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Re: [Phys-L] Would a Carbon Tax Save Life on Planet Earth?



I heard Hansen speak at a recent AAPT conference. As I remember it, his
carbon tax proposal is that the carbon taxes (or fees, or whatever you want
to call them) would be levied at the wellhead/minehead, to represent at
least roughly the public costs of the use fossil fuels, and that 100% of
these taxes would be sent to citizens, who could use these payments any way
they choose, including paying the higher prices for fossil fuels caused by
these fees. But the key point is that citizens could choose to use the
payments to buy something other than fossil fuels, stimulated by the higher
(and slowly rising) prices of fossil fuels.

In other words, it's an attempt to make the price of fossil fuels represent
the real costs of fossil fuels, but done in a way that consumers would not
in fact have to pay more for fossil fuels yet would be encouraged to avoid
fossil fuels.

I read his book on the subject and it did seem to me that this is a much
more effective way to deal with the fossil fuel problem than the
cap-and-trade scheme, which he argues is overly complicated and does not
provide the right incentives for people to seek alternatives to fossil
fuel.

Bruce