So you force people to pay for it, instead of people wanting to pay for it. That's the major difference. People want gasoline or gas. People don't want to pay for CO2 removal, because they don't get anything back immediately - maybe a slightly cooler planet and better biosphere 50 years in the future.
I think it's too strong a claim that people don't want it. They don't particularly want to spend money on it, but they do want it to happen. It's one of the things I think is really useful about taxes: they allow us to justify (to ourselves) spending we wouldn't on a case-by-case basis.
If someone asked me if I wanted to contribute to a new freeway in my city that I'm not going to use directly, no I don't, the marginal benefit to me is too slight. But I appreciate having sophisticated infrastructure, and when I see infrastructure spending on the budget, I'm more or less content with it.
By the same token I don't for example pay for trees to be planted for every ton of CO2 I generate, but I'm happy for my taxes to go towards addressing the issue. If someone asked me if I'd like a tax break on the condition that it came out of that line-item, I wouldn't.
I wholeheartedly agree! I think this is a stumbling block that all too many folks encounter and then give up on seeing the idea as a solution to climate change altogether, but there's a rather clever fellow named Klaus Lackner who frames the solution in precisely these terms. Air Capture is a waste removal problem with financially viable solutions today... It's really just about getting the right diffusion of cost.
I found out about him and his uplifting work through an appearance on the podcast Manifold [1]. But you can also learn about his research directly through ASU [2, 3].
Personally, it made me feel like the problem was far more tractable than I previously intuited.
> People want gasoline or gas. People don't want to pay for CO2 removal, because they don't get anything back immediately - maybe a slightly cooler planet and better biosphere 50 years in the future.
I don’t want gas; I want some means to propel my car from A to B. I’ll choose the most economically practical option, gas being the currently most available one. I live in Florida, so the “underwater in 50 years” meme hits very close to my home: about 3km away, to be precise. Lots of people will see the incentive to use less gas, or to pay for carbon sequestration in the absence of a non-gas option.
natural gas is used for heating, and for the time being it's more energy efficient to heat using natural gas directly than using electricity from generated from the grid which for me is a mix of nuclear hydro & natural gas
People don't want gasoline or gas. They're dangerous, toxic chemicals. People want these things because of what they get them. They want gasoline and gas because they want to go somewhere or heat a house.
Well that is what governments are for, no-one really wants to pay for tanks and aircraft carriers either. But politicians have managed to convince the public that it is in their best interest to do so.
Isn't a cooler planet in 50 years worth some amount of money?
Nobody _wants_ to pay for trash removal or a sewage system either, because they don't get anything back immediately—maybe a slightly less smelly neighbourhood in a few weeks. The only difference with CO₂ is scale.
It's hard to express how strongly my wife feels about wanting trash gone. She in fact often comes up with schemes to pay to get rid of it before the city will do it for free
While most Canadians would love warmer weather, we also are strongly against climate change. It is just such a bag of negative consequences for the whole planet.
Would they mind losing a lot of trade because other countries have to deal with climate change and hence can't spend more to buy Russian or Canadian products?
Rephrase the above as "so you force people not to destroy the planet for their own immediate gratification" and it seems more reasonable.
Laws and treaties ended leaded gas, atmospheric nuclear testing, and markets for several industrial chemicals with global impacts. Future archeologists will be able to date these legal constructs by the concentration of these chemicals, or radioisotopes, and their effects, in layers of rock and soil.
People who steal things aren't just "called" thieves. They are thieves. In some cases, they can even get away with not paying for gasoline (or other things), not get caught, never get called a thief, yet they still are, definitionally, thieves.
Depends on whether you assume the background property arrangements are valid. We call them a thief because we call this gasoline owned by this group of people we call a company.
Some other group of people might call everyone who buys gasoline thieves since they profit off of the negative externality they leverage on the rest of society.
It's all a matter of what you view as neutral and objective and what you view as a violation of others rights.
It sounds like you are saying it makes a difference whether a carbon tax is billed separately to you the consumer. I'm doubtful.
My impression is an economist would tell you that it theoretically doesn't matter that much if you tax the consumer or the producer. It's like US payroll taxes - does it make a difference how the tax is split between employer and employee? The real question is who is forced to absorb the cost, and theoretically that isn't determined by who pays from an accounting perspective - it's a red herring.
Often people insist without evidence that someone who will pay a tax can or cannot pass it through, whichever is convenient to argue against it, when the real answer is probably "it's complicated" and the entity taxed is not in control.
I think this is the Wikipedia page describing the phenomenon I'm fumbling at:
"The theory of tax incidence has a number of practical results. For example, United States Social Security payroll taxes are paid half by the employee and half by the employer. However, some economists think that the worker bears almost the entire burden of the tax because the employer passes the tax on in the form of lower wages. The tax incidence is thus said to fall on the employee.[2] However, it could equally well be argued that in some cases the incidence of the tax falls on the employer. This is because both the price elasticity of demand and price elasticity of supply effect upon whom the incidence of the tax falls"
I'm thinking this also is related to the recent political arguments over who pays US tariffs.
Yes people don't want to pay property taxes either. That's the point of taxes, to force people to pay for the externalities of their purchases. The carbon capture is a part of the gas price. The package recycling cost is a part of the product price. The only way to make an economy sustainable long term is forcing people to pay the true price for their purchase rather than forcing future people to subsidize their decisions.
Hey now. The characterization at the end is uncalled for.
To your point, using gas causes externalities. We know how to address externalities broadly. But the political will is lacking due to anti science proponents.
That's what governments do. Force people based on political process. Really, free market is more of a illusion than a model of how the world works (never mind what libertarians may fantasize).
