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Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

arstechnica.com

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Re: Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

#61

Post by jfim »

ecshafer wrote: post #60
Nifty3929 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be happy to support a carbon tax, as long as the proceeds are held off-books and distributed annually to all citizens equally, with no income or other qualification criteria. Basically a carbon funded pure UBI.

So the guy working in a kitchen that makes $20k a year and bikes to work should be taxed the same as the ceo with a private jet when it comes to carbon production?

A carbon tax just puts a price on carbon emissions. So if the guy bikes to work and doesn't buy gas, he's not paying taxes on carbon emissions, while the CEO in a private jet pays more. If the carbon tax proceeds are redistributed, the guy in the kitchen comes ahead, actually.

Re: Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

#62

Post by transcriptase »

jfim wrote: post #61
ecshafer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the guy working in a kitchen that makes $20k a year and bikes to work should be taxed the same as the ceo with a private jet when it comes to carbon production?

A carbon tax just puts a price on carbon emissions. So if the guy bikes to work and doesn't buy gas, he's not paying taxes on carbon emissions, while the CEO in a private jet pays more. If the carbon tax proceeds are redistributed, the guy in the kitchen comes ahead, actually.

Everything in the modern world has the oil/energy needed to create it baked into the price.

Implementing a carbon tax that increases that cost along every step of a supply chain increases the price of everything, not just gasoline.

See: Price of groceries (and all other CPG) in Canada. People will blame the retailers and lazy headlines about record profits, but if you look at their actual margins, the value of CAD, and the fact that the government is increasing the population faster than anything else can catch up… it’s not surprising that they’re posting record numbers. People need to eat. The oligopoly issue definitely plays a part but that’s another can of worms.

Re: Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

#63

Post by AnthonyMouse »

hunter-gatherer wrote: post #48
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right way to do a carbon tax is to refund 100% of the money to the population. Everyone gets a check every month for the entire amount collected, divided by the number of citizens. This way it costs you nothing unless you emit more carbon than the average person, and you can even come out ahead if you emit less. On top of that, it ends up being a net transfer from corporations to individuals, because corporations…

Why wouldn't people just use their UBI on buying more things, which, as rudimentary understanding of physics goes, yields more demand for production, which increases C02 output? Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't understand how taxing and redistributing the money does anything besides shifts the consumer power a bit??? I mean, wouldn't a better solution just be to have a carbox tax and then destroy the taxed…

You're neither creating nor destroying any new money.

Bob is average. Bob pays $100 in carbon tax and then gets a check for $100. He doesn't have any more or less money to spend than he did before. He is able to continue his existing behavior and make no change whatsoever, if he wants.

But now he has the incentive to make a change. Because if he installs electric heat pumps instead of heating his house with oil, now he is only paying $50 in carbon tax but still gets a check for $100. If he can get the heat pumps installed for a monthly payment of less than $50, that's what he's going to do. And that's the goal.

Re: Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

#64

Post by papercrane »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #59
papercrane wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is essentially the Canadian model. The federal government mandates that every province must put a minimum price on carbon. If they don't the federal program puts a direct price on carbon and rebates the residents of the province directly. About 90% of the money goes directly to residents and the other 10% is directed by the federal government to programs within the affected province, for example in Ontario they…

All the money goes to the refund or every part that doesn't is a regressive tax and an opportunity for corruption. It's also not clear what local deference is buying you here, because this is one of the very few cases of a national issue where the right solution is clear and simple and makes sense to implement uniformly at the national level. The only sense of doing it at a local level is if the national government f…

The deference to local levels here is simply pragmatic. Constitutionally the environment is a provincial government responsibility. The Federal backstop is only legal because of the "peace, order, and good government" clause of our constitution.

Re: Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

#65

Post by ClumsyPilot »

transcriptase wrote: post #62
jfim wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A carbon tax just puts a price on carbon emissions. So if the guy bikes to work and doesn't buy gas, he's not paying taxes on carbon emissions, while the CEO in a private jet pays more. If the carbon tax proceeds are redistributed, the guy in the kitchen comes ahead, actually.

Everything in the modern world has the oil/energy needed to create it baked into the price. Implementing a carbon tax that increases that cost along every step of a supply chain increases the price of everything, not just gasoline. See: Price of groceries (and all other CPG) in Canada. People will blame the retailers and lazy headlines about record profits, but if you look at their actual margins, the value of CAD, a…

> Everything in the modern world has the oil/energy needed to create it baked into the price.

Ye, and CEO consumes more of everything, so anyone lower income will receive more from re-distrubtion than they wil pay in tax.

Re: Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

#66

Post by ClumsyPilot »

quixoticelixer- wrote: post #39
postmodest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "researchers" rake in grant money based on promoting apocalyptic levels of fear This is a bad take. We are currently living in apocalyptic levels of REALITY. The people saying what you just said, but twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, were speaking out against the warnings that--if we'd acted in them instead of attacking the messenger as you did-- could've kept us from global wildfire and heat domes.

The world isn't actually going to end.

> The world isn't actually going to end.

The world didn't end after the Black death and it did not end after WW2. And it will not end after a nuclear war.

So we should never do anything because the world is never going to end.

Re: Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

#67

Post by ip26 »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #32
Explore3003 wrote: post #6

The money going towards carbon offsets would be better spent on lobbying in favor of carbon taxes, and establishing Enhanced Weathering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering

I would be happy to support a carbon tax, as long as the proceeds are held off-books and distributed annually to all citizens equally, with no income or other qualification criteria. Basically a carbon funded pure UBI.

One of the big problems seems to be simply getting supporters to agree on what to do with the money. There are plenty of supporters who staunchly insist the money must be used exclusively for miscellaneous social justice causes.

Re: Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

#68

Post by AnthonyMouse »

papercrane wrote: post #64
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the money goes to the refund or every part that doesn't is a regressive tax and an opportunity for corruption. It's also not clear what local deference is buying you here, because this is one of the very few cases of a national issue where the right solution is clear and simple and makes sense to implement uniformly at the national level. The only sense of doing it at a local level is if the national government f…

The deference to local levels here is simply pragmatic. Constitutionally the environment is a provincial government responsibility. The Federal backstop is only legal because of the "peace, order, and good government" clause of our constitution.

That actually makes sense in a way. If the local government is addressing an issue the national government shouldn't need to touch it. In the US it's basically the opposite (once the federal government gets involved with something the states can't override it), and it's basically terrible because there were originally meant to be limits on what the federal government can get involved in but they've been expanded beyond all reason.

And local control can still "work" even when the same solution should apply everywhere because they can each individually adopt the same solution, the same as different countries can. In theory a province could even counteract the effect of the federal government trying to get them to spend 10% of the money by just distributing it to the population as it should have been, though of course politicians rarely have that much willpower.

Re: Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

#69

Post by Nifty3929 »

ecshafer wrote: post #60
Nifty3929 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be happy to support a carbon tax, as long as the proceeds are held off-books and distributed annually to all citizens equally, with no income or other qualification criteria. Basically a carbon funded pure UBI.

So the guy working in a kitchen that makes $20k a year and bikes to work should be taxed the same as the ceo with a private jet when it comes to carbon production?

Yes. The alternative is having politicians and beaurocrats fighting about all the little details of who gets what.

It’s not about being fair, it’s about keeping the politicians out of it as much as possible. It costs very little money to let the 1% get theirs, because by definition there just aren’t very many of them. Thats a tiny price to pay for the major advantage of less political football.

Re: Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact

#70

Post by mym1990 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #22
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lobbying in favor of carbon taxes This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason. When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and…

The right way to do a carbon tax is to refund 100% of the money to the population. Everyone gets a check every month for the entire amount collected, divided by the number of citizens. This way it costs you nothing unless you emit more carbon than the average person, and you can even come out ahead if you emit less. On top of that, it ends up being a net transfer from corporations to individuals, because corporations…

You really believe that a within a complex restructuring like this, there would not be any opportunity for graft? Would love to step into whatever fairy tale you're in.
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