> Every single plane ticket I take should have a tax which is used to offset or capture the carbon emissions of my flight. I will pay it.
So what you're saying is that it won't change your behavior. Why don't you just donate $1000 or whatever to a charity? (I dunno, maybe you already do). I don't mean to attack you, but encoded in your very language is the exact problem. No one is willing to change their own behavior, they want other people to change. Repeat this x 7 billion and suddenly you understand what the inertia is.
We live in the fading dream of a world that we sold to us that we could do whatever we want with absolutely no consequences; worse, that everything that we did that "made money" and contributed to GDP growth was good for everyone. Turns out that that was bullshit greed talking and the God of consequences is visiting its revenge on us through the same lesson every petri dish full of bacteria learns: you will choke to death on your own waste products.
Pardon me, but your post is just about virtue signalling or you're missing the point entirely.
If you increase the taxes for something, you will drop the demand and, therefore, consumption. It doesn't matter whether OP will change his/her behaviour, it matter that we, as a planet of people taking X flights per year, will reduce our flights by Y% due to tax.
I don't want to change my behaviour because that doesn't fix anything. I want to be forced to changed my behaviour, along with everyone else on the planet, through taxation for which I am happy to vote for and support with all my being.
> I want to be forced to changed my behaviour, along with everyone else on the planet, through taxation for which I am happy to vote for and support with all my being.
I agree with you, and do so with my fiat (EVs, solar, no air travel unless absolutely necessary, vegetarian, etc). There are billions of global citizens who likely don’t agree with you (or us), who will happily consume regardless of the consequences (and either can’t or won’t pay for the per ton emissions).
The challenge is in changing the behavior of disinterested or adversarial parties in the face of political apathy. It’s going to get uncomfortable.
I was by no means implying that people want this, I know categorically that almost nobody wants this.
But it doesn't matter what people want, I have already lost hope because nothing in our system is geared towards helping out with this. The incentives are completely misaligned and nothing will really change for a long, long time.
As far as I see it, you have the following:
- Our entire world economy is based simply on consuming as much as possible. This is exactly the opposite of what needs to happen in order for us to have a chance, the exact polar opposite.
- People are willing to protest even a few cents in tax increases, even in Europe. In the USA, everything required for climate action will be seen as communist by half the country.
- You have so many other countries coming from behind that will simply want the standard of living you see in the West. (China, India, Brazil, Africa etc.).
- Emissions are actually rising, even though we knew about climate change for decades.
- Politicians have their career in 4 year chunks. Nobody wants to rock the boat by increasing taxes on their constituents and get voted out.
- People have somewhat short lives. Most people who are alive now will not worst of the consequences.
You have very large forces pushing towards maintaining the status quo.
What needs to happen in order to fix our planet will just not happen because it cannot happen. We might be able to limit the damage, but that's about it. If science and technology don't solve this by some sort of miracle, it will only get worse.
I actually completely agree with what you wrote, so it's weird that we disagree about the carbon taxes. Sure, carbon taxes are going to reduce the demand for certain types of goods due to basic economics. But taxes also bless certain things as acceptable, as long as you pay your indulgences. It puts the onus on the rubes, the masses, to stop doing that.
People talk about eco-fascism and really heavy-handed things like outright bans on certain activities. Frankly, I think what is coming will be worse. It will be eco-anarchy. Mad max style where billionaires and ex-oil executives will be hunted.
It really isn't the rubes' fault. If you give a monkey a banana, he will eat the banana and throw the peel over his shoulder. If you give a monkey a bag of chips, he will eat the chips and throw the bag over his shoulder. Who's responsible? The monkey or the craven bastard who cooked up plastic chip bags to expand their market to every monkey in the world? Same principle. The bastards who are responsible are those producers who set the menu of choices and slip crack into their products on the sly so the monkeys get addicted. And then they blame monkeys and think monkeys should pay a chip-bag tax while they fuck off to New Zealand. Yeah, they will he hunted.
Well, I actually I agree with a lot of the stuff you write, but definitely disagree on taxes.
The main point I disagree with is that adding taxes somehow makes your choices seem okay. I don't really think that's the way to look at it, though I do understand there is some merit to the idea.
I'm not saying adding a carbon tax should be the only solution or even the best longterm solution. But the issue is that we cannot ban cars or flying or oil or plastics without seriously disrupting the whole world. So that's a nonstarter for me, we just can't do it, even if it would, in fact, be the best solution if you only consider the environment.
So we're down to mitigating damage at this point, since we can't directly fight the root cause. So maybe there are other solutions, but taxation is a pretty obvious way to reduce demand. Is it true that rich people will still be able to pay the tax and just indulge? Sure, we can maybe compensate for that somewhat, but rich people will always be better off. Should we all dig a deeper hole just in order to prevent some rich people having more than the rest of us?
> I'm not saying adding a carbon tax should be the only solution or even the best longterm solution. But the issue is that we cannot ban cars or flying or oil or plastics without seriously disrupting the whole world. So that's a nonstarter for me, we just can't do it, even if it would, in fact, be the best solution if you only consider the environment.
Oh, we can totally ban plastic, or at least all plastics that are not biodegradable. We lack political courage to do so, and it will cost money. I pick up a lot of litter and by far the bulk of it is one-time packaging for snack items. (It's hard not to conclude, as if studying humans as animals, that we're a bunch of fat little monkeys that can't stop eating and must carry food with us everywhere we go.)
I don't think we can ban flying though. What we need is not electric jets, because batteries will not compete with liquid fuel for energy density. We need carbon-neutral production of jet fuel, either through a process like biodiesel or a chemical process that takes electrical energy as input, e.g. from solar or nuclear.
> So we're down to mitigating damage at this point,
Oh, we are so fucked that it's almost pointless. Literally every thread of our economy is not sustainable. Crank the handle of time 1000 years, even with no growth, and every single thing we do goes off the rails. We're depleting all the resources on this Earth and even if we halt the CO2 crisis, there's a hundred thousand minor crises vying to metastasize into something as bad or worse. A thousand years, ten thousand years of modern tech living, and this planet is a tech junkyard with precious little biosphere. Humans will either go back to being monkeys eating bananas or Earth is going to be a desert hellscape pocked with nuclear-powered Arcologies.
>I don't want to change my behaviour because that doesn't fix anything. I want to be forced to changed my behaviour, along with everyone else on the planet...
That first sentence is the problem with this world. Everyone says that they want to fix a problem until it comes time to take action. You're just lying to yourself and virtue signaling to everyone else if you're not making steps in your own life to actively make a change in your own behavior.
That second sentence will be the downfall of all free people. It's weak willed people like you who won't make changes in their own lives literally begging for government to take more power. Asking the government to force you to change your own behavior.
You're very naive to think this power you would give so freely will be used benevolently. You needn't look any further than the government's inaction to punish those big companies who are destroying our oceans, our economies, our rivers. No big company CEOs ever go to prison for destroying our planet because our politicians are bank rolled by them. There is the ruling class, then there is you me, and everyone else. These are the people you will surrender your freedoms to so cheerfully.
So what you're saying is that it won't change your behavior. Why don't you just donate $1000 or whatever to a charity? (I dunno, maybe you already do). I don't mean to attack you, but encoded in your very language is the exact problem. No one is willing to change their own behavior, they want other people to change. Repeat this x 7 billion and suddenly you understand what the inertia is.
We live in the fading dream of a world that we sold to us that we could do whatever we want with absolutely no consequences; worse, that everything that we did that "made money" and contributed to GDP growth was good for everyone. Turns out that that was bullshit greed talking and the God of consequences is visiting its revenge on us through the same lesson every petri dish full of bacteria learns: you will choke to death on your own waste products.