Comment by gzread
15 hours ago
An interesting policy proposal is negative tax. Basically take the carbon cap, divide by the number of people, and give the equivalent carbon tax price to each person. A person who uses exactly average carbon sees no change, while a person who uses less gets a tax rebate, and a person who uses more pays more. You can charge it at the source, tariffing oil by its carbon content and then reducing taxes by that amount for everyone.
Again - poor people, which:
- still drive old cars with lots of CO2 emissions
- live far away from their workplace
- probably have a poorly isolated home with oil or gas heating
will be the ones with higher than average emissions. And the rich people who do will just shrug at this minor extra expense. I feel like this is not mentioned enough in discussions (probably because wealth disparity is such a touchy subject) but your ability to reduce your carbon footprint is also directly tied to your wealth.
Rich people, even with electric cars and solar panels, are responsible for far greater emissions than poor people even with their old beaters and longer commutes. Far, far greater.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/this-study-calculated-t...
The average would also include rich people - if rich people are using far above average and poor people are using slightly above average, who's below average?