I need a Terry Pratchett philosopher to help here, but they're all in the bath.
First, the inelasticity means that a tax is a great way to raise taxes, but a terrible way to reduce use. Oil has gotten more expensive lots of times, when has it ever made people take the bus? We've seen oil price fluctuations. A tax will work just like a natural price hike. A nasty painful tax (with street protests just short of revolution) might get you a 10% reduction in emissions, maybe 30% over a really long time if your tolerance for civil unrest is above average. Probably less. Also, flat taxes hit poor people hard.
Second, a carbon tax is an almost hopeless mission. We're having enough trouble with money taxes. I mean we might be able to make carbon tax or cap-and-trade or something in that family of thing work in a country. We might even be able to get it partially functional in the EU, NAFTA or some group level. We are absolutely not ready to pull off this level of cooperation at international scale yet.
We will have cheating and defecting. Carbon tax evasion and carbon tax loopholes and carbon tax havens, or whatever the gasey equivalents of monetary tax mess are.
A great book (though slightly dated now) on climate change is "Climate Wars" by Gwynne Dyer. He's a shining beacon journalist and an ex soldier-scholar tip. He made the argument (I'm paraphrasing) that we're lucky we hit this problem now, when we have a chance of cooperating at this scale. Imagine if you had to get China, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Canada and everyone else to cooperate in the 1700s. I like the thinking, but I think he's overestimating our chances. It's straddling the border region between optimisms and lunacy.
We have spent the last 20 years trying to come up with a light weight agreement for minimal reductions in rates of expansion. The idea was, put in a framework, make it easy and painless at first. Then turn the crank. We failed! We failed at ground level, well before the point where it even starts to sting. Even though the targets were way under what we need to be targeting in order to avert disaster based on the median models (or the most lenient ones), we failed to agree on them. And, when we did agree them, we failed to meet them.
I need a Terry Pratchett philosopher to help here, but they're all in the bath.
First, the inelasticity means that a tax is a great way to raise taxes, but a terrible way to reduce use. Oil has gotten more expensive lots of times, when has it ever made people take the bus? We've seen oil price fluctuations. A tax will work just like a natural price hike. A nasty painful tax (with street protests just short of revolution) might get you a 10% reduction in emissions, maybe 30% over a really long time if your tolerance for civil unrest is above average. Probably less. Also, flat taxes hit poor people hard.
Second, a carbon tax is an almost hopeless mission. We're having enough trouble with money taxes. I mean we might be able to make carbon tax or cap-and-trade or something in that family of thing work in a country. We might even be able to get it partially functional in the EU, NAFTA or some group level. We are absolutely not ready to pull off this level of cooperation at international scale yet.
We will have cheating and defecting. Carbon tax evasion and carbon tax loopholes and carbon tax havens, or whatever the gasey equivalents of monetary tax mess are.
A great book (though slightly dated now) on climate change is "Climate Wars" by Gwynne Dyer. He's a shining beacon journalist and an ex soldier-scholar tip. He made the argument (I'm paraphrasing) that we're lucky we hit this problem now, when we have a chance of cooperating at this scale. Imagine if you had to get China, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Canada and everyone else to cooperate in the 1700s. I like the thinking, but I think he's overestimating our chances. It's straddling the border region between optimisms and lunacy.
We have spent the last 20 years trying to come up with a light weight agreement for minimal reductions in rates of expansion. The idea was, put in a framework, make it easy and painless at first. Then turn the crank. We failed! We failed at ground level, well before the point where it even starts to sting. Even though the targets were way under what we need to be targeting in order to avert disaster based on the median models (or the most lenient ones), we failed to agree on them. And, when we did agree them, we failed to meet them.
Technology is the only way out of this.