Ah, those stone age cavemen, with their LED light bulbs and their small cars.
It sounds to me that either you don’t believe it makes all that big a difference what size car you drive or what kind of light bulbs you use, or you don’t care,
If it’s the former, you should welcome a carbon tax, provided it’s fairly and accurately imposed. You still get the choice to do what you want; you just have to pay for its effects on the world, and if those effects are insignificant, so is the cost to you.
If it’s the latter, I’m not sure what I can say to you outside the Pit.
One or another aspect of this problem is why the idea isn’t that popular.
Like you say and is obvious, the tax has to redistribute at least from people with relatively more carbon intensive lifestyles to those with relatively less carbon intensive lifestyles, even at a given income level, or else it’s pointless. IOW in the simplest most honest form possible it is, as a rule, taking money from less densely populated places and paying it out to more densely populated places. Because under a strictly market pricing of energy the former tend to have higher carbon intensity (on the consumption side: further to travel on average, harder to do so other than by car, fewer walls of indoor heated spaces abut other people’s indoor spaces etc; and on the production side too, fossil fuel extraction/production is a relatively bigger economic activity in less dense areas). It’s no surprise that’s a challenge in the urban v rural politics of a lot of countries.
Then as you also pointed out in a couple of posts, on the left side especially it’s really difficult to propose any new tax, expend the political capital to drag it through the process, then ‘waste’ the potential to use it to redistribute income from higher to lower income groups even at a given level of carbon intensity, besides redistributing by carbon intensity. Or potential allies really prefer more fundamental collectivization of the economy (eg. ‘Green New Deal’) and the climate issue is actually in part a means to that end. A redistribution by carbon intensity just doesn’t do what they actually want to do.
On the right side of things a lot of people have real skepticism about the future cost of climate change. In this regard I think it’s useful to look beyond the set piece battle between ‘deniers’ and ‘those who listen to science’ and realize that ‘consensus science’s’ estimate of the expected future cost of climate change in temperate countries as % of GDP is much lower than the estimate for the world as a whole. This has been illustrated in various releases by the US govt, even as some of them are trumpeted by the media as dire warnings about climate change. Like the one which (supposedly) embarrassed the current admin in the last year (similar to others going back across various admins). A relatively bad case non-carbon action scenario amounted to a big $ number annual cost to US econ by 2100, but a quite small % of what would be a much larger US real GDP by then if there’s reasonable growth. Really bad expected outcomes are mainly in already hot areas (though a graphic in The Economist’s ‘Climate Issue’ last week pointed that relatively within the US ‘red states’ would be hit harder). So paying a net cost in economic efficiency to reduce carbon intensity is in part a foreign aid project, or could reasonably be seen as one if the debate got sophisticated enough.
Then to the extent you are redistributing even just from more carbon intensive to less carbon intensive people/places/economic sectors, that doesn’t magically become economically efficient just because it’s ‘revenue neutral’. The differential costs you are imposing, away from solutions the market would choose with no carbon tax, have to be less than the externality costs you’re avoiding by cutting carbon emissions. That’s not a no brainer for significant carbon taxes if you consider the globally disparate impact of not taking action, and seek to have the tax justify itself on a nation basis. It’s really not just ‘greed’ of some chosen bogeyman like ‘corporations’. A high carbon tax that results in adopting less efficient (not considering carbon externalities) ways of producing and using energy (or else they’d be the ways already adopted) is for a ‘societal’ benefit that might be disproportionately in other countries. It’s no surprise that’s a big political challenge in a world of separate national govt’s.
Yes, quite frankly. I’d rather be dead than have to put up with living in an apartment building instead of my house and have to ride a bus instead of owning an SUV.
You know I’m pro carbon tax but I’ve got to say your description of a environmentally friendly life sounds terrible. I’ve lived in modern apartments and it was terrible. I never want to share walls again. I hate public transportation and if I could afford it would never fly outside of a private plane. Buses and trains are terrible ways to get around. I’ve spent more then a decade living outside of the US and I firmly believe that the rural/suburban lifestyle is vastly preferable to what us common outside the US. I would be shocked if you convinced anyone to support a carbon tax based on converting people to that.
On the other hand I’m really excited about the Rivian R1T and R1S since they seem to solve most of the problems I have with electric vehicles and I’ll hopefully be buying one in 2021. Instead of trying to force people into driving shitty electric death traps I get amazing reactions from my friends who work in oil and gas when I tell them about a truck that can do 0-60 in 3 seconds, tow 11,000 pounds and has a 400 mile range between charges. They don’t really care that its electric but they do care that its better then their F150 in every way. In the same way getting someone to convert to an electric house from their dependance on natural gas is better done by showing them how awesome an induction stove is compared to even a top end gas range rather then telling them they have to cook on a shitty electric cook top to save the world.
As for the actual topic of the thread. The problem with the carbon tax is that people on the right see it as destroying their lifestyle and people on the left see if as a money grab to fix the ills of society. If it could be shown as a method to simply make costs that are already their concrete and allow the market to then act on the increased knowledge you could get people on the right to agree especially once you can show that they can still drive their truck and have a good life. People on the left need to be convinced that solving all of society’s problems simultaneously isn’t going to happen and they need to focus on important things. If solving wealth inequality is more important, fine but quit using climate change as you fig leaf to get the rest of us to accept it. If climate change is the most important thing then focus on that and pass a bare bones carbon tax and refund.
Poverty and the environment are unrelated issues, politically.
The suggested carbon taxes are consumption taxes. People who use less carbon would pay less than people who use more carbon. There would be a lot more political support for spending any carbon tax money on environmental initiatives.
As I explained in my first post, “One problem is that significant aspects of manufactured goods and even mechanized agriculture involve fossil fuels, such that a broad-based carbon tax will also lead to price increases for basic needs.” Those are the same basic needs of the poor.