Carbon Tax vs. Cap-and-Trade System

[bedstuy]

You don't need to choose between the two necessarily.

I think cap-and-trade is more efficient, but it can only really apply to stationary sources like refineries, power plants, factories, etc.  Cap and trade works better for them because it creates an incentive to reduce your emissions as much as possible, whereas a tax provides the same incentive to everyone.  The factory that can cut emissions 80% has the same incentives as the factory that can cut emissions 40%, it's just inefficient.

For individuals, taxes are the only option to affect behavior directly.  But, I wouldn't have a strict carbon tax.  I would have something like an environmental externality tax on things like gasoline, electricity from coal plants, cars, etc which factor in all greenhouse gases and some measure of the pollution they cause. 

[bedstuy]

Cap and trade was basically 'here little companies and poor but well intentioned environmentally conscious individuals...hand all your money to people like Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore who already have a lot!'

They should be in jail...both of them.

Neither...but if you must...just slap a fracking tax on it.  No more of this free market bullsh**t.  Every time its just a transfer of wealth upwards with the blessings of the 'left'.  Its absolutely disgusting.

Do you know what cap-and-trade is though? 

What about the NO_x cap-and-trade program?  Do you think we should tax NO_x and SO₂ instead?  What about mercury?  Should companies be able to dump mercury into the atmosphere as long as they pay a tax? 

[bedstuy]

Cap and trade was basically 'here little companies and poor but well intentioned environmentally conscious individuals...hand all your money to people like Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore who already have a lot!'

They should be in jail...both of them.

Neither...but if you must...just slap a fracking tax on it.  No more of this free market bullsh**t.  Every time its just a transfer of wealth upwards with the blessings of the 'left'.  Its absolutely disgusting.

Do you know what cap-and-trade is though? 

What about the NO_x cap-and-trade program?  Do you think we should tax NO_x and SO₂ instead?  What about mercury?  Should companies be able to dump mercury into the atmosphere as long as they pay a tax? 

I think trying the idea with co2 would need a lot better planning and oversight than the attempts so far, which have been failures that enriched a few people.

You think SO₂ and NO_x trading has been a failure that enriched a specific person?  I don't understand.  That's acknowledged as a huge success and it's administered by the government.

[bedstuy]

Neither will do anything to significantly reduce the amount of carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere.

1) Carbon taxation will either be dodged (employers will relocate overseas or to areas with lax regulatory environments, i.e. the American South), the cost passed onto the consumer, or will be ineffective entirely because other nations won't adopt the same tax because they'd see doing so as pointing them at a competitive disadvantage with the United States.

I think the point of a carbon tax is for it to be passed on to consumers.  You want consumer to factor in the environmental cost of their behavior when they make decisions.  You could also make a carbon tax revenue neutral by lowering other taxes, so I don't see how that's a major problem.

2) Cap and trade will create another economic bubble and will probably cause an economic collapse as speculators buy up pollution credits and sell them off in a haphazard fashion. This tends to happen when you create markets out of thin air (no pun intended), and this would have pretty terrible effects indeed. Also, there's no guarantee of American Capital complying with it, because we have to remember that they're willing to relocate and then ship goods back into the U.S. because those sort of activities are financially advantageous to them.

You can't relocate a power plant out of the United States.  That's mostly what we're talking about.   Most CO₂ emissions are energy production and transportation, not industrial.  The things that are industrial mostly can't be off-shored, or they already would have been.  There are things it still makes sense to produce in America, gasoline, cement, steel.

As for your theory, that's just a bold claim that you created out of thin air, no pun intended.  We have plenty of other trading markets that work pretty well.  Why is this one definitely going to lead to economic collapse?

[bedstuy]

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Why should people who didn't create the crisis pay for it? The only people who should be asked to pay more are those who profit from the destruction of the planet. Not the people who are already having a hard enough time trying to get by.

You want to create incentives based on prices.  Think about it this way, imagine your apartment includes free electricity.  Will you use your air conditioning more in the summer than if you paid for your electric bill?  Of course.  Similarly, the environmental cost should be priced into different goods so people conserve.

It's not a matter of whose fault it is.  And, as for the distributional consequences, why not just replace other taxes with a carbon tax so the majority doesn't pay any more? 

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Because capitalism is inherently unstable and creating yet another market for speculators to speculate in (one not tied to any actual, tangible product, mind you), is a recipe for disaster in and of itself? Have you been asleep for the past decade or so?

Well, that's just silly.  Markets are often the efficient means of allocating goods and capital.  It's a matter of what is the least bad solution.  Markets aren't always perfect, but they're going to be more efficient than government command and control.