made). There doesn't seem to be a one-to-one correlation between efficiency (which literally just measures cost reduction, as externalities don't factor into it unless they have a price tag) and less pollution (unless you handwave carbon capture and offsetting as magic and ignore the real world effects to only focus on numbers on paper).
- hnbad 4y agoI think the one argument you can make is that cutting down on outsourcing will tank the post-colonial economies that are dependent on having their resources extracted and using their cheap labor to create margins for foreign markets. But that's really more telling of how exploitative supposed economic development aid has been for them by failing to restore any level of self-sustainability they had prior to colonialism. Child labor in arsenic mines (to use a graphic but not entirely hyperbolic example) may be contributing to GDP but that doesn't mean it's desirable or that the countries doing it are better off than they would be if it weren't.
- newsclues 4y agoThe elites will carve out exemptions to avoid degrading their lifestyles.
- cute_boi 4y agoNo please. Taxing doesn't work when government is corrupt. And, many countries in this world are very corrupt.
- hnbad 4y agoAs opposed to most large corporations of the world? Corporations are literally self-serving by definition, so even moderately corrupt governments would seem altruistic by contrast.
- Geezus-42 4y agoReal side effect: poor people get poorer and rich people don't care.
- baisq 4y agoThat's how most taxes work.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoIsn't this the effect of ignoring the externalities anyway? Except delayed until some potentially irreversible, acute threshold like the wet bubble or flooding low lying areas?
- SanderSantema 4y agoThis doesn't seem viable in practice, determining how much polution a product causes for every product you tax is impractical and although not guaranteed I would think it likely that you'll simply export less when you start imposing the same taxes on the exported products. I'd bet it would increase inequality as well, given that people with low incomes proportionally pay more taxes on bought goods and services than people with higher incomes (I'm quite certain that's the case but economics really isn't my strong suit).