U.S. Emissions Rise 4.2%, China's Fall 2.7%

The US, like most democracies, is worse at long term planning. It needs robust incentives to counteract short term instincts.

A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.

0: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

People say that but the underlying assumption seems to be planning for the long-term at the nation state level is a good idea.

Given how chaotic the world is, I’m not sure that is true or if so just how true it is.

Democracies are inherently more chaotic than Communist dictatorships because of their very nature - democracies don’t tend to aim for stability, because stability brings about some good things but some bad things like lack of innovation and reduced competing, though I am not saying those are aspects of China per se, just speaking generally.

If we were to speak about China we could bring up a few long term planning failures. 3 stand out in my mind: the One Child Policy, the mass killing and starvation of Chinese people under Mao which set China back decades never mind the suffering, and more recently perhaps over-construction and the resulting ghost cities and unused infrastructure.

We could point to American short term thinking problems too but we are broadly familiar with those.

All that is to say, there’s a lot of either fear mongering or propaganda, not sure which. “China is long term oriented better watch out!” Is the current media phenomenon but nobody seems to really look at their long term planning failures or ask whether such long term planning is even good or successful.

Though one area China has been great at for long term planning is making sure their kids aren’t addicted to TikTok like ours.

And the first person to come along screaming "I will cut the carbon tax that is making your life unaffordable!" will be elected

I didn't mean to imply communist dictatorships always get this right, of course even with central planning and, supposed, long term thinking it has gone horribly wrong before, as you point out.

It does make me think about the failure to react to changes or ideas that we ill-advised from the very start. I think, at least partially, this stems less from the long time horizon when planning and more from the lack of dissent in a dictatorship. The Chernobyl TV series's "The cost of lies" concept feels very poignant.

Certainly and that speaks to the problems of democracies. At least in theory if you ensure the tax is progressive as I suggested it shouldn't make the life of the majority unaffordable. However, monied interest would of course try, and maybe succeed, to convince voters of that anyway (thanks Citizens United).

I was referencing Canada where they implemented a carbon tax with a rebate. Facts didn't matter because the majority conservative media landscape just uncritically blasted out "carbon tax bad" for months/years on end. Most people were making money off of it but the perception that it was making things expensive (things were expensive from covid-era inflation) won out. It also didn't immediately solve global climate change so it was apparently bad policy too.

Speaking of long-term planning, we can't even balance the budget. $500B is chump change, perhaps equivalent to the deficit of a couple of months.

China's CCP do party politics we'd have trouble to distinguish from failed democracies. They kinda fight with each other within the party, then the local CCP members vote on which delegates to send to the central committee equivalent (the NPC), and those 3000 delegates basically vote on country officials (which ultimately decides the political orientation). You also have weird political games between provincial politics and the pressure they put on delegates, and the pressure national officials put on provincial politics.

All in all, China can't be reduced to 'a dictatorship'. It's an oligarchy for sure (90 millions vote, less than 1% of the population) but it has too much political life to be reduced to that.

90 million is around 10% not 1%.

Well, make life afordable then, a simple solution. After that is achieved, make de-carbonated energy naturally cheaper than the carbon-based alternatives - there will be no need for carbon taxation and the right won't be able to mount a successful attack.

It didn't help that there were some very influential and sympathetic constituencies that were getting hurt by it, like farmers.

The carbon tax is supposed to be a three tier system: tax, rebate & tariff. There's supposed to be a tariff on the carbon content of all imports from any jurisdiction that doesn't have comparable carbon policies. It's the "carbon club" that William Nordhaus won the Nobel Memorial prize for. It sounds like Canada was close to setting this up with Europe, but the sticking point was the US -- nobody wanted to piss of the US by putting a tariff boundary with the US. Of course hindsight is 20/20 here. We should have slammed it in place the instead Trump starting being Trump, but by that time the carbon tax was gone. With the carbon club system, Canada's exporters wouldn't have been hurt by the carbon tax so badly.

> A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.

Better is to distribute all of it back to the people with everyone getting the same amount regardless of income. People who are using less carbon than the per capita average end up getting more back than they spent and people using more than the average end up paying a net tax.

I guess in democracies, because we have freedom, then you need to make change desirable.

In this case, you simply need to make renewable energy cheaper and the market will do the rest.

Governments can achieve this through R&D investment, tax incentives for such R&D, subsidies to enable scale if that’s where it’s heading, building infrastructure to reduce cost bases etc.

I guess this also requires _some_ medium term thinking. It also requires genuine desire from governments to improve the lives of their citizens and their countries, and I think that is severely lacking now that the west is in decline. Ruling parties are more likely to help themselves than to build a better future.

Speaking about long term planning and short term instincts it is obvious (for me personally) that any and all so called "carbon taxes" or "carbon credits" are simply a bullshit greenwashing schemes, doing more harm than good in the real long term. They are politically motivated and short term pseudo "solutions" doing nothing but shifting emissions to some "other" party or country or region. Dollars or euros or yuan paid as a fine or incentive for emissions doesn't combat those same emissions, not even a little bit.

I'm inclined to share your scepticism on carbon credits, but a carbon tax is very efficient. It simply prices in a negative externality and lets the market solve the problem. This is probably why it's one of the few taxes that has a broad level of support among economists[0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...

Definitely. Fines do nothing to deter bad behaviors. We should also get rid of traffic tickets and penalties for business crimes. They're all "justice-washing".

My issue with carbon tax is that emissions happen anyway and in the same amount, they are just taxed afterwards. The only way for tax to make a dent in emissions is to tax something so thoroughly that businesses would close or partially close some production lines.

It's like taxing drugs more and more, we have already done this, taxing nicotine. It really didn't work until governments started banning some products across the globe. Before that it was just as deadly as usual, but more expensive with each new tax hike. And that is a luxury product, non essential one.

Taxing emissions too much to actually make a difference would mean taxing business so much that some low marginal ones would go bankrupt. And among those low marginal emitting businesses I'm pretty sure are a lot of truly essential ones, which we can afford to just rapidly close with no recourse. So they won;t be taxed as much or alternatively they will be subsidized after being taxed (yay, double the paperwork and double the options for corruption). And so emissions will stay around the same order of magnitude.

I would silently accept existence of the credits and taxes even if they were pointless, if in parallel governments had acknowledged and implemented actual research and later action to really combat climate change (DAC tech, sun shields, sulphur seeding etc.) at scale (important). But no luck :(

You may be surprised, but in entrenched and widespread cases if ONLY fines are used, they almost do nothing to curb bad "something". Did war on drugs in USA teach us nothing? Or extremely common cases of speeding all across the globe in places which invite people to speed and where only fines (via cameras) are used to prevent it? It doesn't work. Some famous cameras across the globe, even in the law abiding EU countries, rack up tens of thousands of infraction per month, and it happens for years and years.

On the other hand, rebuilding a road to physically slow down cars, work even without extreme fines. Providing a complex set of prevention, therapy and replacement activities for the drug users also mostly works.

Same with carbon tax, but worse - drugs or even speeding in cars are non essential. Emitting industries on the other hand often are essential. So they have even less incentive to close or downsize if fined. Instead they will do anything to continue while being taxed. Maybe they employ shifting production elsewhere, maybe bribe officials, maybe just hike prices and pray that their monopoly position will keep them in business. Point is, it won't reduce actual emissions.

The US is likely particularly bad at long term planning, even relative to other democracies, at least partially due to the strong executive. It's really easy, and almost expected, for long-term projects to get changed or outright scrapped when control of the executive changes; this is less common in parliamentary democracies (and in oddities like the French system).

Sorry, I was typing from my phone :/

Yes, that was my point. 10% of people voting is basically Athenian democracy.

The problem isn't the affordability of life, it's the perception of affordability of life.

If Fox News spends $200M of screen time telling everyone that the tax is making all the prices of everything go up then that will be the predominant talking point.

That's the whole issue with "post truth" - perception _is_ reality at this point, at least effectively.