[piokoch]

Someone who works as a delivery guy needs to drive a car a lot, such person would have to pay big climate dividend. Is that ok? Probably not.

Taxation is a road to nowhere as rich people will always either find the way to avoid taxes or find the way to throw the costs of those taxes on the poor. This happens with every kind of tax.

The only solution to decrease CO2 emission is to behave in a rational way and use the only practical, tested and available now clean energy source - nuclear power plants. No amount of eco-talk will change reality that neither solar nor wind energy plants will be able to power modern economy. Europe is learning this the hard way right now.

Maybe Europe will do the suicidal jump with the ideas like "Fit for 55", and will kill its economy to lower global emission by 0.05% but the rest of the World, which emits much more CO2 and will emit even more when all production will be moved from Europe to Asia or USA cannot care less.

[PeterisP]

If delivery services emit a lot of CO2, then making delivery services (which is not about "someone who works as a delivery guy" but rather about the company selling delivery services) much more expensive is a key part of ensuring that delivery services get used less and only by those needs where those delivery services are relatively more important i.e. those who would be willing to pay the significantly increased price of deliveries.

After all, the whole point of carbon tax is to reduce usage, not to gain revenue or penalize some people; so it works if and only if it meaningfully changes behavior, i.e. if the tax significantly raises prices of some specific market goods/services and thus drives people to use less of those specific goods/services. A simple income-proportional tax or just "tax the rich" doesn't incentivize reducing emissions, so it's useless for that goal; it's perhaps useful for social equity and wealth redistribution, but that's something not directly linked to climate change goals.

It's not about money, it's about CO2; driving deliveries needs to emit less CO2 so the goal is to either get more efficient deliveries (e.g. electric vehicles) or less deliveries (putting some of those delivery drivers out of jobs), and "who's paying for that" is just choosing the most effective means to achieve these goals.

[davidw]

> Someone who works as a delivery guy needs to drive a car a lot, such person would have to pay big climate dividend. Is that ok? Probably not.

It gives the delivery company a big incentive to switch to electric vehicles or ebikes or something more efficient. This harnesses market power to push companies to be more efficient with their resources: the ones who are more innovative at avoiding CO2 usage will see financial benefits.

[EricE]

why are you assuming an electric car will be an overall reduction in CO2?

[davidw]

It's not an assumption. Of course, it depends on a lot of things, but broadly speaking, they use less CO2. And the great thing about a carbon tax is that this shakes out through the system: if they're not reducing CO2, you would see it in costs and could react accordingly. This price signal is a lot more convenient than having to, as an end user, try to figure out what the best and worst things to do in terms of CO2.

[wonderwonder]

Company will just hire the delivery drivers as contractors a la Uber and pass the costs onto them.

[davidw]

Same logic applies though. If you're a contractor and it costs too much because gas is expensive, you either don't do it or demand more money. Or maybe only people with low-emissions vehicles get into it.

[imtringued]

>Taxation is a road to nowhere as rich people will always either find the way to avoid taxes

The entire point of CO2 taxes is that you are supposed to avoid them.

[tapas73]

There is more than one way to avoid taxes. (hollywood accounting)

[soperj]

>Someone who works as a delivery guy needs to drive a car a lot, such person would have to pay big climate dividend.

Delivery emissions should be attached to the person getting the delivery. Otherwise you could just skip most of your emissions by having everything delivered.

[newt_slowly]

It would be far to complicated to try and count every bit of emissions like this. Instead, the emissions are taxed at the source - when buying fuel. Therefore, the delivery company would be paying the carbon taxes, and they could choose to either pass those costs on to you, or to, for example, switch to electric vehicles to be more competitive against their rivals.

Either way, it changes your behavior, because if delivery is more expensive (to factor in the externalities it causes) you will either consume less, or pay more. This ultimately "attaches the emissions to the person getting the delivery" but in a far less complex and less game-able way.

[stonemetal12]

I go into the store and buy a pair of shoes. Am I given a bit of the emissions of the supply chain that delivered it to the store from the manufacturer?

If I order something off Amazon, do I get a say in where the package is shipped from to control "my" emissions.

[aembleton]

> Am I given a bit of the emissions of the supply chain that delivered it to the store from the manufacturer?

Yes, you would have to use some of your carbon credits to pay for the delivery and manufacture of the shoe. The product would have both a monetary and a carbon price. If you don't have enough credits, then you can buy some on the spot market from someone who isn't using theirs up.

This would incentivise repair of the shoe, as it may require fewer carbon credits.

[lenkite]

Pity that you are getting down-voted for a rational position. Wind output dropping is one of the factors behind Electricity prices surging in the EU this year. But folks here are reluctant to even acknowledge this fact due to effective renewables brainwashing.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/german-renewables-us...

If there really needs to be a carbon tax for delivery, it makes the most sense to transfer it directly to the consumer who demanded order-delivery. Any other mechanism will just leave a tax loophole.

And yes, emission taxes/standards should be applied to the whole world. Right now, they are adversely affecting the poor and lower middle class of the first world - none of whom are represented on HN. Meanwhile China can keep polluting away to its heart's content producing ~30% of the world's emissions by itself.

[petre]

> Wind output dropping is one of the factors behind Electricity prices surging

Yes, true. Guess what is used to compensate for lack of renewable output? Natural gas fired plants with short ramp up time. This will only drive electricity prices up.

The article is about gas shortages and people at risk of freezing this winter, yet almost everyone here is talking about CO2 taxes and taxing natural gas?

[jhgb]

> Someone who works as a delivery guy needs to drive a car a lot, such person would have to pay big climate dividend. Is that ok? Probably not.

Probably yes, because that the whole point of Pigouvian taxes.