One popular approach is to add a massive tax/duty on e.g. CO2 emissions, but redistribute the revenue equally to all citizens.
If everyone were consuming the same amount/causing the same amount of emissions, this would be a no-op. However, since the rich tend to consume more, this will be a net positive for poorer people, and at the same time it will make decisions about activity that causes emissions more meaningful.
It's also much more palatable than bans or rationing, reasonably easy to implement, and avoids the trap of populist "ban highly visible thing of the day" approaches that tend to lower quality of life without addressing the real issue.
Yes, billionaires with private jets tend to consume more but your average multimillionaire is probably working remote from a cushy white collar job while poor people need to commute to and from work (often long distances because rent is expensive). CO2 taxes are regressive however you try to sell them.
First, that's not actually true. Have a look at figures 3 and 4 of this paper [1]. CO2 emissions increase with income, and that holds both globally and within particular countries they studied (US, UK, China, India).
Second, even if it were true, you'd still have control over how you redistribute the revenue, and as a result, you can make the net effect as progressive as you want.
If you were going to redistribute nonuniformly why wouldn't you just tax people and give it to the poor and skip the hide-tax-behind-a-fancy-name exercise?
In practice billionaires wouldn't care how much you tax them unless you taxed a substantial portion of income, they'd still consume what they wanted. In order to materially change even middle class peoples' behavior prices need to change by double digit percentage points, and when you factor in that people don't spend all they earn, that's a lot of tax.
One of the reasons to tax CO2 specifically instead of some other tax (e.g. income tax) is that it pushes alternatives.
If there is a CO2-heavy option that's 10% cheaper than the "green" option, introducing the tax will suddenly make the "green" option the cheaper one.
This could be using an electric truck to get food to the store, it could be using a heat pump instead of an oil furnace, it could be the locally grown potatoes instead of potatoes that were trucked over a long distance from a place with cheaper labor, etc.
Most of the savings won't happen because the millionaire flies less, they will be made because someone, somewhere along the supply chain makes a different decision because the environmentally friendlier thing is now cheaper. That's the beauty of it - it's about fixing the emissions where the best effect can be achieved with the smallest investment, not about taking away people's ability to consume and live an enjoyable life.
The question is, how do you determine what the CO2 consumption of something is? Do you include only direct emissions? What about emissions incurred during manufacturing (e.g. for lithium batteries for electric trucks)? The idea seems cool but the execution seems impossible. If you tax only direct emissions you motivate companies to amortize emissions by concentrating them during manufacture. If you tax everything, how do you even begin to count everything that goes into a tomato or loaf of bread?
> And how do you [reconcile extreme green policy goals with income losses for the poorest]?
There are no answers given usually, less so convincingly, mostly because the ones demanding scarcity are usually not the ones affected by it.
Just trying to find one member of the working class / blue collar amongst ExtencionRebllion and the like will be a tedious task. Not so much if you look for kids of millionaires, or of bilionaires. Or Millionaires and Billionaires themselves.
As of now I can only see two outcomes:
They either start making these scarcity demands a part of their foreign policy (meaning getting tough on the actual global polluters, not their domestic poor people who barely can afford one cheap vacation to the Balears per year).
Or we just start naming what we would have called it 150 years ago: A top-down class-war.
I don't know how to parse what you're saying at all. There are tons of working class people worried about climate change and it's pretty trivial to design systems that increase the income for the poorest while being green.
Meanwhile your "ExtinctionRebellion" phrase seems like a political touchstone that you assume other people know what you're talking about, but I have no clue what it is.
The Smart People in the USA realized population growth was a Bad Thing Actually™ and got really into saving the environment in the mid-1960s after we ended racism and poverty forever and needed something even more noble to do: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=segregationist...
"We have all heard about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills."
If everyone were consuming the same amount/causing the same amount of emissions, this would be a no-op. However, since the rich tend to consume more, this will be a net positive for poorer people, and at the same time it will make decisions about activity that causes emissions more meaningful.
It's also much more palatable than bans or rationing, reasonably easy to implement, and avoids the trap of populist "ban highly visible thing of the day" approaches that tend to lower quality of life without addressing the real issue.