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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

The easiest way to get rid of coal plants is to tax the carbon content of fuel. Natural gas has twice the energy per C atom, so this would naturally(!) favor gas power generation over coal power.

Tax it, and let the market sort it out.

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carbon taxes are the exact kind of roundabout measure that creates distortions and unintended consequences[0] rather than directly tackling the core issue. we need to tax pollution directly, as happened with CFCs in the 80s, because what we want to get rid of is pollution and that's how you directly internalize externalities while minimizing gaming potential (and we should use the funds for further clean-up efforts). carbon by itself is not a pollutant[1], but rather an essential component of life. things like dioxins, lead and other heavy metals, particulate matter, ammonium, radon, microplastics, pesticides, VOCs, ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, radiation (coal/fly ash surpasses nuclear waste, but both are relatively small), and yes, even a number of hydrocarbons, are directly pollutants, so let's target those things directly.

[0]: cap-and-trade is another oft-mentioned approach, but suffers from the same gaming potential as carbon taxes. in the ideal, it should work, but practically they've been shown to become regulatorily captured, just like most bureaucratic measures.

[1]: you could even argue that carbon dioxide is not necessarily a pollutant because it's essential to the cycle of life on earth. it becomes a critical problem when we have something like an order of magnitude more of it than we do currently, but so can anything be poisonous in high enough doses.

We must be thinking of different things because imo carbon taxes are the most direct way to internalize the externality. Crude oil, coal, and natural gas now cost more, proportional to their GHG potential, and the free market figures out how to minimize the cost.

It gets tricky when importing finished goods and with non-fuel sources of GHG, but it's way less complicated and more effective than any of the other proposals.

no, because the amount of carbon in each energy input doesn't directly correlate with the amount of pollution and harm, and it's a courser measure than taxing the polluting components relative to their externalized impact on health and wellbeing. we need to directly tax each of the things we don't want proportional to harm, rather than trying to simplify the problem and thereby creating unintended distortions and consequences.

Uh, the carbon content of fuels winds up as CO2 emissions, which are blamed for climate change. Taxing the carbon content of fuels is a very targeted, direct tax. It's simple, too, orders of magnitude simpler than any other proposed method.

I think the person you're replying to has an embedded assumption of "climate change is fake news"

the very point is that climate change and CO₂ are mediopolitical distractions, and your 'simpler' isn't better but rather materially worse. pollution is a consensus problem. we should directly tackle that problem, not the indirect, mediopolitically manufactured one.

* note that consensus isn't how media or political careers are made.

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