Comments on: China Moving Toward Price on Carbon?

By: Steve Hill

Steve Hill — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:00:45 +0000

Education should be used to make individuals, corporations and businesses to act – not just knowledge of climate change but education on how climate change is and will impact on their lives.
Health, their homes and ultimately their money will be damaged if action isn’t taken, in fact all these are happening now.
If people realised what they could do for free and what technology they could implement to save energy and hence money they would be become very energy efficient and as a result reduce their carbon emissions.

By: Hal

Hal — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:22:46 +0000

I always wonder where they come up with these numbers. $27-41 per ton of CO2? Maybe that’s reasonable. Mankiw in the post below this one is quoted as wanting $1/gallon of gas, which would be $100/tCO2, two to three times higher than this group wants. How do you decide? And one thing you guys need to face up to, which I raised last month: a true carbon tax is effectively going to fall far more heavily on coal for electricity than gasoline for driving. That’s just the nature of their carbon emissions. $30/tCO2 is only going to be about 30 cents a gallon, which is a typical fluctuation over a few months lately. It’s not likely to significantly change driving behavior. However $30 will double the cost of coal to electrical generators, making an enormous difference to that industry. The economic message behind these figures is that it makes more sense to remediate coal emissions than gasoline. "Of course we should do both", you might want to say, but that’s infantile. The point of a carbon tax, it’s great advantage, is that it shows us what our priorities should be, in terms of where its impact is felt the most. Coal is where the action is on this issue. If you ignore that or try to pretend it isn’t true (adding extra gas taxes like Dingell did) then you’re failing to understand the reasons why carbon taxes are the right solution to the CO2 problem.

By: Ronald

Ronald — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:39:07 +0000

That is an important start. This is a great start from the scientific community. If anything is going to get done on something that is mostly a problem with the warming call that is scientific, the only way to get the general population to move on this is for the scientists to do what they don’t want to do and get into controversial politics.
Even if we get a price on carbon, every country can still move on consumption tax carbon use. We should be replacing sales taxes that tax general products and then only tax fossil fuels with it. The price on carbon will help on countries that want to tax fossil fuel use in industries that are affected with import/export industries. Fossil fuel consumption can still be taxed without the worry of affecting import/exports.