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

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.