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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?"
I was watching the Colbert Report the other day and the CEO from Timberland was on there explaining his carbon neutral stance and he sounded quite avid about it. He was clearly agitated from Steven's persona of a right wing nut who couldn't understand. It was more awkward than funny.
But it caused me to wonder what would happen if I urged the big company I work for (and it is multi-national) to go carbon neutral. Well, on the surface, we don't burn anything. But I thought harder about the thousands of computers we must operate and the kilowatt upon kilowatt of power that is most likely used by each facility. Ok, so (since we can't assume the power company is adjusting for it) we offset the power consumption through planting some trees. Well, how many trees and how much land would this cost? And what about the thousands of computers we buy yearly from Dell or IBM? What about the plastics that go into the casings? And what about the companies that they buy the chips from and where do they buy the ore that's refined to make the silicon chips?
The more I taxed my brain with this possible carbon neutral proposition, the more it looked like this was going to require a lot of resources. Resources being money. And while we're doing this, some other IT company isn't and we're competing with them to do business with our customers. So my proposition might be passed around at the office as a joke until the CTO got ahold of it and thought about the shareholder and rejected it.
So before any of you say a carbon tax is stupid because consumers will start to buy the most environmentally friendly products, you're simply wrong. The only way they'll buy it is if the environment is having direct negative impacts on their business. And the irony is that if it does negatively affect their business that means lost profits. And lost profits means they'll have less money to spend on their solutions. So our environmentally friendly services with a carbon neutral company will probably be out of the question if they're more expensive. Tell me, when you buy your computer or your Xbox360/PS3/Wii or your new processor, does carbon neutrality figure into your pricing at all? I'll bet it doesn't.
And at the end of the day, my coworkers will tell me that there's X number of companies that are worse than us so I shouldn't even worry about it. Or that we don't even need to worry about that because it's the people who make our tools that should be conscious. But we do need to at least think about it. We might even need to worry about it more than others because we're the least obvious target yet the largest base of carbon output. Take Wal-Mart for example. Just look at the trucks they use for their distribution centers. 500 distribution centers across the states with probably thousands of stores--all of those places being supplied regularly from the coasts and producers by truck. Such an easy thing to overlook--especially if they contract those truckers because then it's not their fault, it's not their conscious and they can have articles hailing them as the greenest distribute in the world while the contractor doesn't care because they're doing business with the largest distributor in the world.
I'm not going to tell you whether or not a carbon tax is a good idea. I'm just going to ask you to tell me what scenario would have to go down for an entire industry to collectively switch to being carbon neutral. And I mean that everybody has to be on board because it will affect price. And when that price goes up, if it doesn't go up across the board, consumers will on average opt for the cheaper product. What would have to be happening to make that consumer stay away from non-carbon neutral compa
My work here is dung.
At the moment, it's humans who are taxed, human work. Well, tax machine work instead. They do more of the work than we do and they have an unfair tax advantage over humans, never mind their ability to work so much faster.
http://www.whynot.net/ideas/2195
Deleted
One of the leading campaigners in this area is George Monbiot, he has thought about how industrialised countries can make a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030.
In a recent article entitled Here's the Plan he set out 10 steps to achieve this while changing our every day life as little as possible.
Instead of carbon tax he suggests:
This scheme would not penalise the poor as carbon taxes might because they would be able to sell off their surplus rations.
I totally agree with you, but your sig prompted me to think: What are some of those dangerous ideas, that sound good but actually aren't? I couldn't think of any offhand.
I'm not talking about "stop giving vaccinations to children to save energy"; I mean proposals that have a chance at getting somewhere.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Actually I have.
No I did not get sick.
Neither did anyone who lived at more than 20 km from the plant. About 50 people lost their lives, due to completely disregarding safety procedures. Some number totaling about 2000 was "affected" in some way.
In comparison, when the Karahnjukar hydroelectric dam broke in China, 60000 people lost their lives, and the region is STILL not back to normal.
Accidents happen. Chernobyl happened because of massive disregarding of safety procedures, not because inherent "unsafety" of nuclear power.
Although the Bush administration has been far too quiet about it, what has been said by them mainly supports the position of non-ExxonMobil supported scientists - namely, that anthropogenic global warming is real. That said, their silence is almost deafening. Also, I did understand that your point was a lack of communication and am in no way suggesting that you are contributing to the misinformation. As such, it's a valid point as many scientists have a hard time communicating with the general populace, and our government doesn't seem to have the willpower to do the communicating, either.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Both my posts indicated that while I believe that there may be a causal link between carbon emissions and average global temperature rise, the fact remains that the average person does not see this. The best you can hope for is "it's seems to get hotter every summer." And then of course we have a bitterly cold winter, and people immediately joke "that's global warming for you!"
What you and I consider adequate proof is no such thing to the average American. They have to be led by the nose -- people are not sitting around their dinner tables (if they even do that anymore) and discussing the effect on the planet's greenhouse system by continuing dependence on fossil fuels. They are blithely accepting what is said, or not said, about the subject, and going about driving their SUVs and throwing away their plastic. I put "smoking gun" in quotes, because the average American wouldn't see the smoke even if their clothes were on fire. Americans as a general rule are short-sighted; because global warming is not inconveniencing them now, they don't see what the trouble is.
I hate to say it, but Al Gore has done more for the global warming case that all the climatologists. It's that kind of publicity, coupled with evidence of how this is directly impacting them, that is going to change the minds of Americans. Nothing less will do.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Per the waste issue, we do have the option of reprocessing it. Much of what we call nuclear "waste" is actually nuclear fuel - it's just mixed up with other stuff that is, in fact, waste. It can be recycled, thus reducing the amount of waste we have to deal with.
Also, the "ten thousand years" argument is selective perception. Some radioactive waste lasts a ridiculously long time, some radioactive waste is incredibly toxic, but these aren't the same kinds of waste.
To give an example made relevant by current events, Polonium-210, which was used to poison that Russian expatriate, is really nasty stuff. A pinhead will kill you. But it has a half-life of all of about 138 days. That's days, not years. The reason for this is that radioactive decay is a finite process. The longer a type of waste lasts, the less radiation it emits, and the more radioactive a type of waste is, the shorter its half-life.
Per the issue of nuclear proliferation, I think the cat's already out of the bag. The US managed to make nuclear weapons with 1940s tech; it is unreasonable to assume that other nations will be unable to duplicate their 60 year old success, with or without reactors to supply them.
I don't disagree with your overall point that taking any and all measures to combat climate change could backfire. I do think however that switching to nuclear power is a good idea, even without the global warming angle. Given the choice between a form of power that dumps its waste into the air (some of which is even radioactive!) and a form of power that contains its waste within the reactor vessel, I'd take the latter.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
By far the biggest hurdle to a carbon tax is convincing our tax-adverse populace to comply with a new tax. Just mentioning taxes is a show-stopper for most politicians. However, there is one phrase that is more evil to Joe 6-pak than "taxes", and that phrase is "income taxes". So, how about a revenue-neutral approach. Lower/eliminate the bottom of the income tax brackets while adding/raising taxes on carbon-based energy. Consumers pay less income taxes, but more at the pump. Joe 6-pak is happy because he gets a bigger paycheck. He pays more to gas up his 4-wheel drive extended supercab, but he blames the Arabs for that problem. He also knows that he can buy a Prius if he gets really tired of paying so much for fuel (although for cultural reasons, he will no longer be able to take his friends to NASCAR events).
Obviously, just about every product and service will increase in price because underlying energy costs will increase production costs. This will put market pressures on all industries to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels so they can gain competitive advantage. Meanwhile, smart consumers will be able to lower their overall tax bill while those of us who don't want to adapt will pay more taxes than we currently pay.
The increased costs of goods/services will be a drag on our economy, but that drag is coming sooner or later. It's just a sad fact of being so dependent upon a finite resource. I would rather pay a little more now and avoid the increasingly volatile energy fluctuations that will most certainly occur as fossil fuel supplies dwindle. Hopefully, the drag on the economy will be somewhat countered by increased spending for more efficient products as well as the growth of the alternate energy industry. To minimize the impact on the economy, the transition from income taxes to carbon taxes would have to be reasonably slow, maybe a 3% shift per year. Ten years from now, the average citizen would pay 30% less income taxes and 30% more carbon taxes.
Oil is dirt cheap, no matter how much Americans complain about gas prices. The fact is, that there's a lot of oil, and it doesn't cost much.
So, consider a single government - what can it do? Fossil carbon and particularly oil is used so widely in all sorts of economic activity, (transportation, manufacture, etc.) that taxing oil increases the price of all goods from the nation. A single country would shoot itself in the foot by taxing carbon. Only if all governments agree to tax oil, then it works. That isn't going to happen. In effect, we're well past the point of no return: it's easier to consume all oil than limits its use.
Yet, the carbon tax issue isn't that simple. You have to think about what a tax is: a transfer payment in a zero-sum game. Those who consume oil pay the tax for the government - which consumes the same oil itself. The government employees have to drive to work, too. Effectively, a carbon tax has no net effects for environmental protection.
Another model is to tax oil and then pay corporate welfare to oil companies. Results aren't any different.
Also, the population is growing at the same pace as energy efficiency is gained. The only way the carbon tax would work is that entire countries would decline the use of oil, even if it's cheap. The political stability of domestically produced energy is gaining importance, but it still doesn't present any alternative to the massive use of oil and coal.