From: kevin@nuchat.sccsi.com (Kevin Brown)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Re: Is car pooling for real? (was Re: Are bikes really less polluting?)
Date: 31 Jul 92 05:22:14 GMT
Organization: I can't see any in the immediate vicinity...

In article <1992Jul30.172306.26471@vexcel.com> dean@vexcel.com (dean alaska) writes:
>In article <1992Jul30.142156.7115@ke4zv.uucp> gary@ke4zv.UUCP (Gary Coffman) writes:
>>In article <1992Jul27.152430.9460@cco.caltech.edu> carl@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU writes:
>>
>>If you had *read* the paragraph you quoted instead of knee jerk flaming,
>>you would have seen Larry's proposed solution. That's strict emissions
>>requirements. The advantage of this scheme over taxation is that the 
>>government doesn't profit from it. Larry seems very determined to limit
>>the amount of money the government coerces from his pocket, an admirable
>>trait. This sometimes leads to other problems such as the fact that 
>>regulations tend to have hidden costs that are often poorly understood.
>>The carbon tax idea is better at getting the costs out in the open, but
>>is subject to abuse as a revenue raising measure for the government. 
>>
>>Allowing the government to get it's hands on too much money is
>>a bad thing(tm) because they'll spend it on silly pork to get themselves
>>re-elected, achieving a social good should be done at the expense of
>>*all* the people who benefit, and at no expense to those who don't.
>>That means the carbon tax is flawed since many of those who benefit
>>from reduced pollution don't pay. 
>
>Who should pay?  Those who get the "benefit" of clean air, or those who
>cause the dirty air.  I think a carbon tax makes the right people pay.
>The problem of govt profiting and eventually depending on it is a real 
>one, though.
>
>>This brings up the idea of a market
>>in tradeable pollution permits. The government could issue a set number
>>of permits each year, at no cost, to every citizen. The citizens could
>>engage in free trade in these permits. This way the government receives
>>no revenue from pollution. Yet the total amount of pollution is reduced
>>to the level of the number of permits. A built in safeguard against
>>overly strict regulation could be a price trigger on permit trades such 
>>that if permit bidding drove the price above a certain limit, the government 
>>would be obligated to issue additional permits.
>
>This has some similarities to regulations in that the level of permissable
>pollution is set by govt which is a questionable situation.  Your
>safeguard would be of questionable value since setting its level would
>be subject to the same pressures as those affecting the number of permits.
>Would there be limits on the "migration" of these permits so that
>regions inhabited by rich polluters wouldn't be dirty?
>
>What if the carbon "tax" were mandated to be spent on projects related
>to carbon pollution only, such as cleanup and retrofiting, health care
>for pollution related expenses.  These schemes are sometimes referred to
>as true cost pricing since they attempt to avoid giving the money to the
>govt.

Why does everyone I've ever seen posting about what to do with tax money
like this insist on spending it on "projects"?

Here's my answer to the problem: you collect the "carbon tax", just as
proposed.  The tax is directly proportional to the mass of various types
of emissions you're interested in, with different rates on different
compounds.  Each rate is directly proportional to the amount of damage
the given compound is expected to do on a per-mass-unit basis.  You change
the rates as you learn more about the compounds and their effects.

Then you redistribute what you collected among those you collected it from,
with the amount a given entity receives being inversely proportional to the
amount that was collected.  Of course, something has to be done about those
that are producing zero pollution but that would not be doing so if it
weren't for the incentive...


That makes this a zero-sum game from the standpoint of the tax, but the
effect is to discourage carbon compound emissions.  It puts everyone
who is being taxed in competition with everyone else who is being taxed
such that those who pollute the least are rewarded the most for that
fact.  In one simple process, it provides both negative *and* positive
incentive, both of which are directed towards the goal in question:
reducing carbon emissions.

When the average emissions level is such that the tax/redistribution
scheme is no longer sufficient to yield the improvements you want, you
increase the tax rates and the cycle starts all over again.


Aside from the fact that it makes way too much sense for a government to
do something like this, what are the problems with this scheme?

>		dingo in boulder	(dean@vexcel.com)


-- 
				Kevin Brown

			    kevin@nuchat.sccsi.com
			    kevin@taronga.taronga.com
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