The biggest problem with such a tax is that all countries would have to implement it. When the US is accounting for about 15% of global carbon emissions we can’t solve the problem just by reducing our own carbon emission.
In in actual fact, the sooner leader countries like the USA do it the sooner other countries get their act together.
Don't act like this is all or nothing. It's not.
Furthermore, the sooner the USA does it the sooner technologies improve, the sooner other smaller countries are suddenly enabled by said technologies.
That aside whole "we all need to do it" is utter nonsense. No, you don't. Other countries taking advantage of you is still not a socially moral excuse. Mind yourself first thanks.
The US led the world in emission reductions in 2018, meanwhile the EU, Canada, India, and China increased their production significantly. Yet the US gets slammed by the global community
Yes it should. It made it happen because instead of having endless meetings and brainstorming sessions in Lesbos or Johannesburg, the heartless ignoramuses of Texas figured out how to drill for clean energy. What really did the brainstormes accomplish considering the chart presented?
One useful rhetorical side effect is breaking the narrative linking GDP with petrol consumption. Opening people's mind's to the possibility that conservation and switching to renewable won't crater the economy.
Growing is easy when you start from zero, and reducing is easy when you can easily move your production elsewhere. BP statistical review probably have their numbers right, I'm more concern about the message they want to spread. (I do not say that EU/China should be able to increase their emissions, just that the US is not decreasing its consumption therefore it is impossible to decrease emission)
Border adjustments are a well understood policy solution to this issue. Imports from polluting countries are taxed appropriately, and exports to those countries subsidized. From the perspective of anyone inside the nation with the border adjustment, it’s as though the whole world implemented the carbon tax.
the US is pretty big as a whole, compared the EU the difference is as extreme. Also, never allow for the discussion to go by per capita as the seriously distorts the numbers in countries where a great deal of the population does not participate
> The biggest problem with such a tax is that all countries would have to implement it. When the US is accounting for about 15% of global carbon emissions
Hypothetically provinces/countries could be taxed relative to their emissions (albeit this would take some fantasy-like widely agreed upon criteria).
The US has a little over 4% of the world population, yet it's responsible for 15% of carbon emissions [1]. Even if the US is the only country to implement it, it would already make a huge difference.
Or in a more civil way, since it seems we have entered the era of tariffs wars, perhaps countries with carbon taxes should be slapping tariffs on imports from countries with none. Tie the tariff to some metric derived from a country's estimated CO2 emissions, subtracting some amount for % land mass in forests, reforestation efforts, carbon tax rates, deployment of renewables, etc.
It would have negative economic consequences in the short term, I'm sure. But put in place by large importers it would directly motivate emission offenders to not play the game of lowest-common-denominator.
