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Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

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Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#141

Post by npongratz »

dontreact wrote: post #131
npongratz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bottom ~2/3rd of households would, on average, get more money back than the tax would cost them. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding: 2/3rds of households would first have to pay up, and then they'll get more money back than they paid in? If that's true, it sounds like it would be instituting needless added complexity, with a layer added for politicians and bureaucrats to take a cut before giving it back.

The value add of the layer in complexity is that the costs of some goods but not others would go up. This would make buying and investing in renewables more favorable economically.

So the value add is to artificially add a cost to one form of energy production to make it cost more than another form? That does not sound like a "value add", but rather a simple "cost add," with government agents making the demands and meting out financial (and eventually, physical) punishment for non-compliance.

And we really want to add complexity and inconvenience to 2/3rds of households just so they can get their money back?

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#142

Post by vkou »

BurningFrog wrote: post #134
andrepd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do get that, but waiting for people to spontaneously start doing the right thing is just not a very good strategy. That's why we need a carbon tax. To force people to.

I don't think China would consent to being taxed like that.

They don't have to consent. That's the whole point of tariffs. They can be imposed unilaterally (As we have recently seen with the US - China shoving contest. Which, of course, had nothing to do with the environment, or carbon emissions, and everything to do with political optics.)

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#143

Post by shoo »

varjag wrote: post #78
rerx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Norway's wealth comes from exporting oil and gas. That's not very indirect.

That's exactly what indirect means. Only a tiny portion of this oil and gas was ever used in Norway, the rest was exported. A lot of it was used up by developing nations. Either way there were no hydrocarbon exports prior to early 1970s. Unless by "predecessors" you mean gen-x'ers.

Norway gained a lot of wealth from extracting and selling the oil.

All parties in the transaction (producer, middle men, end users) "should" be carbon taxed to some degree.

It's not obvious to me why you'd only want to carbon tax the consumer.

Similarly, in public debate there's a lot of finger pointing at oil companies. The public can be somewhat less vocal about wanting to carbon tax the demand side of the trade, of which they play a large role.

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#144

Post by nostromo »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #52
wil421 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Europeans killed off most large animals like Aurochs and Bison, and a few predators including Tigers, Lions. They also killed off most of the forests. When I was in southern Germany I did notice how cultivated the land was. There were a few patches of trees but they didn’t look like old growth forests. Even the hills were cultivated into farmland. Costa Rica is a good example of developing a country who wants to…

> They also killed off most of the forests. Yeah, keep this in mind; big parts of Europe are hundreds of years after a gradual deforestation. Europe, mostly Western, is highly cultivated. Mind you, thanks to that we're also very efficient in agriculture - NL, despite being one of the smallest countries in the world, is also the second biggest agricultural export country in the world.

I love farm tech but found the endless greenhouses I saw in NL and neighboring countries kind of depressing.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/magazine/righ...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/magazine/righ...

The fact that we're putting acres and acres of farmland indoors leaves no room for wildlife of any kind -- including animals like birds that can happily exist alongside outdoor farms -- or migratory animals like deer, wolves, etc.

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#145

Post by tropo »

est31 wrote: post #12
XorNot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less beef, specifically. On a practical level cutting out meat entirely can actually increase emissions because you can raise farm animals off of human inedible parts of plants like stems and other marginal food (i.e. parts we don't get any nutrition from). Beef however is one of the worst conversion methods in this regard, but animals like chickens and goats are quite efficient.

Insects are most efficient btw, but there are cultural reservations about them in the west.

We have the same cultural reservations about shrimp. We do not normally eat the head, tail, exoskeleton, legs, gills, or poo-filled gut. It's pretty similar for chicken; nobody eats the feathers and beaks and poop.

Shrimp is nevertheless popular however. We simply remove the parts for which we have cultural reservations.

So, where can I get insects that have been properly prepared, just like shrimp?

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#146

Post by jaggederest »

JoshTko wrote: post #139
sideshowb wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CO2 accounting and taxing will be a massive invitation for corruption, gaming and bad actors That's the problem already. We've had a CO2 price for a long time - but it's meaninglessly low. I can only presume because of lobbying from those with vested interests.

Can't we make fines high and give anyone that reports fraud a cut of penalty?

There's a similar concept to a Pigovian tax for fines, I think of it as a "Pigovian fine", which is the price at which the likelihood of getting caught times the fine exceeds the cost to pay the tax directly.

So if you have a 1% chance of getting caught, the fine needs to be 101x the tax.

This is why so many e.g. banking and consumer protection fines fail to achieve their goal - the cost of adhering is more than the probability of getting caught times the fine, so it's economically rational to not pay.

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#147

Post by Rebelgecko »

varjag wrote: post #74
peanutz454 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per capita?

98% of Norwegian energy sector is renewables, so any way you slice it.

That seems like a questionable statistic, considering that something like 20% of Norway's GDP comes from oil and natural gas. Or by "energy sector" do you only mean the energy that is consumed domestically?

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#148

Post by jaggederest »

npongratz wrote: post #141
dontreact wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value add of the layer in complexity is that the costs of some goods but not others would go up. This would make buying and investing in renewables more favorable economically.

So the value add is to artificially add a cost to one form of energy production to make it cost more than another form? That does not sound like a "value add", but rather a simple "cost add," with government agents making the demands and meting out financial (and eventually, physical) punishment for non-compliance. And we really want to add complexity and inconvenience to 2/3rds of households just so they can get the…

It's called a pigovian tax, and it's widely considered the most efficient way to deal with these kinds of negative externalities.

For most lower income households, they would actually be receiving a net increase in their income, since they emit less than the mean carbon output.

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#149

Post by Kephael »

vkou wrote: post #142
BurningFrog wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think China would consent to being taxed like that.

They don't have to consent. That's the whole point of tariffs. They can be imposed unilaterally (As we have recently seen with the US - China shoving contest. Which, of course, had nothing to do with the environment, or carbon emissions, and everything to do with political optics.)

If the West stops trading with China then they will invade Taiwan and Okinawa and also supply modern weapon systems to North Korea.

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#150

Post by tim333 »

EGreg wrote: post #86
andrepd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do get that, but waiting for people to spontaneously start doing the right thing is just not a very good strategy. That's why we need a carbon tax. To force people to.

We don’t just need a carbon tax. We need the public to support it unlike the French public. So we need to redistribute the carbon tax as UBI. So people say “more carbon tax please!” Climate Justice. Contact Andrew Yang who is running for President and tell him his UBI needs to be funded with a carbon tax!

I think if you had a properly planned tax so you could say this is fair and will fix or at least significantly reduce the risk from global warming then people would be ok with it. The present ineffectual stuff doesn't really achieve much.
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