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Comment by beebeepka | Hacker News Reader

> Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.

I am very conflicted. Deeply share your concerns regarding misuse of such info. It will be used as a weapon. But I am totally in favour of making wasters pay up, and not just fixed amounts.

I hate wasting resources.

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"Waster" isn't really a coherent concept when taken outside of an individual's value system. What might be waste for one person might simply be a sensible use of resources for another.

Doing for a drive to the countryside for a walk? Having a long and relaxing bath? Go-karting? Using a heated pool? Keeping the heater on a single house-level timer so they don't have to think about it rather than planning ahead what rooms they will be in later?

Everyone will have a different place they draw the "waste" vs sensible expenditure line.

The correct economic solution to this is CO2-offsetting taxes and letting each individual decide how they want to spend their resources. Trying to centrally plan for a hundred million diverse people with different things they like and care about is a recipe for unneeded misery.

Taxes just push the problem into poor people. If you want a fair solution we should have carbon/resource rationing. In fact, I'd prefer a solution in which the governments work hard (much harder than they are) to bootstrap the brave new world so everyone can benefit from a sustainable world.

Rationing is ridiculously inefficient.

People's desire for heavily carbon consuming things vs lightly carbon consuming things varies massively. If you're worried about the poor don't ignore the externalities of their consumption but subsidise them directly via UBI or somesuch.

Rationing is a very worst of all possible worlds solution, losing you all the benefits of trade.

We don't want trade. We want people to reduce their carbon consumption. In any case, you could always allow trading of rations.

You do. Many others don't.

> We want people to reduce their carbon consumption

Remember that this isn't the end goal. What we want is not to feel the effects of releasing CO2.

A CO2 tax that costs as much as it costs to mitigate the effects of that CO2 release reduces CO2 production to exactly the amount its worth emitting. Rationing means you either get more or less CO2 than this number.

Just as a thought exercise, if anything was possible:

UBI seems to work towards the goal of making sure people don't die due to lack of resources (it is a basic income, after all). It's less clear how it works towards the goal of reducing carbon emissions.

Rationing, on the other hand, has the potential: Natural resources (publicly owned ones anyways), and perhaps natural limits like how much CO2 the skies can take, are collectively owned by the people. So it could make sense to distribute those amongst the people. The people could then sell them in a free® market. This means we can work towards both goals at once: Those seeking to pollute more, could simply buy the carbon credits from their fellow people, who can now better afford to live. And, at the same time, total pollution is capped-ish, depending on the scheme.

As a fun note, UBI is just rationing out the available funds for UBI, so it would suffer from any rationing-specific failings that carbon rationing would suffer from.

A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI, but with side effects. In particular, if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production, but the price will be unrelated to the actual externality cost or mitigation cost of the marginal CO2 release. So you either get more CO2 released than you would with an externality tax or you get less CO2 released than you should given that you can mitigate against that particular CO2 release.

Ideally you'd have credits being available for purchase at prices that correspond to the costs of mitigating their externalities (CO2 emission is not in and of itself evil, its the consequences that we don't want).

> A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI

On the contrary -- I was saying it was not equivalent, because it also works towards the goal of reducing CO2 consumption, whereas I can't imagine how a UBI would do so.

> if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production

The carbon credits I am imagining would not be "produced" per se -- they would, in total, represent the total amount of carbon we as a country want to emit, to reduce climate disaster, allocated equally to each individual, who all collectively "own" that natural limit. Those individuals can then sell their "contribution ration" to companies which wish to emit more than the CO2 allocated individually to their CEO, or whatever. So ideally credits will be available for purchase by the CEO, at whatever rate the CEO's fellow people are willing to charge the CEO. Mitigations will need to be done by humanity regardless, or else.

> total amount of carbon we as a country want to emit

And my point above was that this is not a single number. It varies depending on what we want to use the CO2 emitting stuff for.

My point was, maybe it is a single number! It's whatever We The People decide, and it doesn't vary: a ton of CO2 released into the air does the same damage no matter what released it. You could spend it saving orphans, and it wouldn't make the CO2 heat the planet any less, and it wouldn't remove the need to find a new way to save orphans that doesn't emit CO2.

Indeed, examining the quote below...

> So you either get more CO2 released than you would with an externality tax or you get less CO2 released than you should given that you can mitigate against that particular CO2 release

...it's easy to miss the point that there's no such thing as "less CO2 released than you should" because the amount we should is negative: not only should we be emitting zero (not net zero, literally zero), and then we must do the mitigations on top of that.

In short, we've tried the existing carbon credit scheme without rationing the available credits, and it hasn't worked to achieve the goal. We need to try something different now.

No CO2 emissions is not the terminal value of the human race. It is a means, not an ends. The damage of that extra ton of CO2 is not infinite.

If releasing a marginal megaton of CO2 caused climate issues that cost a thousand lives over the next 200 years but we want to release that marginal megaton because it let's us save ten thousand orphans than we should release that CO2.

It might be that in the world we live in the correct CO2 per ton tax that takes into account externalities is literally greater than the price of capturing a ton of CO2, in which case all but niche cases (antique car drivers and space launchers probably) will stop producing CO2. But I don't know that and the estimates I've seen have a CO2 tax that pays for the climate externalities at less than a quarter of the price of atmospheric carbon capture (and thats the top end of CO2 tax estimates!).

The optimal level of fraud is not zero and all that. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

Taxes don't have to push the problem onto poor people at all. For example, the proceeds can be directly given to everyone equally which will usually disproportionately benefit poor people.

So why would you say that taxes would harm poor people? I think I know why.

In practice, the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, and the media have been almost completely captured by the wealthy to disproportionately benefit themselves.

Wealth is essentially zero sum game despite what many would say. Power is certainly a zero-sum game. When you have power over another, they have less power over you. I believe wealth is another form of power, a little indirect and not perfect, but the correlation is strong enough.

This means that there is no practical solution that won't harm poor people. This includes your proposal where you would like the government to "benefit everyone".

It’s up to individuals to decide if they are wasting their own resources. Everyone has a different perspective. Personally, I think SUVs are a waste and should be banned, but wouldn’t that be overreaching?

Individuals don’t pay for their waste when they aren’t paying for negative externalities.

That’s why a carbon tax is a better solution - it ensures people are paying the true price for a resource. Let people decide their own life after that, they’ll do a better of job of it than someone else deciding their life for them.

(You probably need more than just a carbon tax to fairly price the resource. For example, mining fossil fuels causes health issues for workers, and impacts the local environment.

It's a slippery slope for sure but you have to draw the line somewhere.

For example, if there's a water shortage and someone decides they can afford (financially) to use as much as they please, that's not going to end well.

I don't quite understand the obsession with carbon. Not everything can be mapped to carbon without some mental gymnastics.

During a water shortage, if most of the water is being taken up by few wealthy individuals, then there are negative externalities being created: people dying, falling sick, being hospitalised, protests and violence that takes policing resources, etc.

The market has failed to fully price the external effects generated by some economic activities, thus the government must step in and impose a tax on all water use so that they can correct the negative externality.

At the simplest level, the government can use the proceeds to buy the water themselves and distribute it to those in need. For example, to reduce bureaucracy during a crisis, they could pay for the first 5 litres of daily residential water use for each individual directly on their bills.

The problem is again: the resource is not being priced correctly.

We’re all (well you know) a bunch of primates who travel from single home suburbs in metal boxes in order to work in front of a screen. Going around worrying about who waters their lawn the most excessively[1] is largely a waste of time.

There are exceptions though for things like droughts. But largely this goes beyond this obsession with looking over each other’s hedges (digitally or actually).

[1] Because the agricultural lobby would like to redirect the focus from them to random suburbanites (see California).

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