ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

Carbon taxes etc., are fairly subtle and boring technocratic method to achieve a goal. The reaction to them is almost entirely based on false impressions, a nested series of false impressions actually. There is no problem, there is no solution, this solution would make things worse, this solution would hurt me personally. this solution is just a scam and so on.

"I don't want to do the thing that economists say is most efficient, because it would be painful" as a democratic opinion doesn't really make any sense. If it's efficient then you can use the efficiency gains to compensate anyone who loses out.

And then that deliberately misinformed reaction is somehow raised as yet another reason for not doing the most sensible thing, and to talk about how "painful" it would be to stop polluting and incentivize efficiency.

And the only reason we appear to need to talk about what people want in this weird, third-hand, circular way, is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change. And since that answer isn't acceptable to some people, they need to come up with elaborate ways to prove that people don't actually want what they say they want, and that economists say is the best thing to do.

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.

https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/gettin...

They also keep raising the ambitions of their goals over time. Basically, big corporations don't want to be the only one doing this, because their competitors would screw them. But if they all do it, then it's in everyone's benefit, you just need some system to make sure that the other corporations aren't cheating.

> 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.

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/