[wallace_f]

It's the next-best solution. The only reasonable argument in favor that I've seen is that it is easier and more authoritarian (maybe be careful believing this is a good thing?) to set a hard cap. But a carbon tax can always be adjusted.

It's inferior in econonic efficiency and comprehensive coverage to a carbon tax.

And if implemented incorrectly, it becomes corporate welfare, and this has already happened. It has potential to be just another corporatist-cronyist scheme at taxpayer's expense.

And to date government and bureaucracy have been pretty horrible about solving climate change.

Carbon tax is a simple, elegant, efficient, effective solution. Most people just dont like the sound of it though.

[graeme]

If you edited your original post to add carbon tax, it would probably read a lot clearer. (I upvoted it, I agree)

How would you solve the trade component though? Because carbon production would just shift elsewhere unless:

* there was an international treaty where states each agreed to raise carbon taxes and cut other taxes or do a dividend, or

* import tariffs were levied in proportion to the carbon used in imports from countries that didn't have a similar tax

The latter would demand a large bureaucracy and have a lot of distortions.

I realized recently that a carbon tax isn't like an income tax. An income tax only occurs on profits, whereas a carbon tax is an input tax. This makes the jurisdiction shifting problem more acute.

A carbon tax is still my preferred solution, but was wondering if you had any ideas on how to get around this.

[wallace_f]

I dont really have a strong opinion or definitive answer.

What I know is that many other industries deal with somethint like this. Not just taxes, but costly regulation hurts domestic production. For example, countries which do not respect responsible fishing practices have a competitive advantage.

Part of the answer can be: just dont let those countries sell fish within the US. Others can be international treatise or laws.

If I were king, I'd need to spend more time to consider my options, but I guess a treatise is in order. I dont see how any climate change action within the US's 350M population will do anything meaningful to solve the problem if the other 6.5Billion are not cooperating.

[dnautics]

> The only reasonable argument

Except for the fact that markets are a great way to manage rivalrous goods, dynamically balance economic need against cost without the need for a centralized authority to have high-touch meddling (which presents a corruption danger), oh and most importantly, ad I said, they work, empirically, as with the United States SOX and NOX markets