[concordDance]

"Waster" isn't really a coherent concept when taken outside of an individual's value system. What might be waste for one person might simply be a sensible use of resources for another.

Doing for a drive to the countryside for a walk? Having a long and relaxing bath? Go-karting? Using a heated pool? Keeping the heater on a single house-level timer so they don't have to think about it rather than planning ahead what rooms they will be in later?

Everyone will have a different place they draw the "waste" vs sensible expenditure line.

The correct economic solution to this is CO2-offsetting taxes and letting each individual decide how they want to spend their resources. Trying to centrally plan for a hundred million diverse people with different things they like and care about is a recipe for unneeded misery.

[hgomersall]

Taxes just push the problem into poor people. If you want a fair solution we should have carbon/resource rationing. In fact, I'd prefer a solution in which the governments work hard (much harder than they are) to bootstrap the brave new world so everyone can benefit from a sustainable world.

[CaptainMarvel]

Taxes don't have to push the problem onto poor people at all. For example, the proceeds can be directly given to everyone equally which will usually disproportionately benefit poor people.

So why would you say that taxes would harm poor people? I think I know why.

In practice, the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, and the media have been almost completely captured by the wealthy to disproportionately benefit themselves.

Wealth is essentially zero sum game despite what many would say. Power is certainly a zero-sum game. When you have power over another, they have less power over you. I believe wealth is another form of power, a little indirect and not perfect, but the correlation is strong enough.

This means that there is no practical solution that won't harm poor people. This includes your proposal where you would like the government to "benefit everyone".

[concordDance]

Rationing is ridiculously inefficient.

People's desire for heavily carbon consuming things vs lightly carbon consuming things varies massively. If you're worried about the poor don't ignore the externalities of their consumption but subsidise them directly via UBI or somesuch.

Rationing is a very worst of all possible worlds solution, losing you all the benefits of trade.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Just as a thought exercise, if anything was possible:

UBI seems to work towards the goal of making sure people don't die due to lack of resources (it is a basic income, after all). It's less clear how it works towards the goal of reducing carbon emissions.

Rationing, on the other hand, has the potential: Natural resources (publicly owned ones anyways), and perhaps natural limits like how much CO2 the skies can take, are collectively owned by the people. So it could make sense to distribute those amongst the people. The people could then sell them in a free® market. This means we can work towards both goals at once: Those seeking to pollute more, could simply buy the carbon credits from their fellow people, who can now better afford to live. And, at the same time, total pollution is capped-ish, depending on the scheme.

As a fun note, UBI is just rationing out the available funds for UBI, so it would suffer from any rationing-specific failings that carbon rationing would suffer from.

[concordDance]

A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI, but with side effects. In particular, if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production, but the price will be unrelated to the actual externality cost or mitigation cost of the marginal CO2 release. So you either get more CO2 released than you would with an externality tax or you get less CO2 released than you should given that you can mitigate against that particular CO2 release.

Ideally you'd have credits being available for purchase at prices that correspond to the costs of mitigating their externalities (CO2 emission is not in and of itself evil, its the consequences that we don't want).

[ImPostingOnHN]

> A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI

On the contrary -- I was saying it was not equivalent, because it also works towards the goal of reducing CO2 consumption, whereas I can't imagine how a UBI would do so.

> if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production

The carbon credits I am imagining would not be "produced" per se -- they would, in total, represent the total amount of carbon we as a country want to emit, to reduce climate disaster, allocated equally to each individual, who all collectively "own" that natural limit. Those individuals can then sell their "contribution ration" to companies which wish to emit more than the CO2 allocated individually to their CEO, or whatever. So ideally credits will be available for purchase by the CEO, at whatever rate the CEO's fellow people are willing to charge the CEO. Mitigations will need to be done by humanity regardless, or else.

[concordDance]

> total amount of carbon we as a country want to emit

And my point above was that this is not a single number. It varies depending on what we want to use the CO2 emitting stuff for.

[hgomersall]

We don't want trade. We want people to reduce their carbon consumption. In any case, you could always allow trading of rations.

[concordDance]

> We want people to reduce their carbon consumption

Remember that this isn't the end goal. What we want is not to feel the effects of releasing CO2.

A CO2 tax that costs as much as it costs to mitigate the effects of that CO2 release reduces CO2 production to exactly the amount its worth emitting. Rationing means you either get more or less CO2 than this number.

[userbinator]

You do. Many others don't.