A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

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'.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The real hardship for the poor here is they cannot float that $1/gallon for a year before getting the $1000

The rebate can be paid out more frequently than annually.

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.

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.

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.

> 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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The rebate is a fixed amount, no need for estimation.

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).

> 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?

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.

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.

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).

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.

In official communications it was called the Canada Carbon Rebate or previously the Climate Action Incentive

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.

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.

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.

I hear you. The numbers I provided were manufactured to illustrate the math and support my argument, not to be representative of a typical price.