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Comment by spenczar5 | Hacker News Reader

Carbon taxes don't seem simple, to me. Measuring the carbon cost of many things seems really hard. What's the carbon tax rate of income from a downtown parking lot? How do you even reason about that?

(the others, sure, much simpler)

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You don't need to measure the carbon cost of everything. You tax carbon at the source, like power generation and oil drilling. The costs will naturally balance upwards.

The downtown parking lot, for example, probably doesn't have recurring carbon costs. The gasoline people use to drive there will be more expensive from the carbon tax on oil and gasoline production, and the cement or asphalt that takes electricity to produce will be covered by the source-charge on power plants.

That works for internal products, but not foreign ones. If you're importing from somewhere that also has a comparable carbon tax it's fine, but otherwise you have to apply the carbon tax to all imports.

Doing so also likely violates any free trade agreements you've signed.

It's a hard problem, but the gains are massive, so it's worth it.

It'll be a lot easier if a set of countries do this together.

To elaborate on that last point, one concrete model that was on the HN front page lately was the "climate club": https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001

I think the solution here is likely to pass extra-onerous taxes on imports, and then tell the host countries "If you don't like it, apply the tax yourselves, and then we'll remove ours once we deem yours satisfactory".

I dunno, that sounds like a trade war to me. If it were this easy there’d be no need for international diplomacy.

Yes, Carbon tax is the least simple, but at least the others free up the carbon tax alone from being at all equitable. That helps.

Carbon tax is the simplest because you can do it at the well head or the port for imports.

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