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Comment by js8 | Hacker News Reader

I downvoted you. Fighting climate change is very important, and not just a power grab. People need to rise up and protest against things like these, so that power grab wouldn't happen.

Just to clarify, perhaps my point is not obvious. We want to have carbon taxes because they address the problem of economic externality in combusting fossil fuels. Different example of a similar tax, that aims to solve a similar problem: road tax; it's supposed to help finance maintenance of the road, which gets slowly damaged by each passing vehicle.

Now imagine somebody will lobby for a law that exempts certain vehicles (that rich people use) from the road tax. Would you then conclude, well, road maintenance is nothing than a power grab anyway, and we shouldn't do it? That doesn't make any sense to conclude that, and similarly, it is wrong to conclude that fighting climate change is just a power grab.

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Except I don't own a vehicle. I use public transit, walk, ride a bike, carpool - do all of the things that the government "wants me to do" but I don't get a rebate or any kind of exemption. I pay the same amount of road tax as my father who drives a Ford F150 an hour to an from work everyday, and my step-mother that drives an SUV even though she has zero need for one. I probably actually pay _relatively_ more because they "consume" more of the road at the same cost (ie. do more damage to it by engaging in activities which cause more wear and tear on the road).

People who consume more, should pay more. Period.

It's still a power/cash grab at my expense.

I would hope it was clear from the example, but I mean road tax that is paid by actual users of the road, not all taxpayers.

Such a thing doesn’t exist in my country, unless you use a private road with a toll.

> We want to have carbon taxes because they address the problem of economic externality in combusting fossil fuels.

I think unified carbon tax with rebates (to be revenue neutral) is what we need to fight climate change.

OTOH, specific taxes for some kind of consumption (like jet fuel tax) is just a power grab by valuing different consumptions in a different ways, regardless of how much CO_2 they emit.

Yes, I would be in favor of unified carbon tax and dividend (which should be distributed evenly to everybody), but that is a nuance that we can discuss. I suspect such proposal would actually negatively affect super-rich even more, because they have sky high real emissions.

To clarify, I was specifically addressing GP's point where they said "fighting climate change is a power grab", not those specific consumption taxes as opposed to general carbon tax.

Bullshit.

Before stealing more from my money by making me pay even more taxes, go call out those criminals who go on private jets to a conference so they can tell me and you to not use plastic straws or eat less meat, or to abuse a little kid and use her to "stare down trump" so they can score political points, like we're in a freaking 3rd grade puppetry show, the earth and climate we'd be okay. Go research who's paying for these embedded ad campaigns in news reports about how "it's cool and healthy to eat bugs" and how it's mostly my fault the damned cows are farting. Go demand removal of those benefits to people with electric cars because manufacturing those batteries is as bad, if not more dangerous considering what happens when they explode (lookup exploded tesla cars). Go ask what happened to the ice sheets? Around 2010s it was all what media talked about, now no one even mentions it anymore. I guess they didn't melt. Go ask about why it was called global cooling, then changed to warming, then changed to climate change. This is ALL political. There's nothing scientific about this, alas some thug-researchers being paid by the same corporations who are the ones actually hurting the environment

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