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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

> I don't agree that poorer people should shoulder a greater burden for societal adaptation to threats.

I don't get that? If do adopt a carbon tax, then the rich guy who wants to drive a performance car pays a lot more, than the poor person who take the bus.

> If you have a high polluting performance vehicle, maybe it can be restricted in a normalizing fashion when used for transportation or recreation within some arbitrary boundary, like speed limits to some extent [...]

That sounds awfully intrusive and full of loopholes, that only people who can afford expensive lobbyists and lawyers can exploit.

> [...] but some people shouldn't have the ability to just disregard things in daily in daily life that the place has democratically decided upon only because the money is available.

How would paying your democratically-decided-on carbon tax be the same as disregarding anything?

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I didn't say anything about a carbon tax. I was talking more about agreed upon restrictions that can't simply have money thrown at them to just keep doing what they're doing. This carries over to a number of different policy decisions that have naive approached to truly reducing them. Like the real estate market, noise pollution, other pollution. Put another way, would you be chill about the local high-polluting company continuing to dump sewage into water ways if they're paying some fee? Probably not. People driving performance cars around can already afford the extra expense of having them, either for status or fun or whatever, I don't necessarily want to make it even more exclusive. A different example would be those disgusting coal-rollers that fuckheads drive. Do I want them to be able to drive in the city because they can afford to sink the cost and do it anyway? No.

>I don't get that? If do adopt a carbon tax, then the rich guy who wants to drive a performance car pays a lot more, than the poor person who take the bus.

But the poor guy with a beat 20 year old car in a badly insulated rental pays more than the rich guy with his Tesla and energy neutral villa.

Good, do we care about the planet or cheap access to highly emitting vehicles.

“Who cares about all those poors, right?”

“Who cares about climate change when it means I’ll have to take the bus or apply for some electric car subsidy, right?”

Please don't argue in favour of electric car subsidies (or any other subsidies).

That's just needless paperwork, and never catches all use cases. Eg the guy who walks doesn't get an electric car subsidy. Or the guy who practices hypermiling on his ICE, vs the guy who drives his ICE like a maniac. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermiling

Much easier to just apply an emission tax (or a cap-and-trade program) and let people figure it out by themselves without extra paperwork and government favouritism.

Why not tax the rich more and use that money to help the poor emit less?

That doesn’t work. As long as the cheap option is available that’s what people will use.

Unless you’re suggesting we tax the cheap option, in which case you’re saying the same thing.

I'm suggesting we tax the luxurious option and use that money to improve the cheap option.

Eh, that's what eg income taxes are for.

If you want to do redistribution to help the poor, the impact of the overall tax system is important. You don't need to make every single tax progressive.

Individual taxes, especially sin taxes, should be designed to do their job as efficiently as possible.

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