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Is a Carbon Tax a Good Idea?
.-.-.- (aka Fullstop) asks: "Cosmos Magazine is reporting that the rate of carbon dioxide emissions has more than doubled since the 1990's. Several researchers fear increased levels may be unstoppable. Australia's national science agency, CSIRO flatly states that current carbon reduction efforts are just not working. Add to this heady mix the fact that Toyota is pushing for a carbon tax and Australia, and the UK, are currently considering one, and a trend begins to emerge. If current reduction methods are not working what will? The United States currently employs a voluntary carbon reduction scheme based on market trading, with very limited corporate participation. Is a carbon tax a good way to stabilize emissions in the face of heretofore failed efforts at stabilization?"
that attempts to reduce consumption of unsustainable energy is worth a shot. If people only respond to the cost of something - if it takes a tax that makes other solutions relatively cheaper - then it's worth investigating.
I am a firm believer in capitalism. The market will come up with a good solution.
But the market can only function if all costs involved are part of the price. One way to do this is to have a CO2 tax, provided it is based on the actual CO2 cost of the product, and the money is used to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Then the market can decide what to do.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
So are the many other ideas out there for reducing global emissions.
Ultimately they will all fail if China is not brought on board.
Australia is seeing massive drought and topsoil erosion due to boneheaded land-management schemes encouraged by the government. The Amazon basin is seeing largescale deforestation due to clearcutting for pastureland as well as hardwood harvesting for construction. Europe is vastly overpopulated and over-farmed that the net margins for farming have gone negative in areas accessible by car.
The only large land area that has not yet succumbed to land overuse is North America and that's mostly due to the sheer size of the land vs the population. At current consumption levels, a land teeming (as Europe teems) with people would consume the resources of the American landscape and pollute it past the point of no return. You know what that is? That's the point in a journey where it's harder to go back to the beginning than to continue on to the end. It's like when those astronauts got in trouble when they were going to the moon. Somebody messed up or something and they had to get them back to Earth but first they had to go around the moon. They were out of contact for hours. Everybody waited breathlessly to see if a bunch of dead guys in a can would pop out the other side. Well, we're just about to slide past the moon and there's only one country that can change our course.
China.
how do you know how much CO2 is being dispensed by various companies? Do we seal plants in plastic baggies and measure the CO2 coming out? And what exactly would the tax revenue go towards?
No sane man would shoot himself in the foot.Tell that to people who were drafted to fight in wars and shot themselves in the foot to get out of having to kill other people.
Environmentalists hate the only real solution (nuclear power in case you're doubting that) even more.
It supposedly costs even more, because it costs "infinite" because of the supposed need to maintain storage infinitely. But that way of thinking just ignores progress completely.
And have you seen the movies about nuclear power ? Obviously it's evil !
At the very least, nuclear power can bridge the gap in energy supply until fusion power becomes available.
The only way they'll buy it is if the environment is having direct negative impacts on their business.
The whole central problem behind the "carbon" tax is that with the lack of consensus over whether or not fossil fuel emissions are increasing the Greenhouse Effect and producing global average temperature rise -- and frankly, I don't see how it couldn't be having some impact -- there is little or no "tangible" effect that anyone can point to. You can tax alcohol, gasoline, roads, and the like, and people are comfortable with that because they are things they can see. Businesses are not going to hop on the carbon tax bandwagon because most of those who are doing most of the emitting are not convinced it's doing any harm, and those that aren't aren't strong enough to take on the ones who are.
The carbon tax is a good idea; I just don't think there's enough conclusive evidence that is going to make anyone agree to it.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Before anyone starts on about the need for a carbon tax, we need to address the Billions that go into subsidizing our consumption habits. I'm speaking of Americans in particular, beyond the war on "terror", highway funding, and preferential tax status of oil companies, we also directly subsidize these companies that are taking us for billions in retail.
I say eliminate all of the special subsidies, odd tax loopholes, and other artificial advantages that make Fossil fuel desireable. And then the market will finally be able to sort it all out.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
"If part of an industry that is (very) close to the cause of pollution suggests to take certain actions that mostlikely will cost them money in the short run, then you know something is wrong."
Or you know that car manufacturer runs a cleaner shop than their competitors and will benefit from such a tax. Don't ever think business has more than one goal. Sometimes it's worth it to pay a little more if it means your competitors will pay a lot more.
Now, I know people will call this an ad hominem attack, but if it is, it's valid. Just as it was valid to point out that those scientists who denied that smoking was bad for were being funded by tobacco companies.
And sadly, when a doctor claimed smoking was good for them, people believed them. Look, I'm not saying that global average temperature rise is not occurring and more importantly that carbon emissions are not exacerbating the effect of the natural greenhouse system, but I am saying that unless there is a "smoking gun" (no pun intended), the general populace will believe what they are told. If the U.S. Government and the big polluters put their message out there more forcefully, the populace will reassure themselves that everything is fine, no matter how many climatologists are jumping up and down screaming about runaway carbon emissions. It's not about facts anymore -- it's about the message and how it's being put across. Barring evidence for the eyes, people will tend to look to authority figures for answers, and right now the authority figures they are following are the wrong ones.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I'm a computational physicist, so I have middling understanding of the science. But I understand the scientific process and politics of science pretty well. I'm always floored by the number of "global warming is a conspiracy invented by scientists to get more funding" posts that show up whenever there's an article on global warming. Knowing what I know about industry funding, if a scientist could come up with valid research that contra-indicated the current consensus regarding global warming, they'd have a pretty easy time getting funding from large oil concerns. In fact it's the deep pockets of the oil industries that are responsible for what little quasi-scientific publications are available.
My colleagues in atmospheric science know of NO peer revied publications in the last 20 years that indicate global warming is not a threat. There is plenty of disagreement on the details, but no one seems to be disputing the existence or danger of the phenomenon. Can anyone provide a link to any such research?
To the non-scientists out there, it's true that the peer-review process can lend a certain inertia to scientific biases. The convergence pattern on the charge of electron is pretty canonical example. Rather than approaching the current level of accuracy from both above an below, it approached routinely from above. Scientists tended to introduce a bias towards the initially (too high) measured value. It's not dishonesty... it's a fact that scientists have to discard bad data sometimes, and sometimes it becomes questionable whether you are discarding bad data or introducing bias to get publishable results. That said, well documented, well researched science will get published even if it violates the existing consensus. That's how we get scientific progress. So while the system has flaws, it works pretty well, and I certainly can't come up with a better idea. As another point, in any active area of research, it's unusual to get the kind of consensus one sees in global warming research. Scientists are a contentious lot, and our jobs boil down to questioning assumptions. So the fact that such a strong agreement exists should tell you something.
Beyond scientific consensus, which is of course often wrong (that's why we get scientific progress), there exist other criteria to evaluate a theory's merit: prediction. A good theory predicts verifiable events or behaviors. I first started reading predictions coming from global warming theory back in the early eighties. Every year now I read about events verifying these predictions. So far, fortunately, only the non-cataclysmic predictions have been verified. This indicates that the theory is not too bad, as many predictions have been successfully verified. It is of course true that the environment is a hugely complex system, and it's possible that important factors were neglected when making relevant simulations and predictions. The question we need to ask ourselves is: do we really want to keep testing the theory to see if the catastrophic ones are also true? I for one vote no.
There is no downside to researching, studying and working to counter global warming. There are many common sense steps that can be taken to mitigate the problem that will in the end improve our quality of life, even if the catastrophic predictions are false (something I again don't care to verify except in simulation). Reducing emissions is a wonderful idea. Do we need hummers? Lets make smaller, quieter, more efficient vehicles. When we can let's cycle and walk or use trains. Replace all of your light bulbs with energy saving bulbs. Raise awareness. Give gifts of energy saving bulbs to your reticent friends, colleagues, family. If it's practical for you, install a solar water heater in your
The goal of the carbon tax is to reduce C02 creation, not to raise revenue. So don't make it do the latter. Collect the tax as specified (based on amount of C02 created), but then every year, every U.S. citizen gets a check -- 1/300,000,000 of the taxes collected. After all, we're the ones getting damaged by its creation!
Why is this good? First, it reduces the "it's just a tax increase in disguise" critics (who otherwise have a point.) This also lessens the argument about how much the tax should be, since most of it's "coming back" -- it's not the gov't trying to sneak in a tax increase. Second, think how fond many people are of their tax refund check, and here's a new (and guaranteed) one! (Sadly, casinos and the lottery office will do quite well on the day the checks arrive.) Third, if you do create carbon, you're paying for it, so it's no longer a class warfare/guilt trip issue, at least as far as CO2 is concerned.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.