[Johnny555]

I'm not sure I understand the problem -- you said you need a big truck to provide a service (haul your food, your mail, etc), which is totally fair, we all use things that were hauled around on trucks, you can't build a road by hauling in asphalt on a Prius. So if there's, say, a carbon tax on fuel, when fuel prices go up, everyone that uses fuel to provide service will see higher costs, so the providers will all increase their rates to make up for it. Many transportation providers already charge a fuel surcharge when oil prices go up.

Why would you start a civil war over it?

I'm sure that externalizing environmental costs is attractive, but that just ensures that no one is going to optimize for it.

[femiagbabiaka]

The problem is that most farmers in the modern era are completely reliant on a combo of government subsidies and massive amounts of bank debt in order to stay afloat. It's a pretty huge problem and part of why the industry is massively consolidating. Also there are things like being required to license patented seeds, tractor/combine companies prohibiting personal repair of vehicles/equipment.. I don't think medium/small farming as we think of it will exist in a couple decades.

[jlcoff]

That's the problem, you just repeating the Gospel without understanding the externalities involved in the regulations you advocates for.

Many times, you are not free to set the price of goods, especially in today socialist / regulated economy. Your costs go up, your margins profit go down. There is so much you can squeeze. Heck, DEF sounds nice to save the environment & all, but when your combine three a DEF code and pretty much blew your engine 400 miles from the nearest dealership right during harvest before a storm, goes into limp mode and prevent you from harvesting, you're literally fucked, your all farm might even go bankrupt. Don't even count on insurance to save your ass, because you already had to cut back to focus on other coverage to mitigate skyrocketing fertilizer costs, which doesn't matter anyway because the price you'll sell your production 6 month from now has been set a thousand mile away by a white collar asshole right after his daily jerk off and line of coke. But what a beer sipping urbanite would know of actual hard constraint while at the same time, accusing us of social grand standing. Just GFY.

You pretend yourself smart, but you're not. You sound like Marie Antoinette "let them eat cake". Next thing you know, your head hang on a spike in front of an angry mob.

[Johnny555]

You seem to have strayed far from "I drive a big truck because I need to haul heavy stuff", now you've moved on to "If I can't pollute as much as I want to, I can't make a living".

A DEF code is not the only thing that can make a combine fail, and if you're one mechanical failure away from bankruptcy, it's not the DEF that's the problem.