The #1 "victim" of a carbon tax is coal, which accounts for about 30% of our energy production. A carbon tax will redistribute this production to other sources, mainly natural gas (which emits 42% less carbon). Exxon does a lot of natural gas extraction, and virtually nothing with coal.
Exxon is also working on carbon sequestration technology. Which becomes a much more profitable business if there is a real carbon tax.
And as far as oil goes - a carbon tax has comparatively little effect on gas prices. $30/ton would be about 27 cents per gallon [1].
[1] https://www.uscleanenergyfund.com/articles/carbon-tax-simula... (disclaimer - I made this)
EDIT - After RT-entire-FA, I see they got to this point. But I think they are overcomplicating things with points #1,2,4,5. It's just good business for Exxon.
Not to say that society would not benefit, but it does make me wonder.
I have deeply negative feelings about Exxon for misleading the public on the dangers of fossil fuel combustion while having ample knowledge of that danger (they've known for 40 years). However, I'm a pragmatist; it's more important that we take steps which will move us off carbon-generating energy sources than it is to render punishment. If Exxon happens to benefit, fine. I'd be more pleased if their executives were convicted on criminal charges and the tax was implemented due to the overwhelming will of American voters, but this is fine too.
Of course, over here in the UK it's £1.10/liter, which is about $6.
Find your reps: http://tryvoices.com/ Learn more: http://www.carbontax.org/
Source: I work at a tax policy nonprofit. Someone in the office probably would've mentioned it if such a tax were around the corner.
And that's a lot more people who tend to be much poorer than even the poor rural Americans.
From the article, it looks like the current bill is "Climate Protection and Justice Act of 2015". I propose instead the "Save our Children Act". Hard to be against that.
Unfortunately, it's not going to work, and they will be ran out of business through the political will of the people, just as the tobacco industry is now having done to it.
You're not cool if you smoke, and you're not cool if you don't drive a Tesla. It isn't often that the right thing is also the cool thing; everyone involved should pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
* Ever fly in an airplane - thank oil
* Ever ride in a car or bus - thank oil
* Live in a cold climate and heat your home in winter - thank oil
* Ever use plastics - thank oil
* Ever buy something on Amazon and had it shipped to you - thank oil
* Ever buy something manufactured in another country - thank oil
* Ever use electricity on a still night - you should probably thank natural gas or coal
* Ever mail a letter - thank oil
If tobacco and tobacco products were suddenly unavailable tomorrow morning - the world would probably be a better place
If oil and oil products were suddenly unavailable tomorrow morning - it would probably result in the collapse of civilization as we know it and millions of deaths
Let's not pretend oil and tobacco have anywhere near the same pro/con trade offs.
NPR Planet Money recently did a series of podcasts about oil - it was pretty good. #4 was the episode where they talked a bit about what oil goes into: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/19/490408060/oil-4...
That's wrong. This article compares the two because it seems both groups committed fraud via funding misinformation campaigns that had a goal of affecting legislation on regulation.
Extremists are the ones who cannot deal with the obvious negatives of oil along with the benefits.
Unfortunately, it's not going to work, and they will be ran out of business through the political will of the people, just as the tobacco industry is now having done to it.
https://www.scribd.com/document/320110894/Alex-Epstein-Moral...
Funny that the people who get labeled "climate deniers" are also the most pro-nuclear, while the loud environmentalists are the most anti-nuclear.
I frankly don't give a damn what they believe or don't believe, if they're going to solve the problem anyway.
We have several alternatives.
The only problem they have is that most of them are difficult to store in a self-contained moving vehicle that turns rubber wheels to move on flat blacktop.
So, we increase reliance on vehicles that turn steel wheels on steel tracks, and get their power from overhead wires.
Next question?
Woe to the bicycle commuter, I suppose.
Also, I think you forget there are huge chunks of the world where this is utterly untrue.
And I propose the e-bicycle conversion kits, generally for the price of a commuter class cheap bike the cost per watt of motor and cost per KWh lithium battery has been dropping by half every couple years. Today in 2016 you're looking at about two watts of motor power per dollar (so $500 kit would get you more than a horsepower, and riding on horseback seems adequately fast) and about $30 per mile of battery range so $500 of lithium ion should get me around 15 miles on a charge (depends a lot on speed, hills, how much you pedal, etc)
Of course the government is getting in the way with all kinds of regulation and outright banning in some more backwards cities (NYC, etc). But I don't live in a backwards city so no problemo.
Until 2016 I'm not going to ride a bike to work because I'll be all sweaty during the roughly two months per year the weather is good enough to ride a bike. However my son is very interested in the mechanical work of assembling an ebike conversion, and it sounds like a fun teen boy and dad project to work on together, so in 2017 I could slowly ride an ebike to work mostly sweatless. Its an interesting technological development. I have not gone beyond a couple hours of online research on this project, but I'm figuring for a couple grand, which isn't much, we can build matching ebikes.
Transport for the 1%! I'll just carry on with my bus. Some of them are already hybrid.
PM has been trading for more in the last 5 months than it has in the last 8 years.
Cool to who? Tesla ownership is a sign that you have money to spend but are not informed enough to purchase a vehicle that's worth the money. You might be cool in tech circles, but people that know cars will roll their eyes.
>BC’s fuel consumption is also down. Over the past six years, the per-person consumption of fuels has dropped by 16% (although declines levelled off after the last tax increase in 2012). During that same period, per-person consumption in the rest of Canada rose by 3%. “Each year the evidence becomes stronger and stronger that the carbon tax is driving environmental gains,” says Stewart Elgie, an economics professor at University of Ottawa and head of Sustainable Prosperity, a pro-green think-tank. At the same time, BC’s economy has kept pace with the rest of the country.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2014/07/british-...
I'm not sure I trust future projections much from the EIA; they are extremely conservative in terms of being unable to imagine non-fossil fuel energy. They've been consistently wrong on renewable technology as well:
http://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/15/us-eia-responds-cleantec...
I don't mean to diminish the excellent work they do. But for projections like this they must necessarily embody lots of opinion, and there's a good chance that their opinions embody the slow-change mindset of the energy industry.
I would bet with hybrid (and arguably electric) cars being as usable as their ICE cousins that the demand for transportation fuel will become far more elastic.
That's because gas is inelastic. That doesn't mean a price increase wouldn't have a negative effect.
The argument goes, this is exactly why a carbon tax is needed. The externalities of using fossil fuels aren't captured in the price, leading to overconsumption. There are plenty of ways to mitigate impact, either by applying a graduated subsidy to low-income populations, etc. Allowing folks to continue to live in a financially unsustainable way doesn't seem to be the answer...
Sounds cool! Let me suggest (if you haven't thought about this already) to document all steps and publish it on a blog or something. Other interested dads, curious kids and DIYs in general will love it and might give a shot.
I actually don't have one, though, but that's only because everything I do on a regular basis is within 2 miles. My ride to work on a normal pedal bike is 6 minutes.
I agree that cities are absurd for banning small 2 wheeled vehicles with little momentum while permitting large 4 wheeled vehicles with massive momentum (and with it, massive ability to mangle and destroy human bodies).
2. Electric cars will make this irrelevant, since they'll draw their power from the grid. In the meantime, ICEs/hybrids are becoming increasingly efficient.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
My car friends fall into two camps: those who have never driven a Tesla, and those who have. The former group is optimistic and looks upon Tesla products with naked desire; the latter group has already dismissed the entire company as The Sharper Image of car sales.
Since the Tesla is a car that competes with luxury cars rather than sports cars, it falls into neither of these categories. A reviewer calling it out for poor handling will thus generate a ton of ill-will and angry comments sections from the 'who-cares' crowd, so they don't bother with it.
Here's an example of what passes for an excoriation from mainstream auto media:
http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/tesla/model-s/ride
The phrasing here, combined with a lead-photo of abysmal body roll, indicates to car people that this thing handles like a boat. I've verified this myself behind the wheel.
I understand and agree that this car handles just fine for the mass majority of people, but "meets needs" is kind of a shitty bar to set for a car priced to compete with the BMW M4.
Getting people and things moved by train is a great idea, but in the grand scheme of things we're dependant on oil for so many other things.
In 2013 91.6% of the energy cames from CO2 producing sources[1], and nuclear production is decreasing[1], having peaked in 2005.
The exact percentage, whether it's 91.5% or under 60% doesn't even matter though, what matters is that fossil fuel burning is increasing in absolute terms[1].
[1] http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication...
Easily, 99.9% of all energy used by humans comes from sunlight just looking at farms. Plants store a tiny percentage the ~200+watts per meter of sunlight* average over 24 hours, but if you needed to grow them indoors it would take ridiculous amounts of energy.
* You can approximate that from 4 pi R ^2 as surface area of a sphere / pi * r^2 surface area of a circle. So ~25% of 1050 W/m2 of direct sunlight on the surface. We don't farm above the arctic circle for example so that's just an approximation and most places have winters etc.
So, really it's just a question of how and what we are counting.
PS: ~200w average * 10,000 * 134,000,000 = 2,300,000 terrawatt hours. Oil and coal combined provide less than 40 terrawatt hours per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi... You can play with the numbers but we also depend on plankton to feed fish and of course enough sunlight to keep the earth from freezing.
If we are concerned about reducing CO2 emissions, energy usage is the important metric, not electricity.
However, this distinction doesn't matter much here, because, as I said:
> The exact percentage, whether it's 91.5% or under 60% doesn't even matter though, what matters is that fossil fuel burning is increasing in absolute terms[1].
Also, we burn fossil fuels to heat up houses. If we want to burn less fossil fuels for that, we need to generate more electricity, but we need to do it without fossil fuels. The only available ecological technology that exists today and has enough capacity is nuclear, and nuclear production is decreasing.
We burn a lot of fossil fuels. A big part for electricity, some other part to do other things (X). A big part (not all) of X can be done electrically too, but then we need a way to generate that extra electricity without fossil fuels.
> [something about plants and fish]
True, but I don't understand the relevance.
Just re-stating the problem. People use fossil fuels to heat homes, but we don't generally consider passive heat gain.
China has a lot of fossil fuel use if you look at fossil fuels, but they are also a world leader in solar hot water heaters. They don't show up on most statistics, but people still enjoy the hot water. Further they cost less than 1/10th of what similar systems cost in the US and could dramatically reduce the need for home heating.
And in popular culture, if we end up with people opposed to a carbon tax just because Exxon wants a carbon tax too, well it doesn't more nose-less than that.
I have problems with that statement.
In my opinion, if we start forgetting we are a society of humans that, sometimes, use corporations as a tool for collaborating, we have serious problems.
So, everybody, repeat with me: we want to maximize humans welfare. Corporations are tools.
So in summary, I'm not sure what your problem was with that statement, other than perhaps my statement was too ambiguous :)
Until the aims of multinational corporations are aligned with the aims of society at large, they will continue to be considered untrustworthy.
Um, no. I believe there's a fallacy in there somewhere but I'm not up to speed on them.
It's something subtle in the public discourse (or not so subtle sometimes).
Say you run a delivery business, and your bike messengers can save a lot of time (netting you a higher profit) cutting across your neighbor's property. It's a free market when you can freely transact with your neighbor for an easement over his property; it's not a free market when the government fails to stop you from trespassing on his property without his permission.
Externalized costs from pollution aren't any different. Like trespassing, pollution burdens other peoples' property. Letting people pollute unchecked undermines the free market.
Remember how this came about though, the government of the time had to "step in" and end the use of land as a commons and bring about its privatisation. This sounds like market intervention, doesn't it? We don't look at it that way though, as it was the government intervention that kicked off the whole machine of capitalism. The wealthy at the time were mostly in favour of it and so it had a lot of support.
So what is a free market? In order to have a market at all, you need a government which defends the property "rights" (a purely ideological/philosophical assertion by Locke and co.) of private owners of the stuff and things that we use to produce in this world. We use air to produce things too, as well as land. Just as land must be used to accept the refuse of our production and consumption (rubbish dumps, landfills), the air does too. We charge people to put stuff in landfills, so why don't we charge people to put stuff in the air? This carbon tax is effectively a way of "uncommonsing" the air, just as the land was in the 18th century. This proposed intervention is less popular among the wealthy, of course, as it is not a form of privatisation that they can easily profit from. Ultimately, if it comes to it, they will surely be passing the cost of this privatisation to the workers and consumers in the end anyway.
I don't know if you consider the existing society capitalist or not, but I can't give serious consideration to the idea that corporations even vaguely represent the aims of society. Yes, you can claim that people have aims, not societies, but people constitute societies, and the aims of 99.9% of people are not aligned with the aims of the corporations.
