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

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196 points triceratops | 2 comments | 02 Sep 25 20:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.706s | source
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K0nserv ◴[02 Sep 25 21:48 UTC] No.45109548[source]▶
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

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panarchy ◴[02 Sep 25 22:24 UTC] No.45109896[source]▶
And the first person to come along screaming "I will cut the carbon tax that is making your life unaffordable!" will be elected
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K0nserv ◴[02 Sep 25 22:32 UTC] No.45109989[source]▶
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).
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1. panarchy ◴[02 Sep 25 23:15 UTC] No.45110345[source]▶
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.
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2. bryanlarsen ◴[03 Sep 25 01:38 UTC] No.45111353[source]▶
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.