Example #5621 that a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have.
That's overly reductive.
1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.
2. You can work around #1 by applying incentives for manufacturers to make more efficient cars should lead any carbon tax
3. If you just reward companies based on fleet-average fuel economy without regard to vehicle size, then it would be rather bad for US car companies (who employ unionized workers) that historically make larger cars than Asian and European companies.
4. So the first thing done was to have a separate standard for passenger vehicles and light-trucks, but this resulted in minivans and SUVs being made in such a way as to get the light-truck rating
5. We then ended up with the size-based calculation we have today, but the formula is (IMO) overly punitive on small vehicles. Given that the formula was forward looking, it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.
All carbon tax is inherently regressive but that's also trivially fixable. Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive, since on average richer people will spend more on fuel (and therefore the tax) even though it is likely a much smaller percentage of their spending.
Every single one of your ideas has problems that are solved by a carbon tax. Taxes are simple, they accomplish what you want, and they don't have loopholes. A carbon tax will _never_ have the unintended consequence of making emissions worse. Many of our current regulations, including the one I was responding to do exactly that because they actually cause people to buy larger trucks than they otherwise would with worse fuel efficiency.
A carbon tax might not on it's own be enough to solve the problem (especially if you set it to low), but no matter what level you set it, it will help. Thanks to unintended consequences, many of our current regulations are actively counter productive, while _also_ having negative economic and other costs.
All costs are regressive to people with less ability to bear them. By making them not regressive we don't change behavior! It doesn't matter if they're regressive if the objective is to get people to not drive or to burn less gas. Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon. There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones.
> Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon.
Shifting cost to the emitters is a better way to put it. If a factory can make 10m in upgrades over time to reduce their carbon tax burden by 15m over time, they are definitely going to do it. So I disagree: I say it does change behavior and it does reduce actual carbon.
> There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones
Whether that's true or not it does not mean a carbon tax would not 'reduce actual carbon'.
Drivers of ICE vehicles are the emitters.
An ICE vehicle sitting in a driveway with its engine off emits no pollution (that is, after the initial impact of manufacturing and delivering it).
The fuel/carbon tax would still be behavior-shifting for low-income emitters because it would still apply to low-income emitters per marginal unit, and that part is likely overall regressive because fuel is a larger expenditures for low-incomes.
However, the part where the resulting revenue is pooled and payed out in an equal amount back per capita is progressive, since that payment is a greater fraction of a low income. Desirably, it also means that low-income people emitting less than the average would make money overall: consider a household consisting of a single mom and two kids that take public transit to work/school.
It would change behaviour more, not less.
If you set the carbon tax at about $1/gallon of gasoline, the corresponding carbon rebate would be about $1000 per family per year.
That wouldn't affect rich people much; neither the $1/gallon nor the $1000 extra income is significant. But many rich people get rich by being penny-wise, so many would change behaviour, by buying an EV or similar.
But for poor people both $1/gallon and $1000 per year is significant. If gas was $1/gallon more expensive, poor people definitely would drive less.
The real hardship for the poor here is they cannot float that $1/gallon for a year before getting the $1000
The same thing happened with electric car purchase incentives in New Zealand. The poor cannot afford to buy a new car - so only the well off received the efficient car discount incentives.
The trickle down as those cars depreciated in value was years away.
That doesn’t really sound like the worst thing?
Someone has to buy them for full price before they show up on the used market 5-10 years later.
That doesn't make sense because the second hand car is not cheaper by the amount of the subsidy. Say subsidy is $20k, second-hand car might eventually be $6k cheaper (and the discount time value of money means that the $6k is actually less than $4k). Giving the wealthy person $20k, and the poor person less than $4k is strange.
New Zealand used car market is likely very different from the market where you are. The cheapest Model 3 I could find was a USD18000 for a 2020.
Subsidies make sense if the environmental gains outweigh the costs of the subsidies.
Subsidies: there was a purchase subsidy, charging stations were subsidised, and I think electric cars are not paying their fair share of road maintenance (much of our road costs are paid for by an excise tax on usage via petrol-tax or heavy-vehicle-milage).
That math doesn’t add up. If I buy a $100,000 car for $80,000, and I sell it to someone for $60,000, the recipient still gets a $40,000 discount.
And if you pretend that there is no subsidy, and the original owner paid $80,000 just because it cost that much unsubsidized, the second buyer still gets the same discount off the original purchase price.
So the fact that the car was originally subsidized isn’t relevant.
The context is about when cars reach the poor - your example of someone spending $60k is irrelevant.
A poorer person in NZ spends at most a few thousand on their car. The original retail price is nearly irrelevant by the time it gets to someone poorish (however maintenance/parts costs do matter for old cars).
The financial benefit of a discount mostly goes to the people that own the car while it depreciates as it trickles down.
Context: In New Zealand, the vast majority of people drive second hand cars (mostly imported second hand from Japan). A 20 year old car is regarded as newish in New Zealand. I am well off, so I have two second hand cars, my daily driver is 2006 I think, and I have a 1996 4WD for other stuff. New cars are only bought by the well off.
The rebate can be paid out more frequently than annually.
Having a carbon tax seems to be the most fair way to combat climate change; unfortunately in practice it is political suicide. Australia had a carbon tax in 2011 and was quickly repealed in 2014. Likewise Canada also implemented such a tax in 2019 and was repealed this year prior to their election. People like to say that they want to help the environment, but when it comes time to vote they vote against such policies.
The Australian implementation had a lot of problems. Instead of being (something reasonably loophole free like) a tax levied on fossil fuel consumption it was a scheme that applied to the 500 largest emitters. These emitters then (crucially) estimated their own emissions minus offsets and paid tax on that.
The issue with this is that it creates a whole parallel (and largely fake) carbon accounting world. Fake estimates, fake offsets, a complex web of compensating subsidies - but real public money.
The field of carbon taxes is tricky because we can imagine simple schemes which handle a few scenarios in a fair way (ok, fuel! we know how to tax that) but once you start thinking about agriculture or construction you quickly get into complex estimation. You then end up with armies of carbon accountants who spend all day looking for loopholes and rorts.
Canada ultimately repealed the carbon tax because it was used as a political cudgel against the Liberal party that enacted it by the Conservative opposition in a sustained fashion for several years.
Which is dismaying because carbon taxes are a conservative solution to this problem and IIRC the first political entities to suggest the implementation of them in Canada were Conservative.
At the end of the day you have a nontrivial amount of the population, and many in positions of power who just outright deny environmental concerns and climate change as an existential threat.
They aren't going to approach this problem in good faith and it isn't obvious what the solution to their nefarious influence on policy should be.
Canada's implementation had two problems:
1. The textbook implementation involves 3 parts: tax, rebate and tariff. Canada only did the first 2. They were in talks with Germany/EU to create a carbon tariff zone, but that never happens. Without the tariff the carbon tax is massively unfair to local producers.
2. The rebates were almost invisible. If they would have been cheques in the mail it would have had much more impact psychologically.
But I agree, the main problem was denialism and its use as a political cudgel. It should be hard to argue that carbon tax is stealing money when all of it is given back, but they successfully did that.
Broadly agreed. IMO the Canadian carbon tax had a marketing problem. It should have been called a Carbon Dividend. First, it would have replaced the negative connotation of the word "tax" with the positive connotation of the word "dividend -- and it would have been more accurate to how the program actually worked.
Second, and probably more important: the rebates showed up in your bank account with a description that didn't make the source obvious enough for laypeople. Had people seen monthly "CARBON DIVIDEND" credits in their bank accounts, they would have noticed.
It was never called carbon tax, but carbon pricing. It being knows as carbon tax was the result of of opposition efforts. The same efforts and results would have happened had it been called dividend or anything else.
In official communications it was called the Canada Carbon Rebate or previously the Climate Action Incentive
You can give the rebate based on prior year or estimated usage at the start of the year, and then repay at the end of the year if it was too much, like with healthcare subsidies.
Are you sure? Gas consumption is notoriously inelastic. West coast gasoline is already a dollar or more than it costs on the east coast. Do poor people drive less in California than in Florida?
Gas consumption is inelastic in the short term, but everything is elastic in the long term.
If you want proof of this, just look at what happens to sales of large vs small cars when the price of gas changes.
I think everyone drives less in California than in Florida. (Google says ~14,500 miles annually per licensed driver in Florida, versus ~12,500 miles in California.) Gas prices are a factor in this.
> By making them not regressive we don't change behavior!
I'm poor. I could get just the $X back as my carbon tax dividend and continue with my current lifestyle. Or I could make choices that emit less carbon, which will cost less since they don't have a carbon tax cost to them, and save an additional $Y on top of the $X I'm already getting.
What do I do?
A revenue-neutral tax (like GP proposed) could, in theory, change behavior. I don't know enough about human behavior to say how it would work in practice.
Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.
The results would hit certain geographic areas much worse than others, and (if priced enough to change behavior) would also probably depress car sales, which are two reasons why the federal fuel tax has been flat for over 30 years.
Think about how much easier that is to game though.
The original suggestion could be collected at point-of-sale for carbon emitting products. Gasoline, airplane tickets (based on average for the flights), even electricity are easy to measure and charge at the point of sale.
In your example, the person has to prove how much they didn’t emit, which is way harder in practice, to get the credit.
Why tax the gasoline but then the airplane ticket and not the kerosene?
And similarly i would extrapolate to do we tax the buyer of electricity (which could be green sourced) or the manufacturer - the gas burner. Or maybe even at the first point of contact with the carbon source, the oil company.
I was making an analogy to a revenue-neutral carbon tax. That is tax all of those things, but cut every taxpayer a refund for an equal share of the revenue. This is ultimately identical to paying people for having below-average use.
> Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.
So you're saying that the government should incentivize poorer people to sell one of the last bits of their functional autonomy for what would be trivial amounts? "We'll just hang onto to this for a bit until you decide to stop going anywhere or make friends at work".
You are correct that most consumption taxes are intrinsically regressive, but you can turn pretty much any consumption tax into a progressive one by simply taking the money and redistributing it at a flat amount per person.
I believe this would be more fair to children who are the ones who will be most impacted by climate change in the end.
I believe there are even some governments that use this approach, but many of them don't make it feel as significant as it should. You should get a big fat cheque in the mail every month as if you won the lottery.
It's hard to see any of this as "trivially fixable." Taxes are inherently political, politics are complicated, changing incentives on this scale are pretty much impossible in our political system.
"Taxes are simple... and they don't have loopholes" is not at all how taxes work in the US. Perhaps your imagined perfect carbon tax is simple, but a simple tax with no loopholes is not likely to happen. Everyone wants a break or exception, and many of the interested parties are powerful.
This is mixing two questions: whether a system can be elegantly designed and do the job without major market distortion, versus the question of whether various actors will stand in the way to prevent it.
You could say the same thing about zoning. Higher density is better for affordability, but faces opposition from landowning existing residents. Does that make it wrong, or not worth pursuing? No, and that particular movement seems to be getting traction despite the political opposition.
I read "trivially fixable" as "there is an elegant solution to this," not that "it is easy to get it politically passed."
As we learned in the 90s with email, an elegant solution that doesn't take human nature into account isn't worth pursuing. There used to be a joke checklist we'd send to each other about this.
> I read "trivially fixable" as "there is an elegant solution to this," not that "it is easy to get it politically passed."
The huge problem with this line of thinking is that it's easy to identify a half-dozen key players standing in the way of your elegant solution and it would be easier to remove them from the situation than change their minds. It's an attractive idea that can become a fixed idea.
^ In addition, I find it notable that the political party that is in favor of more regressive taxes is also against a carbon tax.
In an ideal world, I'd like the tax to be made more progressive, but I'll take anything!
I see the carbon tax as a 'stick' (to penalize undesired behaviour, in this case emitting carbon), but it needs to be coupled with a 'carrot' to encourage the desired behaviours.
I'd like to see a carbon tax coupled with massive investments to make public transit legitimately good. There are too many places where there is no viable alternative to driving, a carbon tax will unnecessarily punish those people without giving them a reasonable alternative.
The carrot is doing the things you want to do like getting from A to B or building a home.
Government ‘carrots’ are almost universally a terrible idea because they codify specific solutions. Instead you can get the same effect more efficiently with a carbon tax large enough for people to notice.
Finally, some common sense!
I'll boil it down to:
If you want less of something, tax it.
> since on average richer people will spend more on fuel
Why would you think so? People driving older cars, not being able to afford to fly - will certainly spend more money on fuel for their car.
Rich people use more energy. That’s been shown by loads of studies.
Maybe they drive a more efficient car, but they own much larger houses which are heated or cooled consistently, they travel a lot more, and they buy things with embodied carbon emissions.
Right, but now you're talking about adding the tax to the whole economy, not just car fuel?
That's close to impossible to implement. You'd need to track production and usage of everything in an extreme detail. Plus tracking all purchases (items + services) to a given person. So complete state surveillance of citizens. Globally.
> That's close to impossible to implement.
For a carbon tax, I think you only need to track imports, and domestic extraction of coal, petroleum, and natural gas.
„Only” track imports?
I think customs already tracks this. Smuggling oil and coal into the US at any meaningful scale seems very unlikely.
Tax all fuel. So those energy consumption of wealthy cost more?
Ok, let's assume you do. Let's tax all fuels 300% in the US. Now all manufacturing stops as your production costs are all over the roof. Everything is imported from countries that do not have these taxes.
What problem was solved here? None.
> Everything is imported from countries that do not have these taxes.
Finally a good use for tariffs!
Do you think flying evades the carbon tax?
Yes, if you apply the carbon tax only for the fuel at petrol stations. I am talking about realistic-to-implement solutions.
Aviation fuel is dispensed at a limited number of places; it would be easier (or just as easy) to implement a higher aviation fuel tax than a higher auto fuel tax.
It's trivial to implement auto fuel tax - it's already in place in most of developed countries.
There's an auto fuel tax in the US. Increasing that from $0.184/gallon for gasoline and $0.244/gallon for diesel to say $1.50/gallon and $2.00/gallon would ensure massive losses for that party in the next two or three election cycles.
Increasing the tax on aviation fuel to $2/gallon wouldn't produce massive shifts in the next several elections, therefore it's easier to implement.
We already have a carbon tax, you pay it when you buy the carbon. 3 cents per liter federally and an additional 18 cents per liter in California specifically.
This tax is only assessed on road transportation. It ignores aviation, industry, or any one of the other sources of carbon.
Some European countries have total taxes to the tune of 90+ cents per liter (50-60% tax) with current gas prices, for reference. (~65ct/l for the energy/carbon tax, specifically)
I don’t think that level is sufficient to cover the externalities.
> Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive,
Unfortunately, poor people don't have the cash on hand to hold them over until they get their Carbon Stipend on April 15th.
It's going to hurt poor people to charge them more at the counter, even if you give them more later. The stipend is just going to end up paying for less than the interest the tax created on a credit card.
> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.
You give it back to poor as a income-phased out refundable tax credit. Crucially, base it not on how much they drive or consume, but on their income.
Name it something like the "Worker's Energy Credit". In the worst case, it cancels out the carbon tax spent by them commensurate with their lower income.
In the best case poor people who don't drive much actually come out ahead, and it's just a very progressive sales tax.
The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.
Why don't the poor just buy smaller cars? Less weight - less pollution. Nobody needs a to drive a pickup, unless they run a farm or construction firm. A car weighing less than a ton would be perfectly enough for 99.9 % of drivers.
This is way too complicated. You just give it to everyone unconditionally and tax it as income. We already have progressive graduated income taxes with a huge exempt class, we don't need to layer anything on top of that.
Giving it back based on being alive on Dec 31 seems the best solution to me. (It’s very difficult to game and if you give 900 billionaires under a million bucks in total, it’s just not that big a deal…)
We manage to phase out ACA subsidies at 400% of the federal poverty level, so I don't see why we couldn't use a similar mechanism for an energy tax credit.
You can. It will cost political capital and erode the clarity of the messaging about the purpose of the tax. It also gives politicians one more thing to dick around with later.
Personally, I think it’s letting the perfect be the enemy of the 99+% perfect.
> The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.
Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.
I feel pretty strongly that adding exceptions and loopholes to taxes only benefit wealthy people, which is the opposite of the intent.
I would be interested in reading a study where all the tax laws in the country were burned down and rebuilt, with no loopholes or exceptions. Also, eliminate borrowing against a stock portfolio. That is downright evil.
> I feel pretty strongly that adding exceptions and loopholes to taxes only benefit wealthy people, which is the opposite of the intent.
It depends what the exception is.
If the exceptions are "we treat a form of income received disproportionately by the rich a 'not income' and tax it at a lower rate, and on top of that we add an extra tax on top of income tax on labor income, and cap the larger part of that extra tax, too, to avoid burdening high earners", that helps the rich, sure. But there are plenty of exceptions possible that don't do that.
> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.
The tax would be on consumption, the credit would be based on income, so Larry still pays when he buys gas (if not for his cars, then for his planes).
> I would be interested in reading a study where all the tax laws in the country were burned down and rebuilt
That would burn down the country. Tax policy and the economy are a ship that has to be gradually turned in the optimal direction, just like how for the last 40 years tax policy has been gradually redistributing growth/wealth upwards. Sudden changes (like we are seeing now with indiscriminate tariff policy) are what results in the most harm to the poor.
> Also, eliminate borrowing against a stock portfolio. That is downright evil.
Agreed, or just heavily tax borrowing against a portfolio above, say, $2M/year. That way you don't penalize working people borrowing against 401ks or taking home equity loans for home improvements.
> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.
Salary might be $1 but what is his effective income when he files his taxes? That is what he is taxed on, which includes things like dividends and selling of stocks.
There’s nothing wrong with borrowing against stock, the evil part is the step-up in cost basis when the billionaire dies that prevents them from paying any tax at all.
It would be a good deal for the country to let the billionaire use their skills to grow wealth without interrupting it and tax them all at death.
Carbon taxes become progressive with the simple step of returning the revenue to taxpayers as a dividend payment using the existing social security payment infrastructure. Richer people have such outsized carbon footprints that most people would get back more in dividends than they lost in higher costs.
Meanwhile jet fuel for private jets is (and remains) not taxed at all, even in the EU.
This is a common trope, but is incorrect, at least for the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...
> Meanwhile jet fuel for private jets is (and remains) not taxed at all, even in the EU.
Not correct. Fuel for private aviation is taxed, including jet fuel and avgas. However, there are very few "private" jets, most are operated by some company, and therefore not private. Jet-A1 for a truely privately operated C172 with a diesel engine is taxed.
Which is bonkers. If ever there was a thing that should be taxed it's jet fuel for private jets. 300% tax on private jet fuel would be reasonable.
The emissions just to shuttle rich people from one side of the country to the next (For some, multiple times per day) is insane. You should need to be a billionaire just to afford flying private jets and it should still eat a significant portion of your income if that's what you choose to do.
And for what? Like, we live in the modern era, why does anyone need to travel from NY to Florida to Texas to California in a day?
I have a suspicion the reason why super wealthy people like say Musk but he isn't the only one hate subways and high speed rail is because they fly everywhere. You might like if you could get on the subway in Glen Park and be at lands end in half an hour. You might like getting on a high speed rail and being in LA in 4 hours.
These guy will never ride a subway or take a train anywhere.
LOL on an e-bike I can beat BART to SFO from Glen Park unless you time both to start at just the moment BART arrives instead of at a random moment. If you want a Glen Park to Lands End to take under 30 minutes, the cost would rival the Iraq War.
Looks like the trains are running every 30 minutes.
A super easy solution that doesn't cost the iraq war is adding new trains and running them every 15 minutes.
You'd have to deal with lower occupancy trains as a result, which means it's not as cost efficient.
Many politicians campaigning for green energy (aka AOC) also fly on private jets everywhere so that they can fight the oligarchy - this behavior isn't restricted to wealthy businessmen alone.
Maybe you shouldn't base your assumptions of the world on politically charged clickbait headlines... Did her and Bernie use a private jet? Quite possibly. Does that mean they fly "everywhere" on private jets? Certifiably false.
Depressingly, I think that's why a law to stop this behavior won't pass in the US. Wealthy and powerful people love their private flights.
Doesn't mean that anyone engaging in this behavior should get a pass nor that we shouldn't keep advocating for such a tax.
I'm no Musk fanboy, but it is funny you mention him not liking subways or high speed rail because didn't he try to build a subterranean high speed rail?
The hyperloop was a shit idea from day one and thus far no one has been able to make it work. It's also entirely possible that Elon Musk floated this as a distraction to stop the development of "regular" high speed rain in California[1].
The Las Vegas "loop"[2], on the other hand, is basically a parody of a subway - with a fraction of the capacity.
> In July 2021, the peak passenger flow was recorded at 1,355 passengers per hour.
As a comparison Toronto's subway can handle 28,000 passengers per hour[3] per direction or more.
[1] https://www.jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Convention_Center_Lo...
[3] https://dailyhive.com/toronto/ttc-toronto-subway-station-rid...
Did I say it was a good idea? I was merely pointing out that there's evidence that he is not the best example for people that hate high-speed rails and subways.
>Stop the development of high speed rail in California
I thought that got funded, what happened?
You'll note to two things that ties the hyper loop and the Las Vegas Loop together is private cars.
Don't discount that these guys find ordinary people to be scary and disgusting.
What makes a jet private? Should Trump's Boegin 757 count as one? What if an airline is flying a jet with no passengers? Cargo jets?
The same thing that differentiate a private car from public transportation or freight, I would think. This distinction isn't a particularly novel problem.
We don't differentiate these in any significant way. Do buses in your country pay different rate for fuel?
There are vans carrying 6 people on international routes in Europe, is this public transport? Private? Anyone can book it.
Looks like as long as only positive change is allowed to touch the poor, there will be little change.
TIL poor people can't pollute, so their market segment shouldn't be incentivized to cut pollution.
TIL that US car companies won't make smaller cars in the face of different regulations, even though they made larger cars in response to current regulations.
The only way to avoid perversions is to tax the problem directly. The market will adjust to all proxies in unintended and harmful ways.
A disincentive on a thing you don't want makes people choose another thing that you may or may not want.
The only way to avoid perversions is to incentivize the things you want.
Taxing cigarettes led to vaping. Maybe less bad but still a nuisance.
If you want to reduce carbon emissions, if the tax is regressive or not does not matter as long as you tax emissions. If you want to mix too many things, you will not get a good solution for any.
Are you saying used car sales would have a carbon tax? I've never heard anyone suggest anything like that. It's just a tax on new items.
> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.
The idea that policy makers care about this in any meaningful sense is absurd given the EV mandates, as EV's radically change the lifecycle costs of cars in a way that is absolutely destructive to people who aren't wealthy.
EV's lower the 'fueling' cost but shift part of it into large cashflow crushing battery replacement costs.
Automobiles have been a significant engine in elevating less wealthy americans because you can buy a old junky car for very little and keep it limping along with use-proportional fuel costs and minor maintenance. Even if it's an inefficient car, you use it to go to work, so you're making money to pay for the fuel. Less work, less work fuel required.
EV's significantly break the model and will push many more less wealthy people onto predatory financing which they'll never escape. Yet policy makers refuse to even discuss the life-cycle cashflow difference of EVs, and continue to more forward with policies to eventually mandate their use.
> it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.
It's been broken all along. We've had decades to fix it.
Yeah that’s the truth. The mass of poor people are the predominant polluters. They produce little of value and pollute a lot. So the question then is whether you care about the environment or about the poor and most people would rather the latter.
I think the best way is to tax fuel itself. This way worse mpg result in more tax.
Tax diesel more than gasoline, LNG less.
Thereby penalising existing vehicle owners who can’t switch to a more efficient vehicle overnight.
We have to come up with a rigorous alternative that doesn’t disproportionately affect lower income folk, because people tend not to be overly concerned about nebulous concepts like the climate impacts on unborn future generations, especially when my carbon impact at the margin is negligible when taken in context of global population.
If it is an issue - then option is to have less driving. Take a bus once in a while. Or bike.
Or switch to another old vehicle. Take old Golf instead of RAM, etc.
That makes sense, but there would be no incentive to switch to an engine that emits less carbon for the same fuel consumption (if such a thing exists)
You don't create carbon out of thin air, it's from the fuel, so burning the same quantity of fuel will result in the same quantity of carbon, no matter how the engine works. Therefore a tax on fuel is a tax on carbon.
Ethanol blends get worse MPG, and entail additional carbon emissions in creation. They do not reduce carbon emissions.
What is the point of the link?
Unless you play in the nuclear physics, Carbon in is Carbon out. Carbon in fuel is Carbon out of the engine.
Incomplete combustion is a big component of emissions, and it's exactly what you're saying doesn't exist
Yes but since incomplete combustion is inverse correlated with fuel efficiency (unburned fuel is wasted fuel), it's not really a trade off. What is a trade off is NO emissions vs fuel efficiency. Burning your fuel oxygen rich will burn of more fuel, but also makes more NO (due to higher temperatures if I remember correctly).
Those eventually degrade to CO2 so the increased warming from them compared to co2 by mass is temporary, like with methane.
By definition, more carbon is less efficiency. Efficiency is about how much of the hydrocarbon you turn into heat. Diesels often burn a little dirty. That's partly because diesel engines don't burn all the fuel
We already do in the US (but the money mostly goes to road maintenance)
Apparently not enough, as USA has quite cheap fuel. Add 100% carbon tax and people will start to pay attention to MPG ratings. With x2 price increase gasoline in USA is still cheaper than in Germany.
Isn't that what a carbon tax is? Adding a tax to the fossil fuel based on carbon content.
The purpose of the CAFE regulations is very explicitly to favor American automakers who make big trucks.
It wasn't the intended purpose. It turned out that way because the Detroit lobbyists were smarter and more motivated than the government policy people, and they bamboozled them.
The congress critters knew what they were doing and didn't do it for free.
This has been a known problem and could be changed if the political will to make common sense policy changes and corrections when needed was anywhere near existing. Unfortunately, we live in a [political] dystopia
> a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have
Doesn't this just punt the morass into the magic variable of one's carbon footprint?
How about this: fleet efficiency standards are stupid, anachronistic and counterproductive. Scrap them. Then, separarately, create a consumer-side rebate based on a vehicle's mileage. (Because a gas tax breaks American brains.)
> How about this: fleet efficiency standards are stupid, anachronistic and counterproductive. Scrap them. Then, separarately, create a consumer-side rebate based on a vehicle's mileage. (Because a gas tax breaks American brains.)
It's a good concept that is also ripe for abuse with anyone who has some amount of "fuck your rules" money. Same reason why fines that don't scale with income/earnings in some form often do nothing to deter "the rich".
I certainly like carrots more than sticks, but we need a couple of sticks as well.
Scaling fines with income only works to hard stop behavior, at which point just make it illegal. Most fines are proportional to damages.
Criminalizing fossil fuels is insane. The fines should cover the externalities.
> Scaling fines with income only works to hard stop behavior,
No, it makes it so that the outcome is more equally felt across all income levels.
What does someone affluent care if they have to pay a $100 speeding ticket or a $20 parking ticket? That's just the cost of business for them.
why can't we just tax the gas at the pump? this is, at least, what I'm used to in Europe.
We do. But it’s a super regressive tax. Lots of very poor people depend on a bad MPG car to get to work and live.
If you subsidize polluting life-styles, you'll get pollution.
You think the rich suffer from pollution and car dependency? It's not at all clear that taxing gas will lead to worse outcomes for the poor. It's entirely clear that subsidizing pollution from the poor will lead to worse outcomes for the planet.
What isn’t clear about the fact that increasing commuting costs for those living paycheck to paycheck leads to a worse outcome?
that's a different problem. US cities used to have good publhc transport, but the urvanization policies since 50s is car-centric. plus, because of the American cars having huge engines they have bad MPG. The current situation US is in is nothing to do with the tax regime.
I don’t think it would be possible to produce a carbon tax that’s simple
Tax the fuel. Gasoline now has a $X/gallon tax, as does propane, as does coal, whatever.
What is the difficulty with that?
Not clear what is meant here. Does ethanol from corn count? Methane from waste dumps? Gray hydrogen? Wood pellets? Ammonia?
Electricity from unclear source?
Human ingenuity is infinite. It is not enough to enact simple rules, people will just produce electricity with hydrogen and claim it green if it will make them profit. If it will help them evade carbon tax. Nevermind that hydrogen came from some extremely polluting process involving damaging our planet atmosphere and everyone's health.
It’s extremely regressive. You’d need to also give a rebate based on income level.
Give everybody $1000 (or whatever) to offset that. Ends up being neutral for some folks, a net benefit to the poor, and a net cost to the rich. This is already how lots of jurisdictions handle regressive taxes.
Tax the poor for carbon emission. They'll adjust. People will walk, bike, take the bus, car pool, and buy used hybrids instead of mustangs.
PS, regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical.
> regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical
Turns out you are wrong.
That’s the excuse that is used for agriculture. They sell a vision of a Fisher Price toy farm, but make policy for giant Midwest farms.
The proverbial blue collar truck owner is already screwed. Random surburban dude should be paying through the nose for his F-250. Create demand for fuel efficiency, and you’ll have cars like my dad’s 1993 Escort Wagon, that got 45mpg.
If interested in a case study, have a look at Canada's experiment with it.