[skyfaller]

It feels like you're missing the point, which is that our current level of air travel is unsustainable (just like the rest of our way of life in the USA). Any increase in fuel consumption is unforgivable, no matter how small.

Current carbon tax schemes are laughable and will not be sufficient to prevent disastrous climate change. The carbon tax calculator in the article you linked only goes up to $50/ton, while the IPCC report calls for carbon prices as high as $14,300/ton by 2050. Obviously prices that high would mean a de facto ban on carbon. And that's what we need to avert disaster.

[chris_va]

(I work in a climate R&D group)

Just wanted to weigh in here a bit...

You are correct that increased emissions are definitely bad, but you may have missed how a carbon tax scheme would work in practice.

From a climate perspective, there is not much difference between being zero carbon versus carbon neutral. In other words, adding 1kg of CO2 in one place, and removing it elsewhere is effectively the same as being zero carbon.

So, while a carbon tax does create an economic incentive to avoid emitting carbon, what it really creates is a market to offset carbon. No one would pay a $10,000/ton tax when they can pay someone else $100/ton to offset the same amount of carbon from the air. The smooth ramp-up of any carbon tax allows offset price discovery without significant disruption.

Anyway, net result of a carbon tax would make having a plane be effectively carbon free, and current air travel would thus not be unsustainable.

In the airplane case, what would likely happen is that biofuels, which are inherently carbon neutral, would come to dominate (easier to let plants capture carbon and then turn them into fuel than to sequester CO2 directly from the air). However, that is irrelevant from a consumer perspective, and we'll just see an x% increase in cost as the offset market price gets baked in.

[ethiclub]

Hi Chris,

Out of interest, may we ask - How do you reconcile your carbon emission research against other ecological considerations? Does your group use a preexisting model to map externalities / run simulations?

Many thanks (Apologies for taking the conversation out of scope slightly)

[Alex3917]

> No one would pay a $10,000/ton tax when they can pay someone else $100/ton to offset the same amount of carbon from the air.

That's cap-and-trade, not a carbon tax.

[Dylan16807]

Not really. There doesn't need to be a "cap". You can tax every single ton of net carbon.

Traditional cap-and-trade has a very valid criticism that it doesn't fix the problem, only limits it slightly and moves it around. If you add carbon-removers into the equation, and set things up to have 0 or even negative carbon per year, and then you actually do fix the problem.

[njarboe]

Any reason able carbon tax (not that politics are reasonable would pay (negative tax) people who remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and tax people the same rate when they emit it.

[ricardobeat]

It’s pointless to scream at this flying tree though. Methane and energy production emissions both completely overshadow emissions from aircraft, and have actionable, less painful paths for improvement.