61–70 of 85 posts
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I wouldn't call a 10-15% increase in the price of gas "little effect."
It's nowhere near enough to meaningfully affect demand. The EIA estimates[1] that gasoline has to get 25-50% more expensive to reduce demand by even 1% . [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=19191
That's because gas is inelastic. That doesn't mean a price increase wouldn't have a negative effect.
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> I think that it's a bad thing that "multi-national corporation" has become synonymous with "bad agent" or even "evil." Until the aims of multinational corporations are aligned with the aims of society at large, they will continue to be considered untrustworthy.
In a capitalist society they are.
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There is no "free market here"--CO2 production is an externalized cost and not taxing it enables some companies (that use energy) to pass off part of the costs of their profit-making activities on everyone else.
My understanding is that externalized costs have nothing to do with a free market. Intervention is necessary in order to account for the externalized costs, which is an infringement on a free market. Are you saying that is incorrect?
Say you run a delivery business, and your bike messengers can save a lot of time (netting you a higher profit) cutting across your neighbor's property. It's a free market when you can freely transact with your neighbor for an easement over his property; it's not a free market when the government fails to stop you from trespassing on his property without his permission.
Externalized costs from pollution aren't any different. Like trespassing, pollution burdens other peoples' property. Letting people pollute unchecked undermines the free market.
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There is no "free market here"--CO2 production is an externalized cost and not taxing it enables some companies (that use energy) to pass off part of the costs of their profit-making activities on everyone else.
My understanding is that externalized costs have nothing to do with a free market. Intervention is necessary in order to account for the externalized costs, which is an infringement on a free market. Are you saying that is incorrect?
Remember how this came about though, the government of the time had to "step in" and end the use of land as a commons and bring about its privatisation. This sounds like market intervention, doesn't it? We don't look at it that way though, as it was the government intervention that kicked off the whole machine of capitalism. The wealthy at the time were mostly in favour of it and so it had a lot of support.
So what is a free market? In order to have a market at all, you need a government which defends the property "rights" (a purely ideological/philosophical assertion by Locke and co.) of private owners of the stuff and things that we use to produce in this world. We use air to produce things too, as well as land. Just as land must be used to accept the refuse of our production and consumption (rubbish dumps, landfills), the air does too. We charge people to put stuff in landfills, so why don't we charge people to put stuff in the air? This carbon tax is effectively a way of "uncommonsing" the air, just as the land was in the 18th century. This proposed intervention is less popular among the wealthy, of course, as it is not a form of privatisation that they can easily profit from. Ultimately, if it comes to it, they will surely be passing the cost of this privatisation to the workers and consumers in the end anyway.
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Unfortunately, it's not going to work, and they will be ran out of business through the political will of the people, just as the tobacco industry is now having done to it. Cool, and what's your proposal for an alternative energy source to power modern civilisation? https://www.scribd.com/document/320110894/Alex-Epstein-Moral...
How about nuclear power? It's the most viable energy source that we have. It doesn't emit carbon. It could power the world. Funny that the people who get labeled "climate deniers" are also the most pro-nuclear, while the loud environmentalists are the most anti-nuclear. I frankly don't give a damn what they believe or don't believe, if they're going to solve the problem anyway.
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I'm fine with Exxon benefitting from a carbon tax. They have the political clout to push a bill like this through Congress, and it benefits the country as a whole to have carbon legislation in place. Seems like a win-win to me.
If a corporation, especially a multi-national, benefits from a tax, I would question the benefit to society from that tax. Not to say that society would not benefit, but it does make me wonder.
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Well over 40% of US electricity comes from things that don't create carbon dioxide. Exact numbers are hard to come by because a lot of solar power for example never ends up on the electric grid.
I know this is very hard for this forum to consider at times, but the world is not only the US, and the question about what do with coal, oil, and gas is a global, not a US problem. United States is a somewhat lucky outlier when it comes to energy production. Unfortunately, even in other currently lucky nations, the public sentiment is strongly against nuclear power. In 2013 91.6% of the energy cames from CO2 produci…
Easily, 99.9% of all energy used by humans comes from sunlight just looking at farms. Plants store a tiny percentage the ~200+watts per meter of sunlight* average over 24 hours, but if you needed to grow them indoors it would take ridiculous amounts of energy.
* You can approximate that from 4 pi R ^2 as surface area of a sphere / pi * r^2 surface area of a circle. So ~25% of 1050 W/m2 of direct sunlight on the surface. We don't farm above the arctic circle for example so that's just an approximation and most places have winters etc.
So, really it's just a question of how and what we are counting.
PS: ~200w average * 10,000 * 134,000,000 = 2,300,000 terrawatt hours. Oil and coal combined provide less than 40 terrawatt hours per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi... You can play with the numbers but we also depend on plankton to feed fish and of course enough sunlight to keep the earth from freezing.
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My understanding is that externalized costs have nothing to do with a free market. Intervention is necessary in order to account for the externalized costs, which is an infringement on a free market. Are you saying that is incorrect?
This argument is a good way of understanding that there is no such thing as a free market. The air we breathe is treated differently to the land we walk on, under the laws we have adopted in most of society. Land is bought and sold, while air is in "the commons" and free to use for everyone, including big industry. Land was once also in the commons, before the process of Enclosure when capitalism really took off. Onc…
I feel like a lot of the people who push carbon taxes have little to no empathy for those who live in rural communities.
