| I'd rather ignore all the livestock stuff and focus on this: "Nobody agrees on exactly how much it costs to offset a ton of carbon. This site says "anywhere from $0.10 per tonne to $44.80 per tonne", but eventualy settles on $3.30." So, if we were paying the true environmental cost of CO2 involved in driving, how much would that be? Let's assume $44 is the number. A Prius emits about 226g/mile. That means in 50 miles, it's 11.3kg or around 0.0124 tons (I'm not going to worry about metric, imperial or whatever) That means the high end is ~55 (US) cents per gallon of gas. Average fuel taxes in the US in 2019 were supposedly about 53 cents per gallon, including state and local. So...how exactly do you talk about economic jargon, externalities, and carbon offsets while maintaining the idea that climate change is not a solved problem? The largest figure over a huge range suggests the worst case is raising average gas taxes by 2 cents per gallon! I'm not saying the conclusion is correct, I'm saying there is some major inconsistency lurking. Note that, even though lots of cars get worse mileage than a Prius, and emit more CO2, they also pay proportionally more gas taxes, so it should balance out, right? |