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

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?

It’s extremely regressive. You’d need to also give a rebate based on income level.

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.

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.

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.

> regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical

Turns out you are wrong.

Well, you don't need to tax the ethanol from corn or methane from waste dumps or wood pellets, or ammonia itself. You would tax the oil/gas/coal that came out of the ground that was used to fertilize the corn, process the corn, transport the corn, and distill the ethanol (otherwise it's double taxation). You don't need to tax the wood pellets or the stove they're burned in, or the electricity, just the carbon that is burned to make and transport them. So this is largely irrelevant.

A better question would be for imported items and services. How do you prevent tax shifting from carbon emission havens, which is no different from financial tax havens now. You tax them at entry using the most beautiful word, "tariffs". If an importing country doesn't tax carbon or carbon tariff their imports then you tariff them. Interestingly, it would then be a higher tariff for air transport than shipping. Where it actually get complicated is services, which people really don't like taxing. But if I run a LLM datacenter on coal in china or make bitcoin burning middle east oil, or consult on green projects on Indonesian gas those should be tariffed as well, and that's more difficult.

Life-style should never be subsidized. God forbid that someone feels the repercussions of their life-style, which is the only feedback mechanism that will ever cause change.

My moral system will stop global warming and save the planet. Your moral system will destroy the planet and kill billions. Everyone needs to be responsible, including the poor. Tough.

You don’t know anything about my moral system. I know that you declared all regressive use taxes in all cases as morally right.

But a system that makes it so you must drive an ICE vehicle to participate in the economy, makes the price of food directly indexed to gasoline costs and then provides tax breaks to the rich who can afford to buy new electric vehicles while increasing the taxes on the poor who can’t is not 100% morally right.

There are lots of ways to introduce a gas tax that are ethically sound but they aren’t simple and the idea that _any_ use tax is morally just is idiotic.

GP said it very clearly: tax the fuel. Taxing carbon atoms as they come from the ground is very different tax.

It is way harder because of reasons you mentioned. It also disincentives, e.g. composite materials with carbon in them. The materials of today and tomorrow, which would make us all richer and planet healthier, because of how much stronger carbon-nanotube reinforced concrete is.

It will disincentive fertiliser production, which can be net carbon-neutral or better.

It will disincentive carbon capture at power plants, since the tax was already paid. Graphite production.

This is my point: every policy is necessary complex. There is no "simple" and "just ..." when making policy

>But a system that makes it so you must drive an ICE vehicle to participate in the economy

You're literally subsidizing this system by preventing use taxes on gasoline.

>provides tax breaks to the rich

42% of people pay no income tax, and 80% pay net zero or less. Poor people care how benefits are apportioned amongst the poor, not how taxes are apportioned amongst the rich.

>You don’t know anything about my moral system.

I know enough: you hate use taxes, because they are regressive (when the metric is % of income, not when it is magnitude).

But use taxes, like any price, provide critical feedback to the consumer to avoid failure modes like the tragedy of the commons.

In this particular case that feedback acts as a restoring force against the literal destruction of the planet's habitability. My moral system doesn't preclude use taxes on general principle, but your moral system does. Ergo, I'm offering a moral system that will save the planet, innumerable ecosystems, and possibly the human species, but you're offering a moral system that lets us feel warm and fuzzy, emphasis on warm.

>I know that you declared all regressive use taxes in all cases as morally right.

What an odd interpretation. I was clearly referring specifically to the regressive aspect of use taxes, not declaring the holiness of every particular use tax conceivable, historical, and existing.

A: "Breathing is 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical." B: "So you want everyone to smoke crack!"

A: "Income taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical." B: "So we should tax 120% of income!"

Of all the ways you could have interpreted my statement you chose the most absurd.

> you hate use taxes, because they are regressive

I think a gas use tax makes a ton of sense and is likely a requirement to get us off ice engines which is imperative.

I don’t think they are ‘simple’ as the op said because to make them both just and politically feasible they need to come with rebates and straight cash payouts. The negotiation of which is as complex as any other form of taxation.

But go ahead and keep believing it’s _me_ who did the absurd reading of comments if it keeps you going.

You want a gas tax, and then you want to refund the tax to the poor. That's a no-op with extra steps.