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but event "emissions" isn't a simple calculation No one is claiming that it is, but there are standardised reporting practices to ensure proper coverage of emissions when published. These are the Scopes 1, 2, and 3 (which includes 12 sub-scopes), listed in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. They are the GAAP of the sustainability industry and is required by every major reporting mechanism (e.g. CDP, etc).

All the items you listed are covered within the scopes, include power generation, fuel processing (typically called well-to-tank), transmission loss, emissions embodied in purchased assets (e.g. construction emissions of a vehicle), employee commuting, waste, etc.

Depending on how you look at something, getting an electric car is a horrible thing to do. Even then, is that better or worse than charging it at night from a coal power plant? A common claim by climate-deniers that has been widely debunked for almost every power network in the rich world (where electric cars are most common). If I remember correctly, only two countries in all of Europe were found to have lower emissions with a petrol engine than plugging into a dirty grid.

I think a lot of the woke efforts in and of themselves are short sighted, and not very well thought out at all though. Woke? Not thought through? You wrote a long comment about carbon reporting when you clearly don't know the first thing about how carbon is reported or calculated...

> A common claim by climate-deniers that has been widely debunked

Extending car lifetime and first-owner possession length can reduce overall emissions more than accelerating replacement according to new study[0]

[0] https://www.kyushu-u.ac.jp/en/researches/view/218

That study doesn't say what you're trying to imply it does, and it's just not very good regardless:

> In this case, by keeping more cars in the hands of their original owners longer, the number of used cars on the road decreases. Accordingly, emissions from the driving of new, relatively fuel-efficient cars increase while those of used, relatively fuel-inefficient cars decrease.

That, makes no sense. They seem to believe that a years old car moving from one owner to another suddenly increases the emissions. It does not, the relative emmisions change with age, because new, more efficent cars are produced, like EVs.

But yes, making cars last longer is good. You know the best way to do that? Make them EVs.

> Make them EVs.

Only makes them last longer if you leave the LTE modem and dmca and safety regulation backed repair countermeasures out.

> but even "emissions" isn't a simple calculation

It actually can be. A molecule of oil does not burn twice. If you tax all the fossil fuels at the source (i.e. when they are extracted), then you tax all the emissions. The companies that extract the fossil fuels will pass some of the tax to those who buy from them, who will pass some of their purchasing costs to some who buy for them, etc.

You can take that tax revenue and pay people who remove CO2 from the atmosphere. For example if you own forested land you should receive a tax rebate proportional to how much CO2 the forest absorbs. This way you incentivize people to buy land and plant forests.

In the US we have 30 million acres of land cultivated with corn used for ethanol production. The idea is that corn-derived ethanol is not a fossil fuel, and legislating a 10% ethanol fraction in our gasoline is somewhat similar to a 10% reduction in fossil fuel use reduction. Of course, we use a lot of fossil fuels to produce that corn, but the bigger problem is that in the end all the CO2 scrubbed from the atmosphere by the 30 million acres of corn is put right back in when it's burned in a vehicle.

If you start giving people a tax rebate if they plant trees on their land, then the farmers will immediately stop the whole ethanol charade and plant trees.

Just accelerating the existing EV transition would help, here's someone who's done the numbers:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/electric-cars-sales-in-the-us-co...

> A faster shift to electric vehicles (EVs) in the US would avoid around 10% of the global cropland expansion expected over the next 30 years, according to a new study.

> Instead of growing maize (corn) to make biofuel for US cars, modelling in the Ecological Economics paper suggests large swathes of land could be left to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2).

> This land sparing would bring “substantial” emissions savings, in addition to the direct benefits of electrifying US road transport, the researchers say.

more like 80 million acres, just to update your fact regurgitation

No.

As per the latest USDA report [1]:

  - total area planted with corn: 90.7 million acres
  - total production 14.1 billion bushels
  - out of which 5.0 billion bushels used for ethanol

The don't give the exact area used for ethanol production, but making the reasonable assumption that the yield per acre is constant (it's probably not, but it's also probably not that far off), you get 5.0/ 14.1 x 90.7 = 32.2 million acres.

[1] https://www.usda.gov/oce/commodity/wasde/wasde0722.pdf

> but even "emissions" isn't a simple calculation

Yes, it is. Tax the fuel on its carbon content at the point of sale of the fuel from the refinery.

Many activities generate emissions that have nothing to do with the sale of fuel.

Who gets to decide what counts as emissions?

What percentage of it is is fuel based? 95%?

If that's big enough to worry about, then tax carbon at the point oil, gas, and coal, come out of the ground.

Does ethanol, wood and other non fossil carbon sources get a pass?

If the goal is to reduce CO2, then the source of the fuel is irrelevant. The only relevant thing is the carbon content, which gets turned into CO2 via combustion.

Isn't the goal to reduce net CO2?

Seems to be somewhat hardcore to reduce the entire debate down to (effectively) "any CO2 is bad CO2"

In the ideal sense, we go strictly chemical on this & track the chemical outputs from a given process. From there, the chemical/resource inputs are taken into account to get (supposed resulting emissions + inefficiency overhead + 5% padding).

With those emission outputs in hand, a table of carbon prices is referred to before the final tally is made.

That forgets to count methane from cows.

Taxing beef isn't hard, either.

Cows aren't adding fossil carbon to the atmosphere. They are a distraction from the real problem.

Honestly, I think all the talk of cows comes from the fossil fuel companies trying to distract people from doing anything. Much like the folks who say the US shouldn’t do anything because China emits more CO2 than the US does. Just delaying solutions so they can keep making more money.

> tax

Not sure how making the government profit from it is gonna solve anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

As soon as you add a tax to something that money goes somewhere and politicians (or more often then not their offspring) will be profiting off it and then where is the impetus to prevent it when it brings money in?

Smoking could be completely phased out but it wont because it's just too profitable for the government.

We're getting a bit binary and reductive here, taxing fossil fuels is like 80% of the answer, but the details matter too.

For example, the production of fossil fuels releases both carbon and methane. You want to tax those as well, to incentivise cleaner production methods.

If a single country taxes their production, then products made with carbon intense methods in other countries will be imported, so international co-operation is required.

And outside fossil fuels, which we already have great low-carbon replacements for 80% of the uses of, there's other stuff that matters, like not destroying forests and peat bogs.

We don't need to figure this out from first principles on a nerd forum, the entire planet has been figuring out the details for the last few decades and publicly published the best answers we have collectively found, and continually update them:

https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/

An 80% answer is all we need. CO2 emission does not (and cannot) be reduced to zero.

Not doing it because other countries won't is a completely defeatist point of view. It is not destructive to the US to do it, because the carbon tax can be offset by reductions in other taxes, making it a net zero effect on the economy.

Do car emissions get attributed to the car manufacturer, or the petrol stations?

Or the owner? (Which could be a company of course, in case you're thinking that's a cop-out.)