The most well-respected methods for reducing carbon emissions seem to be carbon taxes and carbon price mechanisms. I have written before about how I think they will not work to achieve a zero carbon state, based on lessons from the field of public health. Here I want to explore in a little more detail just what we might expect in the long-term from a carbon taxation system.
An illustrative example: Effects of carbon taxes on fishing
Fish are a staple food in Japan, and fishing is a carbon intensive practice because fishing fleets use diesel oil. We can get a rough estimate of how much carbon is required to produce a single piece of fish, and use this to estimate how price would change under a carbon tax. First, consider the total carbon emitted in catching fish: this website puts it at between 1750 and 3300 kg for a ton of fish, with the highest carbon emission amongst farmed fish. The analysis suggests that 1kg of wild-caught frozen salmon will be associated with 1kg of CO2; a carbon footprint of up to 6Kg can be expected for fish that is caught in say Chile, and shipped to the US. Taking 5kg as a conservative estimate of the carbon footprint of a kg of fish, we can see that for a carbon tax of $X per ton, $X/200 is added per kg of fish sold in the super market. So for a price of $250 per ton, we get $1.25 per kilogram; for $2500 per ton, we get $12.50 per kilogram.
The Coles website tells me that salmon fillets are currently $30 per kg. A carbon price of $2500 a ton will increase their cost by approximately 30%.
We can calculate the cost for fresh fish in a supply chain directly, so let’s try this for a typical fresh Tokyo fish, Mackerel. The Seafish.org website has a carbon footprint profiler which indicates that you need to take into account “landed to live weight” and “final processed form to landed weight,” which we can estimate fairly conservatively (though I don’t know the details). This ancient paper (pdf) gives an efficiency of about 3% for shrimp fishing, while this FAO document gives landed weights of between 3 and 84%. Working with Mackerel from that document, let’s assume that only 3% of caught fish is actually edible[1], and make that the “landed to live weight” ratio. The FAO provides a handy guide to “conversion factors” for converting landed fish to actual final processed form, as an annex (pdf) to this guide. Taking the mackerel factor, let’s assume that only 50% of the final fish is eaten, in the form of a fillet. The site then asks us to show how much the fish traveled before and after processing, and by what means. Let’s assume it is landed fresh in Tokyo after a 5 day fishing trip, and that it traveled 40km by truck to the processing plant, then 40 km by van to the shops, and was eaten within a day (pretty standard in Tokyo). Using “Trawling for Herring in the NW Atlantic” as our model fishing method, we get 7.4 tons of CO2 for every ton of final product. So we would need to add X/133 to the per kg price of the fish. For a carbon price of $250, that’s $1.90; for $2500, a $19.00 impost. This site tells me that Mackerel in Japan costs between 600 and 8000 Yen per kilogram ($6-80), so a $2500/ton carbon tax would change this price range to $25-100 per kg. The Coles website tells me Australians already pay $20/kg for tinned mackerel – is it very likely that Japanese will baulk at paying $25 for fresh mackerel? Furthermore, this is for the most inefficient live catch and processing values I can find. If the live catch efficiency goes up to 10%, for example, the impost for those carbon taxes drops to $0.60 – $6.
No one on earth is currently considering a $2500 ton carbon tax. Even $250 a ton is considered radical, but $250 a ton will increase the final price of mackerel by $0.60 – $1.90 per kg. Does anyone seriously believe that this impost will be sufficient to force the fishing fleet to go carbon-neutral?
What are the long-term impacts of carbon taxes?
I chose fishing as an example because it differs from electricity generation in one simple way: short of returning to sailboats, there is no viable low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels for fishing boats at present. So the fishing industry will have little choice but to absorb the price of a carbon tax, pass it on to consumers, or disappear, unless and until an alternative energy source becomes available. If our goal is to get to a carbon zero economy and still be able to eat fish, a carbon tax is surely not going to work. But there are other aspects of the economy that are entirely vulnerable to a carbon tax, most especially electricity generation and public transport. So how well are carbon taxes predicted to work in these industries?
There does not seem to be a lot of available modeling on the long-term impact of carbon taxes, but those reports that have been published are not promising. For example, this report by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby describes a carbon tax starting at $10/tonne and increasing to $250/tonne at $10/year. They use four different established models to identify total, and industry- and region-wide effects of the carbon tax. Their final estimate of the effect of the carbon tax is a 50% reduction in emissions by 2035 (page 30). After that the gains decline. This report, from the carbon tax center, proposes a system of tax and credits that appears to correspond with a $113/tonne tax, and would lead to 25% reductions in emissions by 2024 on a 2012 baseline.
350.org says we need to get to 350ppm by the end of the century to avoid catastrophe; we’re currently on 400ppm and increasing at 2ppm per year. If we halve global emissions by 2035, we’ll be above 420ppm, and still increasing.
As another example, my July electricity bill was $66 for 214kwh of electricity. In Tokyo at the moment this is mostly gas, and would (according to Wikipedia) have released a total of 107 kg of CO2, based on median emissions. At $250/ton that’s going to increase my electricity bill by about $25/month. How much electricity use will that discourage? $25 is a cheap meal out with a few drinks. At $2500/ton it’s $250/month – two cheap meals out and two trips to a love hotel. Am I willing to give up two dates a month in order to keep my electricity use unchanged?
I don’t believe that even a $250/ton carbon tax will be sufficient to force carbon neutrality in electricity generation, and $2500/ton, while it will make solar and wind competitive and force a fairly rapid switch to renewables, may not lead to much change in other behavior, especially in industries like shipping and trucking where alternatives are expensive and still barely off the drawing board. The Citizens’ Climate Lobby report tells us that in the USA each $1/ton of carbon tax is a $.009/gallon increase in petrol prices; $2500 a ton will increase petrol prices by $22.5/gallon. Currently in Tokyo gasoline is sold at probably $2/gallon. Will people completely stop using cars at $25/gallon? Given that a single journey in Japan can cost $5 in parking, and a car can travel 35 mpg, i.e. two trips per parking cost, the total cost of those two trips will go from $14 to $35 in Tokyo. Is that sufficient to stop recreational use of cars?
These reports make clear that even sizeable taxes of up to $250/ton are not enough to get where we need to go. The first report, suggesting $10/year increases in the tax, shows the obvious problem – as the tax grows, the incremental benefit of further increases declines, so going to higher taxes will have smaller and smaller effects. By the time we’re at $300/ton, a further $10/year increase will be less than the effect of inflation on prices in many countries. People will stop responding to those taxes by that time. And as I showed in the case of fishing, there will be many industries where this cost can be passed onto consumers with a negligible effect. I routinely buy fish fillets in Tokyo for $2/fillet, am I seriously going to reduce my carbon footprint if the price of such cheap food doubles?
What we need to bear in mind here is that we don’t want to reduce recreational use of cars by 50% over the next 30 years, or by 90%; realistically, any CO2 emitting form of transport needs to be cut by 99%. These taxes alone are not going to do that.
What do we need to do to achieve carbon zero?
Carbon neutrality will not be achieved by taxes alone. We need additional government interventions to make it happen. Carbon taxes with appropriate transfers to ensure that poor people are compensated for the change are a good start, but they are only a start. We need to go a lot further if we want to achieve these goals. Some policy interventions should include:
- Complete electrification of freight rail: Australia’s rail freight system (indeed all inter-city lines) is still diesel-powered; it should be electrified immediately, so that it can be shifted to a renewable energy source as the taxes bite
- Expansion of passenger and freight rail: Most Australian cities are heavily dependent on road transport, which for the foreseeable future is immune to carbon abatement policies. As much as possible, the transport network needs to be shifted to rail, that can be electrified
- Electrification of all buses: all public buses should be immediately electrified
- Implementation of tollways: all major interstate highways should be shifted to a toll system, with tolls based on both distance travelled and journey speed, and tolls manipulated to ensure long distance travel is always cheaper by train and bus than by car
- Construction of high speed rail: this is never going to be profitable in Australia, so it should be subsidized by government, using carbon tax proceeds, and prices fixed in such a way that it is always competitive with air travel and private road travel
- Minimum price for air travel: Air travel will never be carbon neutral, so it needs to be discouraged or people need to find ways to use their journeys more efficiently (i.e. travel less often and stay longer). A minimum price will encourage this, and should be designed so that electric high speed rail is always cheaper
- Nuclearization of all large ocean-going vessels: if it’s large enough to have a nuclear power source, it should. No freight should be carried on a CO2-emitting ship.
- Reorientation of commercial fishing fleets around batteries and nuclear tankers: I don’t know if this is possible, but fishing needs to be redesigned so it is carbon neutral. If it isn’t yet possible to design battery powered ships, research funds should be dumped into this
- A timetable for the banning of internal combustion engines: Some time in the future, internal combustion engines need to be banned. This timetable should be implemented now. By e.g. 2020, gasoline-using cars should be illegal, so people have 6 years to buy a battery car or convert to CNG; by 2025 or 2030, CNG cars should be illegal. That gives a 15 year time frame to completely electrify the personal transport industry
- Immediate conversion of cars to compressed natural gas: This should be a brief boom industry, as all old cars are converted.
- Lower all speed limits: so that cars travel more efficiently and private travel is less time-efficient than public transport
- Ban all new coal-extraction licenses: No new coal mines should be built anywhere in Australia, and furthermore no new development should be allowed in connection with existing mines. Existing infrastructure bottlenecks to efficient extraction should be seen as a good thing.
- Divestment laws: Investment funds should be required to divest all holdings in carbon-intensive industries on a reasonable but definitive timetable
- Scale-up of electric charging points: Cars should be rechargable anywhere
- Mandatory roof-top solar: for all businesses
- Mandatory grid integration: no power company should be able to refuse a reasonable request to sell power into the grid.
- Mandatory storage in new buildings, and subsidies to convert existing buildings: apartment blocks are not efficient solar collectors, but they could still be built with sufficient storage that they can store some solar power for release onto the grid at night
- Ban all rice and cotton production in the Murray-Darling watershed: water needs to be returned to the river for greening of the river course, because restoring natural wetlands and green areas is essential to improving carbon sequestration
- Huge rewilding and reforestation programs: Carbon sequestration through forestry management is essential, and this project needs to be undertaken immediately, so that it forms a key part of future carbon reduction strategies. It can be conducted in such a way as to support and restore biodiversity
- Huge research grants on storage and renewable energy: We need to get to the point where electric trucks and ocean-going boats are a possibility within 20 years. This will need research. We should be doing it
And finally, I think that climate change denial should be illegal outside of scientific journals – if people want to claim it’s not happening they should be required to present peer-reviewed scientific evidence. Funding climate change denial should be a criminal act. The government should further refuse to offer contracts to organizations that have hosted denialists or funded denialists in e.g. the last 10 years. These people need to be driven out of public life and should have no influence on public debate. It is absolutely ludicrous that after three of the hottest months on record (April, May and June), the government’s business advisor is publicly claiming that a period of major global cooling is imminent. That dude should be unemployable, and preferably in stocks[2].
A lot of these programs will require major government subsidies, transfers and loans, and huge government intervention across a range of marketplaces. We need to stop acting as if the worst consequence of responding to the climate crisis is government intervention in markets, and start recognizing that it is the minimum requirement to stave off a civilization-level disaster. It’s huge government intervention now, or civilization collapse later.
So go looking back through history and ask yourself – has any civilization collapse ever been preventable through a small tax that raised the price of fish by 10%? I think you’ll find the answer is no. The emergency is coming, and we need to act as if it’s an emergency, not a minor market failure.
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fn1: For farmed fish, this number should be near 100%, obviously.
fn2: This is clearly a rhetorical point
Compromise and Conceit 
August 16, 2014 at 6:40 pm
I like your list of things we need to do to get to carbon neutrality. There needs to be much more public discussion about this kind of thing and I find that having a strategy in a list like that is actually quite motivating. I also agree that a carbon tax alone is not going to be sufficient.
However, I disagree with your sentiments about making climate change denial funding illegal. People should be free to spend their money on whacky ideas if they want. What should be illegal is the trashing of our planet without penalty. Externalities ought to be included in the price of things and there should probably be a law for this.
August 16, 2014 at 11:28 pm
I think your plan to nuclearize maritime freight carrying capacity is interesting in that it is the highest risk application of the technology. If this is the way forward, why not scrap gas and coal generators and go all nuclear? Alternative/renewable are a very minor player in Australian domestic energy generation.
Also, the Queensland LPG export hubs coming online over the next few years in conjunction with the export focus of the current round of gas concessions will put a serious dent in any plans for mass ‘gassification’ of the auto market. It is more a question of whether there will be enough gas held back from export to support the domestic market. The gas concessions were distributed based on the assumption that coal seam gas in the hunter would go ahead just as it did in qld. The irony of the folks live tweeting the CSG protests in nsw is that in 5 years from now the gas available to generate the electricity to charge their phones will have shrunk by about 70%. It is a surprisingly dire situation.
So maybe nuclear is the answer. Any such vessel is basically mobile generation so a sophisticated freight tracking system could have them arrive in port in time to boost local generation to meet peak load. Considering that wind and solar deliver something around 5% load (if I remember correctly!) And that most of the figures that promote alternative/renewables as anything more than an expensive sideshow include the snowy and franklin hydroelectric generators, nuclear would appear to be the sole viable alternative.
Assuming that it could be done (and let’s face it the track record isn’t too good), nuclear also addresses the problem of declining base load. Average electricity load in Australia (and most of the developed world I expect) is in decline whereas peak load is increasing. Everyone is saving power except on that week in summer when it’s 45c. So the revenue base declines while the cost of maintaining a system that only sustains peak for maybe 10 Max days per annum is increasing. Technically nuclear can solve this because there is no need to turn the lights off and moderate your thermostat if there is a surplus of electricity and the cost is moderated by using a cheaper nuclear fuel (especially if there was a carbon tax). Of course this all depends on nuclear actually being cheaper and the generators being reliable and clean.
This is all academic because the Australian carbon tax has been scrapped. I have spoken to many people about it and very few had any real sense of what it was other than another federal tax that reduced their disposable income. The benefits were never adequately explained and I haven’t spoken to a single person who regrets it’s demise. Yes this is a shame and it illustrates the necessity of broad, educated support for this kind of initiative if it is ever to return.
August 17, 2014 at 1:04 pm
Lots of your logic seems centred on Japanese examples, but all your prescriptions are for Australia. I’ll presume that your prescriptions are global in nature (so Addis Ababa [1] is going to be purely electric in the same timeframe).
In Australia, we’ve recently had our Treasurer propose a 1 cent increase in the fuel levy and justify it by citing data showing that on average “rich people” drive 3 times as far as “poor people”. I saw an estimate that the average cost to a family would be around $15/year. The papers and opposition parties (including the Greens) immediately lost it. The increase in the levy is dead on arrival.
In that environment, you’re proposing something that is a root and branch reform of everything? And you’re suggesting that people will need to be forced into it by government diktats? Who the heck is voting this reforming government in?
”Carbon taxes with appropriate transfers to ensure that poor people are compensated for the change are a good start”
I think it’s really important for your argument that you accept that there is no way that the poor will be fully compensated for the changes proposed. And as such, that should be communicated to everyone because otherwise your proposals will hit the same problem the carbon tax did – everyone supports it in theory, but bugger all people understand or supports paying it in practice. That just gets the proposal rolled back the first time it impacts anyone.
Looking at your list of suggestions I would wonder whether if we:
1. lined up every rich person in Australia
2. took all their stuff, and
3. forced them to continue working while under a 100% tax rate
If this would provide sufficient resources to reimburse the poor for the cost increases this would cause.
You’re suggesting a $250/month increase in electricity bill as being insufficient, plus an increase in food costs that seem to come in at >$500/month [2]. Then there’s transport costs plus the cost of everything else under the sun. So let’s call it $1000/month ($250/week) in cost increases.
In 2009-10, it seems the bottom 10% of households earned about $350/week [4]. But we can’t just compensate the bottom 10%, because a $250/week cost increase is going to pull everyone earning up to $600/week into the style of life that you felt should be compensated [5].
In light of that, the compensated households make up about %40 of the population [6]! And the political considerations are only going to drive that figure higher.
Please note, I’m not trying to put forward a climate change “denialist” argument, I’m just saying that your plan to get this implemented has to have some sort of starting point like “Let’s work out who we’re going to put up against the wall in our initial bloodbath” because absent the creation of a military junta led by Lee Rhiannon I just can’t see this happening. It’s pure turkey’s voting for Christmas. [7]
Frankly when faced like a comprehensive change like this, I’d want to see what the alternative option is. Something that says “We flush >20% of all our future income forever down the toilet forever to deal with the effects of AGW” needs to written up and the figures compared. Even when you count the number of deaths that climate change can cause, I’d want an accounting against how many people the junta will be putting against the wall.
So sorry, I’m in favour of action on climate change but all options that involve gutting myself now are off the table, even if that means the only ones left involve gutting myself later.
George Monbiot’s proposals in Heat are much more realistic and (according to him) also result in averting catastrophic climate change. I’d pick his prescriptions over yours any day of the week.
[1] Or your choice of backwater location. Bonus points to anyone who can describe how they’re going to do it for somewhere that’s in a nigh-permanent state of civil war.
[2] Taking a $30/kg increase in fish price as indicative across all food [3], assuming 200g food/meal and 21 meals a week = $30/5 * 21 meals * 4 weeks = $504.
[3] I know you call fish out as especially high CO2 emitting, but you also say that $30/kg isn’t enough. So I’m just going to use it cause the figure is lying around.
[4] http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/1301.0~2012~Main%20Features~Household%20income,%20expenditure%20and%20wealth~193
[5] I’m assuming the bottom 10% as defining the “poor” but feel free to come up with another definition.
[6] I’m just eyeballing the graph 9.5. Median income is $715/week.
[7] Let’s spare everyone the “If they don’t support it then they’ll be cooked like a turkey due to rising temperature”. I’m talking purely in terms of voting patterns. Its impossible to see these ideas getting off the ground in Australia, let alone China, India, Indonesia and every town in Africa.
August 17, 2014 at 10:54 pm
Thanks everyone for commenting and sorry for the delay in my reply – I heard there is this thing called a “life” that you can have outside your home on weekends, so I thought I’d give it a go.
Rachel, I’m surprised you stumbled on this tiny and arcane corner of the universe, but glad you found your way here. I don’t want the “freedom of speech” thing to be a big distraction from this post, the prime point of which is the possible long-term benefits of a carbon tax, so let’s just put that aside. If censorship isn’t your thing, then perhaps you’d be more interested in proposals centred on making funding more publicly accessible, and greater campaigns for genuine balance in science reporting? First and foremost though we need bipartisanship at the political level – in Australia this is how all major past political problems have been solved, but we have no bipartisanship on this issue, nor do I see any in the US or the UK (in the UK it is largely within the parties that a lack of consensus exists, but in the end it makes no difference). Bipartisanship would also answer some of Paul’s (very valid!) points that such a political program couldn’t be achieved. It can be if both sides agree to focus on it, and this is exactly why Australia’s response to HIV/AIDS is respected around the world for its effectiveness, humanity and speed. Again I point to the lessons from public health to argue that narrow sectoral changes, or limited changes based on what seems politically feasible, just don’t work against big problems. In the case of global warming, bipartisanship includes some kind of political agenda to neutralize denialism. Whether that is achieved by censorship or an agreed political program, it should be clear that something needs to be done about people telling straight-out lies about what is important and what can be achieved. Without bipartisanship, nothing is going to get done. But how is this possible in the current political environment? I fear it will require a genuinely huge climate-related disaster to make it happen, and by then it will be too late…
August 17, 2014 at 11:06 pm
Matthew, another aspect of this post that I would like to not turn into a big distraction is the nuclear issue. If you browse a little hereabouts you’ll see I’m not opposed to nuclear power, and I think in previous posts here I’ve recommended it as a short-term solution, but my opinion has changed a little since then. I didn’t include nuclear as a baseload option in this post for three main reasons: 1) Australia and other countries just don’t have the industrial base (manufacturing and personnel) to support a native nuclear industry; 2) “4th generation” and “modular” generators keep being talked about but seem to me like vapourware; 3) nuclear plants take a long time to complete (I think the current figures are around 8-10 years) but in that 10 years we could carpet the nation with solar. I also get the impression that the actual energy return for investment is very low with nuclear, and I think your figures on the efficiency of solar are a bit out of date.
I included nuclear for cargo ships because as far as I know there is no low- or zero-carbon alternative for the major tankers and cargo ships at present. If it’s high risk, I think options like e.g. having the US, French and British navy run the ships (since they have experience of nuclear vessels) might solve some of those fears. I like your mobile generation idea though I suspect it would be marginally useful. In the long-term we would need to find high-density portable energy systems for ships that were non-nuclear, so that we could run small ships with minimal expertise. The big problem with nuclear is that it requires a high technical capacity amongst the operators, and this puts a personnel limit on how much it can be scaled up. But for the very large ships, it seems like a viable short term solution to the huge amounts of carbon that they produce.
August 17, 2014 at 11:43 pm
Paul, you’re absolutely right that none of these policies are viable and that no party running for parliament on this platform would have a snowball’s chance in hell. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to be needed. I also think you’re slightly misinterpreting my post. I’m not arguing for a $2500 carbon tax, or a $250/month increase in electricity bills, I’m just arguing that it wouldn’t work for carbon zero – I am arguing against such a carbon tax, because I think we could (must) find alternatives to make industry carbon zero at lower cost than this.
Let me give another example that I posted up at John Quiggin’s blog (where I started this discussion). Someone there suggested a $120/tonne carbon tax would increase the price of petrol by 27c/litre. A Prius does 40km/litre, roughly, so you’re looking at an extra price per km of about 0.8c (conservatively). Let’s say 1c/km for ease of calculation, or 1yen/km in Tokyo. The current flagfall for a taxi in Tokyo is 730 yen, and the cost per km 90yen; my house from my local station costs 820 -1000 yen. There are lots of taxi drivers using prius in my area. So if these taxi drivers choose to pass on the cost to me of the tax, they will increase the per km cost by 1 yen, or the total cost of my journey by between 1-4 yen. Less than 1%. Is this going to discourage me from taking a single taxi trip? Is it a cost that will convince a taxi driver to trade in his 3,500,000 yen ($35,000) prius for an electric car, especially if the recharging points for electric cars are not convenient and widespread? The argument that this $120/tonne tax will seriously change a taxi driver’s economic behavior rests on, I think, a shonky economic model in which the main cost of his or her business is fuel, and not labour and capital. You can do the maths for other carbon taxes – $2500 will/tonne will increase the price of my local trip by 20-80 yen, still less than 10%. That might discourage a bit of taxi use, but it’s hardly going to lead to a speedy elimination of fuel-burning taxis. Whereas a government program of trade-ins with a long-term ban would get the job done.
I think the same considerations apply to things like electricity. Even a $250/ month increase in electricity bills might not discourage use or encourage changeover in some people; but a government-mandated plan of rooftop solar on all businesses in conjunction with a more reasonable carbon tax and a rapidly declining ceiling on allowable emissions would lead to a rapid phase-out of carbon-fueled sources. Currently the government is relying on economic incentives to encourage individuals to drive this transition, through solar on roof-tops, but this assumes a) access to capital and b) ownership of the roof. We know we need to get to this point, we know at some point every business has to have solar panels on the rooftop. We can let the market get us there slowly (and have all renters and poor home-owners unable to contribute to the solution) or we can do it quickly.
Which I guess brings me to the implicit idea underlying this post. The idea that a carbon tax alone will save us is based on the idea that there are range of different possible pathways to mitigating global warming, and to reducing emissions, but we need to get to zero carbon. That means that there is only one pathway: ceasing use of all but the absolutely most essential carbon-emitting industries, within 70 years and preferably (according to 350.org) sooner. Given there is only one pathway, we can make a choice of getting there quickly, or slowly ratcheting up the economic pressure until people decide to do what they have to do anyway. If you read the Quiggin thread you’ll see a few people there arguing that there is more than one pathway, but all the pathways they postulate are either pie-in-the-sky sequestration-type vapourware, or planting trees. But planting trees doesn’t work for three reasons: 1) it’s too slow; 2) trees are a carbon risk as well as a sink; and 3) they will run up against land-use limits. Furthermore, what trees we plant should be prioritized for offsetting carbon we cannot avoid, not for interim replacement of carbon for which other mitigation paths are available. We need to think in terms of carbon budgets, and any part of our budget that can be eliminated through substitution should absolutely be done so through substitution; sinks should be reserved only for carbon emissions that cannot be substituted (unless we can find a really big sink, for which there is no current scientific evidence). By this same token the German plan to phase out nuclear with renewables is madness. We should be phasing out coal with renewables and once that’s done then we can get all nimby over nuclear.
The key thing to remember here is we have a deadline; we don’t have an infinite number of generations in which to get to carbon zero; it’s not a boutique cultural choice or some kind of hobby. “We’re in this war for the species, boys and girls.” So we can’t faff around with just any old lacksadaisical pathway to the endpoint. And that’s what a carbon tax is based on: the idea that economic levers will enable us to choose the most efficient pathway for eliminating carbon. We should be less concerned with efficiency and more concerned with speed, and with balancing that carbon budget.
So my argument here is not that we need a $2500/tonne carbon tax; it’s that we need a reasonable carbon tax plus a metric crapton of interventions to ensure that the economy changes[1]. To be clear: any economic decision taken by individuals or corporations which leads to us digging up more coal is the wrong decision. That decision has to stop being made. You don’t stop that decision being made by making it more expensive. You stop it being made by banning the digging up of coal. The economic levers in this decision only exist to encourage the least expensive, lowest carbon alternative to the thing you banned. Any other policy is just wasting time, so that when the trouble really hits, the decisions we have to make are that much harder than the decisions we should be making now.
(And no, I don’t think the decisions we have to make now are equivalent to being gutted; but they will be if we don’t get serious soon).
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fn1: Actually I suspect that if you dig through those reports I put up above, you’ll see that the main source of carbon savings from a carbon tax is in power consumption, because that’s the only aspect of the economy where fuel is such a large part of the purchasing decision that a reasonable carbon tax can encourage rapid changeover. And even then a lot of the changes will not be people mothballing coal, but choosing non-coal generators when a generator reaches the end of its working life. This is not a fast enough change.