[dukoid]

Why do we still allow drivers to externalize most of the costs associated with cars? There is existing technology to extract co2 from the atmosphere, and the current cost of this should be the free market-based price for co2 emissions.

[misja111]

I'm not sure if you're referring to the article, but that was about Ozone pollution.

In most countries cars are already taxed, in Switzerland as well. The tax is proportional to the weight of the car, so it compensates for higher fuel consumption. For similar reasons, EV's are taxed less.

[aaronmdjones]

In the UK, VED is based on the vehicle's CO2 emissions per kilometre traveled under prescribed driving conditions. This means the registered keepers of EVs (and some hybrid ICE/EVs) pay nothing.

There are talks about scrapping this system as more and more of the country transitions to EVs, and taxing them by vehicle weight instead (the same way driving licences are classed). This would reverse the current status quo, with EV owners paying the most due to the greater weight of their vehicles.

I'm not sure I like that idea, but I also appreciate that as the revenue goes down under the current scheme, they may feel tempted to introduce something even worse to make up the deficit instead, like a tax per mile traveled.

[connicpu]

Some states in the US with large numbers of EV drivers are already kinda doing this. I now have to pay a flat EV tax on my registration, although it's still less than I'd pay annually in gas tax if I drove an ICE car.

[lupusreal]

Those taxes pay for road upkeep, as well as other state programs, but not carbon sequestration.

[connicpu]

And I don't believe any states manage to cover the full cost of just their infrastructure and upkeep through use taxes (gas tax, registration, tolls). Non-drivers still end up subsidizing the remainder.

[deepsun]

Just tax fuel/electricity instead of car.

[aaronmdjones]

We also tax those already.

EDIT: There is a fixed VAT charge of 5% on electricity, as well as a currently 16% levy on electricity to cover various environmental and social benefit schemes. Which is hilarious, as the UK is moving away from fossil fuels for its electrical generation mix, while taxing electricity consumption much more than it taxes gas (5% VAT and 5.5% levies). This punishes those using electricity for heating and incentivizes people to continue using gas at home. This is on top of the fact that currently, gas is much cheaper (in unit rate, per kWh) than electricity. It's like they can't make up their mind on what they want to accomplish. For fuel, the tax is currently just under £0.53/L with 20% VAT added on top of the total as well.

[deepsun]

Exactly. Why do we need to come up with clever formulas to estimate car CO2 production based on car's gross weight, wheelbase, engine displacement, efficiency ratings if it's much easier to calculate how much CO2 is produced from the car's fuel?

PS: electricity is hard as there's a lot of volatile renewables, but I bet is still way easier than clever formulas.

[hndamien]

Tax them again!

[dfxm12]

Auto industry is pretty powerful, worldwide, but also particularly locally around Switzerland. I mean powerful enough to shape people's opinions and sway regulations.

[pkulak]

That is crazy to me that the country with a national identity built around trains also has a powerful car lobby. You really can’t escape it.

[Vegenoid]

Automobiles are extremely seductive. They offer a lot of benefit to an individual. The trouble comes when everyone is using cars, at which point their advantages to the individual are substantially diminished, and their harms to the populace substantially magnified. A thing like this is tough to stop, because by the time you really want to stop it, it's entrenched.

[SkiFire13]

Because drivers are still a majority of the population, so this would be wildly unpopular

[dfxm12]

Governments do a lot of wildly unpopular things. I can't speak specifically for Switzerland, but one recent example is UK's Online Safety Act 2023. Even related to drivers, speed cameras are enabled despite being unpopular.

[sofixa]

Unfortunately, that's not how Switzerland operates, because it's a very direct democracy where the status quo and the will of the majority takes priority over common sense and long term thinking. Full franchise (women being allowed to vote) didn't happen in all cantons until the 1990s (after it being made possible in the 1970s), because the existing voters (men) just voted against it.

[qcnguy]

That's because women themselves voted against it. Which is actually the history of the female franchise everywhere. The suffragettes were reduced to bombing campaigns because fellow women did not agree that women should be allowed to vote. In the UK it was only WW1 that changed things. Maybe in the UK female franchise would also have been much delayed if not for the huge social upheavals caused by the world wars.

[n4r9]

> women themselves voted against it

Do you have a source for this? According to Wikipedia,

> An earlier referendum on women's suffrage was held on 1 February 1959 and was rejected by the majority (67%) of Switzerland's men.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...

[tzs]

> That's because women themselves voted against it

That's rather confusing. If women didn't have the right to vote, how would they be able to vote on the question of whether or not to grant women the right to vote?

[1718627440]

Public opinion and newspaper influence. I think the idea that any policy is about a male/female divide is wrong. I also think, that women in the past having no influence on politics only because they weren't putting their name on documents, is flawed.

[lclc]

Yes, how horrible when people get to have a say. Where will this end? In the case of Switzerland, it's ending up as one of the wealthiest countries, with a median wealth of $182,248 per adult.

Also, since when is a political ruling class known for long-term thinking?

Besides, cars are already taxed based on weight/power (what you considered common sense).

[dkiebd]

I completely reject the notion that direct democracy is bad because Politicians Know Better. It’s borderline if not completely authoritarian and frankly disgusting.

Maybe consider that Switzerland is one of the best if not the best country in the world because people can choose what they want it to be.

[sofixa]

> I completely reject the notion that direct democracy is bad because Politicians Know Better

Not politicians, experts and administrators.

And yes, most people are limited in knowledge and vision. Look no further than Brexit, where the average UK citizen couldn't comprehend the complexity of the situation or the question, yet voted. The most asked question on Google the day after the vote was what is the EU... And it took years to begin to untangle the mess.

And again, look at Switzerland and their human rights travesty of not allowing half their population to vote because the existing voters said no.

[Avicebron]

This issue with direct democracies is that the they can get out of hand pretty fast unless your population is somewhat homogenous and reasonable. Aka Switzerland. If you're too young to remember twitch plays Pokémon, that's direct democracy and it was wild.

A direct democracy could decide tomorrow that we wanted to fuck China sideways with nukes because it's funny and based all because a tiktok went viral.

[1718627440]

I think people rule differently depending on how much impact it has. People claiming "We should nuke them" knowing it will never happen is very different from them really deciding on that matter.

[sofixa]

> This issue with direct democracies is that the they can get out of hand pretty fast unless your population is somewhat homogenous and reasonable. Aka Switzerland

Sorry, but that's just a racist dogwhistle. Switzerland has four main ethnic groups, and has had multiple rounds of migration (e.g. after the Yugoslav wars). Look at their various national sporting teams. Just because you can't look past people's skin colour that doesn't make them "homogeneous".

You need an educated and engaged populace that understands their civic duties.

[dotancohen]

Even disregarding your quip about when women got the vote, your post reads like another anti-Western agenda post that has become very popular in the past two years.

[bondarchuk]

It's true though, quite amazingly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...

[dotancohen]

Why do you double down on this when I specifically disregarded that aspect of your comment from my post?

And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda posts always met with multiple simultaneous downvotes, whereas my other unpopular opinions are downvoted one by one?

[komali2]

It appears that 200,000 people live in Geneva, and daily there are 700,000 "boarding passengers" in Geneva, which I take to mean that if someone transfers a bus, they get counted twice. That said, I suspect based on these numbers that the vast majority of the population are also public transit users.

https://opendata.tpg.ch/pages/accueil/

[dmoy]

Geneva Metro area has a million people. Still could be a majority of people using public transit. If true, I suspect it's not the vast majority though Switzerland as a whole is still majority car commuters I think.

[bevr1337]

> There is existing technology to extract co2

Source? As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale. We can hit neutral, like a tree does, but that doesn't improve the situation. Like desalination, it sure seems like an easy problem but is not.

[lupusreal]

> As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale.

I'm sure he knows. He's just tacitly saying cars should be defacto banned for anybody who's not a multimillionaire.

The reason this isn't done is because trying something like that is how you lose elections. So really it's a fantasy about having authoritarian control over everybody else.

[adolph]

> existing technology to extract co2 from the atmosphere

I wonder what would be the energy cost of onboard co2 extraction for vehicles? Could there be a theoretical automobile that used a carbon-oxygen cycle fuel but which emitted nothing, where a "gas station" would push fuel into the vehicle and then pull out the stored material that was formerly emissions?

[MangoToupe]

I'm not sure I trust either consumers or market effects well enough to rationally move away from car usage.

[SilverElfin]

Why single out cars? I may like using cars to get to destinations. Maybe you walk but do other things that have various environmental impacts like having kids or buying trendy clothes or pick something else. It seems unfair to let some people externalize their life’s costs but charge others.

[fmobus]

If you like it so much, you should be willing to pay for the externalities.

[lucb1e]

Nobody said to not apply the same elsewhere...

[theappsecguy]

This is a very naive take. For one, we don't do this because a lot of people in a lot of places have no other choice. Not everyone lives in a developed European country, good luck living without a car in Texas.

[const_cast]

The reason we have so many cars in Texas is because we don't pay the costs.

Source: I live in Texas.

Part of the problem of automobiles is that we put the industry on such extreme welfare that it makes no sense to do anything else. If we remove that welfare, the industry will be forced to shift.

[lucb1e]

> a lot of people in a lot of places have no other choice. Not everyone lives in a developed European country

Then let's start with the people from developed European countries who can afford this and built it out from there. "I have no choice but to pollute your planet" is a bit of a thin argument to me, surely we can (as a society) find a way to make that not necessary. Collect funds, build the system we want, use it. That's the point of a government, it doesn't exist just because we like to pay taxes

[dukoid]

I am not arguing against cars. I am just arguing against the "right" to pollute the environment without taking responsibility for adequate cleanup.

[smsm42]

Gas and cars are already heavily taxed. In California, for example, it's 61c per gallon now. I am not sure what's the situation in Switzerland, but last time I have been in Europe gas prices there was very significantly higher than in the US (even in California). Given as European gas doesn't seem to be a different product than US gas, I have to conclude Europeans already pay a lost of costs when buying gas. Same with car prices. So claiming car drivers do not pay the costs is just plain wrong.

[bkettle]

> So claiming car drivers do not pay the costs is just plain wrong.

We can’t determine that that is the case simply because the cost seems like a lot. California has the highest gas taxes in the US, so even if California is correctly pricing the externalities of consuming a gallon of gas (which I very much doubt), the rest of the country is under-pricing those externalities. The EU has a minimum gas tax of $1.60 per gallon, so if they are correctly pricing the externalities, California must be under-pricing them by over half.

[pkulak]

That 61 cents doesn’t even come close to covering road maintenance, let alone pollution and every other negative externality of personal car use.

[amanaplanacanal]

I'm not familiar with how things are done in Europe, but in the US fuel taxes aren't enough to pay for road maintenance, let alone new construction and externalities like pollution. New construction is typically mostly done with federal grants (newly printed money) and pollution we all just breathe.

[Leherenn]

According to the Swiss government that's actually the case there: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/mobility-tra...

"Degree of coverage of motorised road traffic infrastructure costs: 111%"

[jerlam]

California doesn't even have the same kind of gas as other US states. Supply is limited due to only a subset of refineries that can produce it.

Gasoline is regulated both by federal, local, and state laws.

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/fuels-enforcment-pr...

https://www.wearethepractitioners.com/index.php/topics/art-a...

[lillecarl]

It is a different product, across the world. In Sweden you can't buy anything below 95 octane whereas I've seen 89 in Australia and 87 seems to be common in USA according to Claude.

Editorialized: US "gas" is cheap crap

[striking]

> An octane rating, or octane number, is a standard measure of a fuel's ability to withstand compression in an internal combustion engine without causing engine knocking. The higher the octane number, the more compression the fuel can withstand before detonating. Octane rating does not relate directly to the power output or the energy content of the fuel per unit mass or volume, but simply indicates the resistance to detonating under pressure without a spark.

from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating

It just lets higher performance cars achieve higher compression ratios. I believe technically this means it has a little bit less raw combustion potential the higher the octane rating. But none of this actually matters in practice as long as you feed your car what it asks for.

[lillecarl]

It means we can run higher compression in our engines without engine knock, which means we can run our turbos and timing harder on a smaller dispacement engine without ruining it, meaning more efficient engines.

Cleetus McFarland ran a car on brake-clean which has really low octane rating so sure anything works if you care about nothing. https://youtu.be/0hYOgGYQ_c8

American big block naturally aspirated engines will be tuned for crap fuel, if you've got a modern efficient turbo engine you should buy premium fuel to not ruin your engine.

[striking]

I'd love to know which new big block naturally aspirated American cars don't recommend premium fuel. I think the low octane fuel is really only there for the older cars (and for folks who don't understand octane ratings).

[lillecarl]

Recommendations only do so much, 80% of sales are crap fuel.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1270-dece...

Modern engines will pull back timing and decrease efficiency to prevent breaking down, raising the bar is in everyone's best interest, except the fat and happy Oil companies.