Carbon Pricing

Australia appears to be going round and round with trying to implement a carbon tax and Richard Branson has chimed in with his opinion that the entire world should adopt it at the same time to avoid undue strain on particular nations’ economies. This is admittedly a bad time for the U.S. economy to take on significant additional costs and the business community will fight it tooth and nail but it appears to be necessary in the long run. So why not just implement a very tiny/token carbon tax for now, with very tiny planned annual increases, just to get it started and get us acclimated to thinking about the effects of our fossil fuel usage? Almost like a dry run or test phase. Then as the world economy gets stronger it could be increased to more meaningful levels. B.O., if you’re reading this, try to get it done in the next year and a half if possible, just in case… :slight_smile:

Sounds good to me, but realistically, its not going anywhere in the current US Congress. Hopefully in the next Congress, EPA carbon restrictions will be odious enough to carbon-emitting companies that the GOP be willing to throw some votes to cap-and-trade in return for lifting EPA regulations, and we’ll see it pass. But thats 2013 at the earliest.

Implementing a tiny one would be very problematic. Even just reporting GHG emissions will cost a lot. I’m not necessarily complaining, I’m an environmental consultant.

Where would this money go?

IIRC, the new EPA regulations already require emissions reporting, though maybe for a smaller class then would be needed for a cap-and-trade scheme?

For now, the Ctax money could just be used for the additional administrative expenses to collect it. After that, it could be applied to reducing all the taxpayers’ marginal tax rates.

Cap and trade or carbon taxes are necessarily regressive, so pretty much every proposed scheme involves rolling a sizable fraction of collected revenues into some form of tax credit for lower income households.

The EPA GHG reporting is pretty limited in who has to report and what they have to report. A Carbon Tax or Fee or whatever would not be, at least if it hopes to get anything done.

I would approve a carbon tax if they applied it directly to building nuclear power plants. I would change the charter of the TVA to allow them to build nuclear power plants anywhere in country. I’d also grant them exemptions similar to what the Navy has so they could build power plants without NRC certification since the TVA is already part of the federal government.

This is not a question of paying the additional cost: We’re doing that anyway. It’s about admitting that we’re paying an additional cost, so the market can get to work on decreasing that cost.

In a pure cap-and-trade system, the government would never see the money at all, but rather it would go to industries which are doing a good job of reducing their emissions, or even re-sequestering carbon somehow.

Basing mitigation efforts on a carbon tax demonstrates a fundamental mis- and non-understanding (intentional or otherwise) of carbon trading and is inherently more costly. Politically, it facilitates zero movement towards mitigation (promote misinformation about carbon trading, then decry the imposition of new taxes) so garners more support than trading schemes. This isn’t to suggest that direct/indirect taxes have no role in a mitigation regime–just that relying primarily on taxes greatly increases the overall cost.

In view of the depth and breadth of climate change impacts, it would be most effective and economically efficient to coordinate approaches and aim for simultaneous implementation of both mitigation and adaptation measures. Unfortunately, this is extraordinarily unlikely. The ongoing UNFCCC negotiations are making progress, but given the divergent needs, priorities, and interests of Parties, incremental implementation is the most likely path. While raising costs in the long-term (and paradoxically forestalling progress and increasing harms and costs), it is the only way movement is possible.

You apparently don’t understand the difference between carbon trading and a carbon tax. Carbon trading is a scam to let politicians reward favored groups with credits and speculators with unearned profits. Carbon Trading doesn’t reward people for reducing emissions. It rewards them for gaming the system. Politicians love carbon trading because it provides them with a huge new source of graft. A no-exceptions carbon tax is the fairest way to actually reduce emissions.

BTW did Australia plan to tax exported coal? Frankly if they don’t , then all they are doing is exporting the pollution to China. We already have that problem in California where a lot of their regulations just push the pollution over the state line.

Well, your hyperbole has certainly convinced me.

While carbon taxes can play a strong role in mitigation efforts, forgoing emissions trading out of spite (sorry, ‘fairness’) or belief in fairy tales (‘scam to let politicians reward favoured groups’) or any other reason based in emotion and ignorance of basic economics makes reduction overly expensive.

I wouldn’t exactly call politicians rewarding favored groups a fairy tale.

In order to be “fair”, you need to have some way of rewarding people who reduce CO[sub]2[/sub]. And if those rewards are going to be a channel for graft in one system, they’ll be a channel for graft in the other.

But that’s all speculative. In the situation we have right now, we know we have graft, and massive amounts of it, going to the energy companies. If all of that wealth is going to graft now, and a fraction of it will go to graft in a carbon pricing system, then by all means, we should go to a carbon pricing system.

As a logical thinker, I think I can see where all of this is going as far a history is concerned. Technology is progressing leaps and bounds ahead of rational thinking. Our Nano and robotic technology will take care of the problem of PowerHungryTreehuggerthuggery by giving them what they want. They are using science to browbeat the world into believing THEY can save us all and only they. So, the logical next steps is to use science to clean up the world of those GD pesky carbon emitters. Now when they get the science good enuff, what is going to stop those pesky nanobots that dismantle carbon emmiters? That is right, their programs that I know can not be hacked because after all, Al Gore did invent it, right? Well I can envision a world without those pesky carbon emitters, clean, sterile, void of carbon based lifeforms. That includes you and your children and their grandchildren. Oh, I am wrong you say, well, lets wait it out and do nothing to stop them. Hell, support them and help it along, but you had better arm yourselves with nanoguns. Or maybe you will have enuff money to purchase the right to emitt. Al Gore will be dead and rot out his own green house gasses by then. Do not believe politicians, they have something else in mind than what they are saying, always. Read history. It does not change without big lies.

Branson’s point is not that a carbon tax will not cause economic strain if adminstered globally, it will still cause pain, it would just prevent the outsourcing of pollution.
The reason that it will never work is that unless China and India are included any other nations that reduce green house gas emissions will have such a small impact on Global Warming that they will have hamstrung their economies for the promise of a couple of months of cooler weather in a hundred years.
Any attempt to get China and India on board would involve a European going to them and explaining that while they were living in squalor for the last hundred and fifty years watching their countrymen starve, we in the west were using industry and carbon to get really rich. Unfortunately in the process we screwed up the planet and we would like you to stop using carbon to get rich and be happy with living standards about a third of ours. Maybe this is just pessimism, but I do not see them going for it. I hope everyone likes hot weather.

There is that, but China and India will be subject to a lot of the same environmental issues of their cities near coasts being subject to rising sea levels, etc. as well as their economic trading partners struggling to deal with crop disruptions, droughts, floods, etc. so I think they can see that the past is past and they will have to be part of future solutions. People also think they have a lot of leverage over the U.S. because of all the money we owe them but since we’re on the brink of defaulting anyway, what if we decide to say the hell with it…declare bankruptcy…let’s start over? So we have some leverage on them as well. The key is to get a climate treaty started ASAP, so make it as painless as possible now just to get past the initial psychological/political hurdle of actually putting a price on carbon…preferably everywhere.

That assumes that assigning the real costs to carbon emissions will not lead to an acceleration to adopting new technologies and advancements. It also assumes that China and India will avoid most of the climate disruptions and costs that they will suffer if they do not do anything on carbon emissions controls.

Assuming no new miracle technologies is the safe way to bet. Europe has had massively more expensive gas than the US for decades and the new technology they created was the really small car. We have been 10 years away from revolutionary breakthrough in solar power all of my life. I am in favor of a carbon tax coupled with a payroll tax rebate because of the remote chance that a new breakthrough technology will be developed but in a democracy taxes that are designed to cause economic disruption are very difficult to get passed.

China may benefit from less global warming but the benefits will be globally dispersed and from what I have read will mostly go to countries in the tropics. Whenever you have dispersed benefits and localized costs that is a formula for inaction.
Addressing global warming will take coordinated, voluntary sacrifice to benefit people you will never meet and are not like you. Any country that could cheat, would make alot of money very quickly. All of the incentives are lined up the wrong way for this to work. Transformative technology that will make clean energy as cheap as fossil fuels is the best hope of preventing global warming but if it were easy it would have happened already. The most likely scenario is that it will never be solved in time to make a difference.

That also ignores that AGW is not that simple, there is already a commitment or change levels that we will have to endure for not doing anything so far (CO2 accumulates, and it takes a good time for nature to sequester the excess that we are dumping in the atmosphere), the longer we don’t do anything means that even **worse **disruptions are in the pipeline, the point here is that right now we are discussing about doing something now to make the future situation less onerous, however, doing something later will then mean that a future shitty situation will not get even worse than that.

It will make a difference, the level of the outcome will depend on how soon we do it.