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?"

Comments

Proposed Carbon Neutrality

[eldavojohn]

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

Re:Proposed Carbon Neutrality

[Billosaur]

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.

Anything

[Threni]

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.

Yes

[Scarblac]

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.

Re:Yes

[arivanov]

Absolutely.

And at the moment the great problem of the free market is that all costs are not part of the price. The only reason we have to buy Chinese instead of European and American goods is that their goods do not have the environmental costs included. They pollute as much as they want dumping toxic chemicals into their rivers which end up in the ocean which we all use. Same for the atmosphere.

Frankly, f*** carbon. Put excise duty on environmental damage for all goods. The price of the good must include its full recycling cost and damage cost to the environment when producing it. This should be the case regardless of where it is produced. The Earth is not that big, so mercury, cadmium and lead dumped into the Yantze will end up in the tuna on our dinner table in less then 5 years.

Carbon tax is a good idea

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Sounds great, but...

[s31523]

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?

Yep ... except

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

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.

Here's the Plan: Set a personal carbon ration.

[7times9]

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:

...set a personal carbon ration. Every citizen is given a free annual quota of carbon dioxide. He spends it by buying gas and electricity, petrol and train and plane tickets. If he runs out, he must buy the rest from someone who has used less than his quota(2). This accounts for about 40% of the carbon dioxide we produce. The rest is auctioned off to companies. It's a simpler and fairer approach than either green taxation or the Emissions Trading Scheme, and it also provides people with a powerful incentive to demand low-carbon technologies. Timescale: a full scheme in place by January 2009.

This scheme would not penalise the poor as carbon taxes might because they would be able to sell off their surplus rations.

Yes, but...

[Noryungi]

What I'd really like to see is this:

1. A carbon tax, levied on the f*ng idiots who drive SUVs in the city. Ideally, I'd like this tax to be paid each year, and it's amount to be directly proportional to the oil consumption of the car? Own an SUV? Fine, that will be 50% of its price, every year, as long as you own it. Own an hybrid/highly efficient/electric car? Fine, that will be 5% of its price every year. Don't own a car? Using your feet/your bike/ mass transit? OK, no taxes for you.
2. A carbon and pollution tax, levied on the industries that pollute the atmosphere, water and soil. Same principle as above: send an (independent) team to assess the damage and tax the company accordingly. The more CO2 and pollutants are released, the higher the tax. Inefficient industries will go under and/or will be forced to streamline their productions pretty fast unless they want to pay enormous taxes.
   And let me tell you one thing: most big companies can afford to lose money for a couple of years in order to lower their pollution rate -- sure, it's going to be painful, but everyone will benefit in the log term. Oh, and no outsourcing polluting plants to poorer countries either: the tax should be levied globally, if necessary by using estimates. Outsourcing to, say, India, in order to pollute freely? Sorry, bub, all your plants in India are now considered as "high" or "extremely high pollution": that will US$ 45 million. On the other hand, extremely efficient and non-polluting industries will win.

Still ideally, I'd like the revenue from these taxes to be used to plant trees, create recycling and de-polluting plants, and optimize natural resource usage. Other worthy uses are scientific and technical: developing renewable resources and developing the technologies needed to clean behind us most of the pollutants we have been dumping on Earth for the past 100+ years.

The key point is this: whether you believe in Global Warming or not (I do) the fact is that the Earth is Dying(tm). If we don't force the big companies -- and the individual citizens -- to face up to this fact, all solutions we'll apply to this problem will be too little, too late. There are solutions available right now . Carbon Tax is one of them, and it's probably one of the most effective.

And... Wait for it... Creating new technologies and optimizing our resources consumption may actually increase the wealth of everyone, by creating new jobs and improving/cleaning our habitat.

Of course, I am not holding my breath: most politicians will never have the guts nor the gonads to sign a Carbon Tax into law. We'll probably come around to it once the Earth is so polluted and the climate so out of whack it will taxation or death.

Lack of consensus?

[benhocking]

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.

If you subtract those people who are receiving money from fossil fuel companies, then as far as I know there is a total consensus on this issue. In fact, even among those people who DO receive money from the fossil fuel companies, you'll find several scientists who admit that fossil fuel emissions are increasing the Greenhouse Effect. (Go to the bottom of this article and see Pat Michaels arguments against Global Warming. Basically it's that "That number [the amount of global warming] is significantly low, and it suggests to me that this becomes a self-limiting issue in the following way: 100 years from now, the technology that runs our society, and powers our society, is going to be radically different than it is today. It will almost certainly be a more efficient, maybe not even a carbon-based fuel society.")

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. I say it's valid because for the majority of people who don't actually understand the science themselves, they need to consider the biases of those who provide the information. One on hand you have scientists being largely funded by an administration that has very weak on climate issues, but who still find very strong evidence to support the greenhouse gas theory, and on the other hand you have scientists being funded by ExxonMobil and friends who try to find faults with those arguments. It's also worth pointing out that this same group of scientists first denied global warming was happening, then suggested that it's not due to greenhouse gases, and is now claiming that it's not really that big of a problem. So, if you don't understand the science, who do you believe?

Personally, I understand the science fairly well. But it's hard to convince those who don't understand it without pointing out to them why some scientists might be deceiving them (either deliberately or otherwise).

Re:Lack of consensus?

[testadicazzo]

Personally, I understand the science fairly well. But it's hard to convince those who don't understand it without pointing out to them why some scientists might be deceiving them (either deliberately or otherwise).

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

Re:Lack of consensus?

[Billosaur]

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.

Screw taxes, stop subsidizing consumption

[EvilTwinSkippy]

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.

Factual Error in Parent

[StCredZero]

The Kárahnjúkar hydroelectric dam is in Iceland, not China. And while there are strong objections from environmentalists, I also doubt that 60,000 people have died as a result of this project.

And this got modded up to +4 insightful?