re: [thread], pol
re: [thread], pol
@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl@niu.moe @cjd @dazinism Right. You tax the carbon at the point it enters the market, whether by being imported or pumped from the ground. The underlying assumption is that all carbon eventually becomes CO2.
Some can become methane, which lasts long enough and has a potent enough effect to be worth taxing or regulating as a pollutant in its own right. But there are far fewer methane sources than CO2.
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re: [thread], pol
re: [thread], pol
@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism
One problem with climate change is there's really no incentive to deal with it. If a democratic state starts to tax carbon, as soon as it begins to actually harm the economy people will vote that government out of power. Clean air is different because people in the cities directly feel the pain, climate change is always Someone Else's Problem.
re: [thread], pol
@cjd @freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism
Today in absolute condemnations of capitalism: " One problem with climate change is there's really no incentive to deal with it." This may be a hint.
re: [thread], pol
@zeh
I don't care what kind of economic system you have, when people start to have difficulty putting food on the table, they're going to vote you out, and quality of life is unfortunately highly correlated with energy consumption.
@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism
re: [thread], pol
@cjd
That makes no sense. You're mistaking your experience for what is possible, when the first is a tiny subset of the second. Voting inside "economic systems" that constrict your options to what is profitable is a travesty of freedom and there could be as many ways to live well as there are people, correlated to energy spending or not.
re: [thread], pol
re: [thread], pol
@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl@niu.moe @zeh @cjd @dazinism Interestingly enough, this seems to be something that entrepreneurship is fairly good at. I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish it, and entrepreneurship (at least when funded by intellectual property) is obviously bad at certain kinds of invention, like certain types of drugs and medical treatments, but nonprofit foundations seem to do the best job there, not government grants.
re: [thread], pol
re: [thread], pol
@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl@niu.moe @zeh @cjd @dazinism The structure of capital markets is driven largely by the specifics of regulation and taxation and by monetary and fiscal policy. The single largest driver is monetary policy, because interest rates decide the balance between debt and equity as a source of financing. Low interest rates drive large market capitalizations, demand for fast growth of individual companies, and an appetite for risk.
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