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Paying for carbon capture is big problem since there is no profit and needs to be done collectively. One option would be taxing energy. The carbon tax would be

Paying for carbon capture is big problem since there is no profit and needs to be done collectively. One option would be taxing energy. The carbon tax would be small by that time. That would also keep the price higher. I had idea for retroactive carbon tax, making people pay for their past consumption. Those of us that are older got lots of benefit from polluting CO2, and makes sense to have us pay to remove it. The feasibility depends on the price, and how to charge lots of people who are retired.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> One option would be taxing energy. The carbon tax would be small by that time. That would also keep the price higher. Taxing energy, carbon or otherwise, is highly regressive. It only works if you refund the money. Otherwise people freeze to death or go broke. Taxing non-carbon energy makes no sense because you're not trying to discourage it. You might as well just use income tax. > I had idea for retroactive carbon tax, making people pay for their past consumption. The records to use for this are unavailable. Nobody knows how much gasoline someone bought in 1995. It would also generally be impossible to collect; what if your contribution for 75 years of carbon emissions was meant to be $250,000 and you only have $100,000? Do we take your last dime and leave you to starve? What about people who are already dead? Do their kids have to pay? Retroactive taxes and taxes on retirees are both going to be intensely unpopular. Which is why people want to justify it by claiming we're going to have a lot of surplus energy to use for it. But how does that work unless the competing demand for energy is negligible, which seems implausible? Every part of it seems like some company trying to extract government money for their inefficient solution that costs more than it would to reduce emissions by the same amount.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> One option would be taxing energy. The carbon tax would be small by that time. That would also keep the price higher. Taxing energy, carbon or otherwise, is highly regressive. It only works if you refund the money. Otherwise people freeze to death or go broke. Taxing non-carbon energy makes no sense because you're not trying to discourage it. You might as well just use income tax. > I had idea for retroactive carbon tax, making people pay for their past consumption. The records to use for this are unavailable. Nobody knows how much gasoline someone bought in 1995. It would also generally be impossible to collect; what if your contribution for 75 years of carbon emissions was meant to be $250,000 and you only have $100,000? Do we take your last dime and leave you to starve? What about people who are already dead? Do their kids have to pay? Retroactive taxes and taxes on retirees are both going to be intensely unpopular. Which is why people want to justify it by claiming we're going to have a lot of surplus energy to use for it. But how does that work unless the competing demand for energy is negligible, which seems implausible? Every part of it seems like some company trying to extract government money for their inefficient solution that costs more than it would to reduce emissions by the same amount.