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Comment by throwaway100773 | Hacker News Reader

The question is why isn’t illegal to externalize on my and my kids life by burning gas as if it had no consequence beside being an asinine financial move.

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In reality, cars are safer now then they have ever been. Allowing people to buy pickup trucks isn’t some dastardly move made out of excess and negligence. Anyone who needs a pickup truck has there own reasons, and as long as the vehicle has passed the legally required safety measures, why not just let people have the freedom to do what they want?

IMO vehicles of a certain size should have to follow specific rules (in densely populated areas). I live where is snows; and when it does, there are lots of 2-way streets that are large enough for 2 reasonably sized vehicles, but not if one of them is a huge truck / suburban. Last night I had to back out of a road because some lady in an Escalade was driving down the center and refused to squeeze right to allow traffic to flow as intended. It also bothers me that you cannot see over these automobiles on the highway. Many times I've been traveling in the left lane on the highway with a big truck in front of me (that's going slow, but I assume it's because of the person in front of them). I move left even more to try and peek around them to discover that there is no one in front of them, they're just oblivious / refusing to yield. If you want to drive something huge, that's okay with me, but keep it in the right lane and off of small streets like all the shipping trucks.

Gasoline is taxed in most places. How do you know gas taxes don't internalize the costs?

Because most places don’t have a carbon tax on gasoline emissions.

I don't see what the label has to do with it. Isn't it the total amount that matters? If the externalities of a gallon of gas are $X, and the total taxes are > $X, then the purchaser is paying for them. How do you know one or more of the taxes doesn't identify as a carbon tax?

I guess you could assume that the current taxes are precisely applied to externalities other than CO2, but given the large differences in taxation due to jurisdiction, I don't see how they could broadly match up. And requirements for them to do so surely aren't strict or universal.

Because the actual harm done from emitting via gasoline usage is not dealt with under the current tax regime. I’d argue that any tax that exists does not encapsulate the cost of removing those emissions from the atmosphere. Considering it costs somewhere between 90 and 400/ ton (possibly more) to remove co2 from the atmosphere, I don’t see how the current tax regimes are quite enough but more importantly the economic harm that’s being done is not being addressed with those tax dollars.

In theory, you could tax gasoline to the level of true removal cost, but unless a market exists to actually remove the carbon it’s moot since the mechanism to clear the damage can’t exist without a functional market on carbon.

Thus, when you burn gasoline you are externalizing. As a result I cannot understand the desire to needlessly do this just so you can drive a superduty to your office job.

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