[snapplebobapple]

This is a terrible argument because it presumes there are no uses of faster travel that are beneficial. The proper argument is for a carbon tax that captures the externalities caused by emitting carbon and then to let individuals decide if they want to pay that or not for whatever activity they are partaking in.

Whether it benefits the masses or the elite is irrelevant, what is relevant is that the use is worth more than the correctly priced cost of carbon

[thfuran]

>Whether it benefits the masses or the elite is irrelevant

Why is that irrelevant? Must we permit everything that might be of benefit to someone, even if it comes at the expense of everyone else?

[snapplebobapple]

Because the problem with carbon is that the cost of emitting it is not reflected in the market price of the things emitting it. This is called an externality in economics. You fix the externality by taxing the carbon emission at a level that covers the externality. After that you let the much more efficient market sort out what emits and what doesn't because it does a far better job than than any grouping of hacker news commenters expressing what ever combination of the seven deadly sins you think makes them hate the most productive people in society. Markets work and envious, wrathful authoritarians don't. You just end up with another episode of great moments in unintended consequences going down that road.

[thfuran]

>Markets work and envious, wrathful authoritarians don't.

So EPA, FDA, etc regulations should be replaced with fees for poisoning everyone rather than outright bans, because to desire freedom from such concerns is to be a jealous tyrant?

[snapplebobapple]

The short answer is: some should be replaced, some should be cancelled outright for being stupid, and some are great ideas that should continue. Those two institutions are massive and encompass such a large variety of things that they have things in all categories (should be taxed instead, should be cancelled, and should stay banned).

The technically correct answer but practically silly answer is: yes because the correct charge for the externality of poisoning everyone would be asymptotic and unaffordable by anyone so it would amount to a ban.

Also the concern is not about being a jealous tyrant, the fact of the matter is markets almost always work better than dictating what to do, especially in the long term due to reacting to new information more effectively and changing course more effectively than an authoritarian regime.

[michaelmrose]

When something is banned any action including planning to do it at all are criminal conspiracies and its hard to change this. When something is taxed its an easier ask to reduce the cost, to play games with finances and parent child company relationships, or just go bankrupt and not pay. The penalties, costs, resolutions for not paying your bills are completely different by design compared to the tools to respond to active plans to commit crimes thus using fees to control things nobody should ever do is ill conceived at best.

Insofar as market based solutions I don't know why you imagine they should work. People are in general hideously stupid, immoral, incapable, greedy, and useless. The only way to make them behave with any modicum of sanity and decency is for someone educated in the topic of interest without a dog in the fight to stipulate based on objective standards the kind of things one must and must not due in order not to fuck their fellow man.

The fact that this at present remains less than ideal doesn't mean we ought to trust the same immoral pieces of garbage with less controls on the notion that they will do a better job that way rather than trivially corrupt the over-complicated process. By and large we know very well in most instances exactly what one should and shouldn't do we don't need a market based solution to figure it out we need a less bought and paid for government to actually implement what we already know.

[snapplebobapple]

You are arguing against the technically correct but practically silly answer when I am not making that argument (except for the very specific case of carbon emissions and what you are allowed to output carbon emissions for. CO2 emissions are not a life and death situation any time soon, they cause potential range of harm in the far future on some spectrum of probability with another spectrum of probability for completely mitigating the problem before it causes serious harm through technology and that makes up the bulk of the externality that needs to be priced).

Do we really have to rehash how and why markets work better in 2023? I mean, we spent the last century watching places that adopted freer markets succeed and places that went in the opposite direction failing, we saw communism fail a couple times, we watched communists that embraced markets turn themselves around (although they now look a lot more like facists, which is very concerning), etc. They likely work precisely because so much of humanity is hideously stupid, immoral, incapable, greedy, and useless and free markets allow those that aren't to supply the needs of the rest while building up capital, increasing influence and spreading capability throughout the system. On the other hand authoritarianism might have flashes of excellence but more often than not excellence has dumbass kids or friends that replace him or other factors change and the formerly excellent authoritarian doesn't pivot like the multitude of independent actors in a market can and then that flash is gone and we are back to stagnation for the society organized along authoritarian lines.

Your third paragraph's main flaw is that WE don't know very well in most instances exactly what one should and shouldn't do. YOU think you know that and YOU may be too hideously stupid, immoral, incapable, greedy and/or useless to know when YOU are wrong. With a market solution you can be all of those things and it's usually self regulating because you lose your ability to influence anything by blowing your resources on stupid, while people that get it right end up with more resources to bet on their predictions in the future.

[avereveard]

How are fines from fda and epa different than fees?

[nitwit005]

We ended up with food safety laws because people did things like knowingly sell unsafe adulterated milk, causing thousands of infants to die (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal). If you do that these days, you will simply go to jail.

Or get executed, as happened with China's 2008 milk adulteration scandal.

[thfuran]

You're asking how taxes and fees are different from criminal penalties? I guess the simplest way to put it would be that you go to prison for not paying enough of the one, whereas you'd go to prison for paying too much of the other.

[elihu]

Taxes work in some cases, but we do bans as well sometimes when it makes sense. That isn't authoritarianism; it's just regular governance. Or you could call it civilization.

In terms of climate change, there isn't really any budget of "safe" CO2 emissions left -- we've used it all up by largely ignoring the problem up until now.

The world can't realistically just stop using fossil fuels right now, because so much of our infrastructure depends on it. But we can stop wasting fuel on things we don't need. One of those things we don't need is the vast majority of air traffic that isn't transporting high-value time-critical cargo or getting people where they need to go to complete a specific job (and if it could have been done with a Skype call then no, it isn't a need).

[ClumsyPilot]

> You fix the externality by taxing the carbon emission at a level that covers the externality.

So the 'Forever chemicals' cannot be removed from the environment now, they are in the blood of thousands of people and in the water.

The fine should be infinite?

[jltsiren]

If you want to tax something, you have to define it, measure it, and report it. You need a system for collecting the taxes, a system for enforcing the collection, and a system for validating that the reported numbers are correct. You will need more regulations and more bureaucracy than if you had simply banned it.

Banning something is a solution that prevents some people from doing what they want. Taxing something is a solution that subjects a (potentially much) larger group of people to a reporting and tax burden and random inspections. If it's authoritarianism you are concerned about, you have to contrast the sizes of these groups and the potential harms from the banning and tax collection to determine which solution is worse.

[Dylan16807]

That taxation system already exists for jet fuel. Nothing new needs to be added.

[jltsiren]

Which is a tax on jet fuel, not on carbon emissions. If you raise the tax to cover the negative externalities, you create an incentive to use other fuels that may be less efficient and more harmful but cheaper. If you extend the tax to cover the use of all fuels in aviation, you need a mechanism to prevent people from using fuels bought for other purposes.

Regulation is difficult, especially when you are trying to outwit the market.

[Dylan16807]

There is also sufficient regulation in place to make sure jets don't put random garbage in their fuel tanks. Not that you need it, because it would damage the engines.

I have no idea what you think a passenger jet would switch to?

[Nextgrid]

> Must we permit everything that might be of benefit to someone, even if it comes at the expense of everyone else?

If we can offset "the expense of everyone else" (in this case via a carbon tax), why not?

[thfuran]

Assessing a tax doesn't actually clean the air. All it does is ensure that only the rich have the right to fuck everyone else over. If the government committed to funding carbon capture at a rate of at least as much as they would've in the counterfactual where there was instead a ban plus the additional amount funded by the carbon tax revenue, taxing the externality would probably be adequate redress, but that isn't ever going to happen.

[Nextgrid]

> Assessing a tax doesn't actually clean the air

Unless you use that tax to pay someone to clean the air?

[thfuran]

You have to both put the entirety of the tax towards it and ensure that the fact that you're funding it through the tax doesn't decrease the amount of additional funding you put towards it or else that decrease effectively decreases the tax rate (at least as far as carbon capture is concerned). The second part is harder than the first.

[greedo]

This is what happened when lotteries started spreading across the US. The proceeds were earmarked for schools, so naturally, the property tax rates (which pays for most school funding) was held in check, resulting in no actual increase in school spending.

[Dylan16807]

There's basically zero funding toward it right now, so the second part becomes pretty easy.

If we wanted to massively fund air cleaning, which I'm in favor of doing, we should use a tax as funding from day one.

[pydry]

>The proper argument is for a carbon tax

The proper argument is to get a carbon tax first before unbanning anything like this.

And it's not on the political horizon so....

[denton-scratch]

Carbon taxes (as they exist now) are a con. You just buy some carbon credits from some company that is supposedly carbon-negative, because it plants forests somewhere so obscure that nobody checks.

And anyway, forests are not carbon-negative; all that lives must die. They're carbon-neutral.

[nwallin]

We do not have carbon taxes, we have carbon credits. Carbon credits are at best green political theater. At worst they're an effective means for the carbon economy (coal, oil, gas) to deflect efforts to get a carbon tax on the table, as evidenced by comments like this one.

Carbon taxes, on the other hand, are an effective solution to global warming.

[ianburrell]

Carbon tax != carbon credits. Carbon credits are part of emission trading approach. Carbon tax doesn't need credits cause uses money. Not being cheatable is one of the advantages of carbon tax.

[michaelmrose]

Offsets are basically mostly lies and nonsense. If your goal is to reduce emissions in absolute terms controlling it with taxes makes less sense than just limiting which unlike offsets actually does something.

[aziaziazi]

What is relevant is the inhabitability of the earth, not who pays what.