I wish we could just have a global carbon price instead of all these piecemeal judgements. Start it at $50/tonne, tariff anyone who doesn't apply it, and increase it until global CO2 emissions reach a target level.
And even with that, it's been hard to get it through internationally.
So one way to actually cause delay and harm is to just always propose scrapping what's halfway built and go for the next system.
Rio in 1992, Kyoto in 1997, Cancun 2010, Paris 2015 https://www.cfr.org/timeline/un-climate-talks
But I suspect that in practice it's harder to make work than a simple tax.
In a perfect world, a tax can do everything that cap-and-trade can do and vice versa. They are basically dual approaches. 'Dual' in the linear programming sense of the word.
On paper, it looks like cap-and-trade would be easier to make work. But in practice, politicians seem to like handing out permits for too cheap?
A tax that generates revenue might be easier to get right?
Perhaps a proper cap-and-trade system should auction off all permits every year, instead of handing them out to grand-fathered polluters?
I tried to find easy to read information on how has it worked so far but I couldn't find anything on the right level. If there's a carbon trading expert here, I would really appreciate some layman appropriate (international law perspective) links.
Given the soaring cost of carbon in the EU, I think it won't be long before the EU heavily tariff's anyone trading with it without a similar policy
This. We should be doing this already. The reason so many goods are made in East Asia, and then shipped to the EU, is because it's cheaper. The reason that it is cheaper is because there are costs for manufacturing in the EU that are not there in China. Those reduced costs frequently come down to:
-- Weaker protections for the environment (i.e. polluting is cheaper than not) -- Reduced cost of labour (i.e. workers are not paid the same for doing the same job, and may be downright exploited or coerced into working -- c.f. Foxconn's scandals) -- Economies of scale. I would argue that this is a consequence of the other two.
These incentives effectively subsidize the operational costs of carbon emitting operations, they very directly make it cheaper to pollute.
It would be better to extend those 'subsidies' to every business rather than attempt to make energy more expensive.
We probably would have a $50 carbon tax if we had a global world democracy that more or less represented the people. We probably wouldn't even need global warming activists.
China is planning to implement similar system. Only USA is doing nothing in this regard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_national_carbon_tradin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Tradin...