Is a Carbon Tax a Good Idea? 238
.-.-.- (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?"
Anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Carbon tax is a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, then, you're a nut. Capitalism and communism are totally idealised nonsense based on a world full of people that don't act like human beings.
Re:car manufacturers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Anything (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a _very_ dangerous thing to say. There are many dumb and dangerous ideas out there, including ones that sound good but aren't.
Yep ... except (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Proposed Carbon Neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Screw taxes, stop subsidizing consumption (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:car manufacturers (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lack of consensus? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yep ... except (Score:3, Insightful)
And still provides the cheapest power available from any technology with ZERO carbon emissions.
"There is allot of options that is way better then nucelar power, and have the potential to open up a new industry that produces not only clean energy in the end, but also work for allot of people."
Potential, potential, potential. We were talking about options available NOW. There are 2 :
-> nuclear power
-> fossil fuels (& coal) power
(-> in some, very limited, places hydroelectric power)
That's it. No amount of crying foul is going to change that list, no amount of campaigning is going to change that list. This list is given by physical facts. Deal with it. And then take your pick between your 2 only options.
Re:Carbon tax is a good idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lack of consensus? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Carbon tax is a good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Bollocks. Implementing good ideas in all but one place is still better than not implementing them at all. Even if, hypothetically, the Outer Countries (China is the middle country; that's litterally what its name means) all implemented environmentally friendly policies, and all polluting industries moved to China to escape taxes and fines, China would become polluted so quickly that they would implement policies of their own soon enough. In fact, they're already doing that.
What we need to figure out is (1) ways to do what we want to do without polluting as much (2) ways to make these economically attractive to those making the choices, (3) find ways to clean up the pollution that we still end up generating, if necessary, and (4) somehow fund that (probably, again, by making the polluters pay).
In some areas, we're well on our way. For example, you can run your car on bio fuel that is better for the environment and cheaper for you. You can use energy efficient lamps instead of light bulbs, which will reduce your electricity consumption and your spendings. These are the sorts of things we need more of.
Re:Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
Excuse me ?
I agree with everything you said, except that.
If the environmental cost was added, that's american products we wouldn't buy at all.
The toxics you talk about come from industrial country like the USA for the most part (like all these computer monitors people dump) and from Europe too.
As for the atmosphere, the USA are still the worst country to pollute it, so be a little more moderate about it, please.
I think I don't need to remind you of the country that didn't sign the Kyoto treaty.
Frankly, f*** carbon. Put excise duty on environmental damage for all goods
But remember carbon is one of them.
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
Transgenic vegetables from the USA already try to make their way on our dinner table, don't think in any way it's a better thing.
You seem to loathe China for environment, but don't make the mistake to believe that USA is not the worst offender in that matter
Re:Anything (Score:3, Insightful)
meh, it's a bit pedantic, I know, but I think the point that the GP was trying to make is that the environment isn't actually a thing...well... it is, but it's more of a collection of things and it's more of an anthropormophized thing than an "actual" thing.
To make it a bit more clear: You can neither harm, nor kill the environment.
You can harm/kill the organisms living in that environment simply by changing some of the operating parameters of that environment though... So the panic-stricken screams of "JOO'RE KILLING T3H ENVIRONMENT!!11oneone" should really be "You're changing the environment in such a way that you're either going to kill us or screw with some part of the food chain which could eventually kill us."
Anthropomorphizing the whole shebang in such a way that "killing" the environment is isomorphic to killing us is a smaller mouthful though.
Re:Yep ... except (Score:3, Insightful)
people dont drive an SUV to drop the kids off at school
shops arent lit allthrough the night
shops dont have heating on in winter and doors left open
incandescent lightbulbs are seen as a quaint thing from yesteryear
A computer doing word processing doesnt ship with a 500watt PSU
Tomatoes don't travel 2000 miles (often by air) to get to my plate
Energy efficiency is an easy way to reduce carbon emmissions, and requires pretty much no huge changes to infrastructure. If the car companies and oil companies would stop liobbying the US govt (and funding the parties) to prevent them from raising fuel efficiency standards in the US, that would help too.
Energy inefficiency is a big problem. I'd rather that problem was fixed, than we try and paper over the cracks by building nculear power stations, especially before the waste disposal problem is addressed.
Re:Yes (Score:0, Insightful)
As far as reducing CO2 goes, there's nothing stopping you from creating something to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and selling it to all your slashdot socialist friends. Invent a scrubber that runs on solar power or something. Too hard? Then knock it off with all the tax and treaty talk. Do something about it yourself. Geesh.
How to get'r done (Score:3, Insightful)
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.