[richardhod]

As a Western developed nation inhabitant, you and indeed most HN readers benefit enormously for your rich lifestyle on past carbon emissions by your predecessors, which those in that country have not benefitted from. This is a good way to incentivise those countries who - quite reasonably - feel it's unfair that they don't get to use up any of that carbon to develop their nation towards a rich modern lifestyles. So, here is one solution.

[varjag]

Norway did not contribute all that much to carbon emissions directly. The electric grid historically been and still is hydro, and the country was never really industrialized in the first place.

[rerx]

Norway's wealth comes from exporting oil and gas. That's not very indirect.

[varjag]

That's exactly what indirect means. Only a tiny portion of this oil and gas was ever used in Norway, the rest was exported. A lot of it was used up by developing nations.

Either way there were no hydrocarbon exports prior to early 1970s. Unless by "predecessors" you mean gen-x'ers.

[shoo]

Norway gained a lot of wealth from extracting and selling the oil.

All parties in the transaction (producer, middle men, end users) "should" be carbon taxed to some degree.

It's not obvious to me why you'd only want to carbon tax the consumer.

Similarly, in public debate there's a lot of finger pointing at oil companies. The public can be somewhat less vocal about wanting to carbon tax the demand side of the trade, of which they play a large role.

[int_19h]

The consumer is the one actually putting that carbon into the atmosphere. Taxing the consumer therefore encourages better uses of oil (such as making polymers).

[varjag]

It did gain a lot of wealth of selling oil, however it has nothing to do with Norway CO2 emissions.

Carbon footprint describes where the source of CO2 pollution is. You can make plastics from all that oil you buy or burn it all, that's on you. If you do burn it, you become CO2 pollutant, really hard to see the controversial part here.

[shoo]

Nonsense. You can define "carbon footprint" that way if you like, but I view that as an accounting definition. You've just decided to define it that way.

CO2 pollution is stored in the atmosphere, which is a shared global resource.

I'd argue that carbon taxing should be designed to discourage economic activity that directly or indirectly leads to greenhouse gas emissions, you need to disincentivise production as well as consumption as well as associated enabling activities such as shipping the stuff. Encourage all of these actors to do something else that results in lower net carbon emissions at the global system level.

[maaaats]

It's semantics, but isn't that the definition of indirect, but with a clear link?

[peanutz454]

Per capita?

[varjag]

98% of Norwegian energy sector is renewables, so any way you slice it.

[Rebelgecko]

That seems like a questionable statistic, considering that something like 20% of Norway's GDP comes from oil and natural gas. Or by "energy sector" do you only mean the energy that is consumed domestically?

[varjag]

Energy that is produced domestically. It is both consumed and exported to neighbours. That's a commonly accepted way to account for it in carbon footprint.