Brother Gore has a new Sermon

[bolson]

"Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent." -- Al Gore
From his new slideshow (28min):
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/243

And a reminder of what I think is the most brilliant policy suggestion:
Revenue-neutral tax shift: replace income tax with carbon tax.

Comments

[motyl.livejournal.com]

Revenue-neutral tax shift: replace income tax with carbon tax.

So that all of the people who can't afford new appliances and expensive hybrid cars get to pay more tax than those who can?

Or is this only businesses you're taxing here...

[flexagon]

I'm not sure I share your concern; lower-income people usually have smaller dwellings than high-income ones, and take public transportation more where it's available, and fly less often. A lot of them might well be thrilled with the idea of no income tax.

I'm willing to bet a lot that high-income folks often use a lot more carbon than low-income ones, with the extra travel and extra size of their homes alone. And also, nobody said the carbon tax had to be flat anyway; maybe it's at one rate for the first X tons, and then a higher rate for the next Y tons, and so forth, the way income tax is now.

I love the idea, personally. Yes, the rich would all run out and buy hybrids, which the poor can't afford to do yet largely because they aren't the standard (which they'd become, with the new trend set by the rich). But everyone could at least scale back usage of what they already have. Imagine if we had a nation of people all scheming how they could scale back! That thought alone is pretty inspiring.

[motyl.livejournal.com]

True that lower-income people may have a lower carbon impact but I think a good number of them don't pay income taxes at all (or pay extremely little) so being taxed at all could be harmful. I suspect (but really have no data) a yuppie household with two hybrids, great insulation etc. etc. would not have much more of a carbon footprint than someone renting a shoddy apartment with old appliances etc. Anecdotal evidence: moving from my apartment to my current place (2-3x the space) my heating bill got cut in half. And if the tax is revenue-neutral and the disparity shrinks you're going to have a hell of a time trying to get the people who can 'afford' to pay taxes to pay a larger share.

It would be nice to encourage everyone to make smart environmental choices but it could also have some pretty nasty unintended consequences. I'm guessing the high tax items would be car followed by heat and electricity. Encouraging people to take public transportation is all well and good but I'd hate to see some family not be able to pay their heating and electricity bills at all because they couldn't afford the new premiums. Living without heat and electricity is no fun. Behold the new black market in candles and chopped wood ('untraceable' .: untaxable sources of light and heat which aren't actually more efficient)

[soong.livejournal.com]

There are always going to have to be special programs for low-income and poor people. Welfare, food stamps, medicaid, etc. Maybe there will a new one to offset the carbon tax.

The enviro-yuppie household gets off easily, but that's kinda the point. Finally a tax structure with 'loopholes and giveaways' that do something good!

Suppose we just start with taxing coal, and the cost of coal generated electricity goes up $.01/KWh at the wholesale cost of generation level. 1.99e12 KWh came from coal in 2006. That one-cent-per-kilowatt-hour tax yields 19.9 billion dollars. There's another 0.813e12 KWh from natural gas which would be carbon-taxed as well. Hmm, suddenly offsetting the $2.4 trillion annual revenues of the US government $28 billion at a time seems like a relatively small change. But maybe if it's a smallish economic change that's all the more reason to try it to make a big environmental change.

Now I'm curious about the oil market and what a carbon tax might do there.