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Tax the fuel. Gasoline now has a $X/gallon tax, as does propane, as does coal, whatever.

What is the difficulty with that?

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Not clear what is meant here. Does ethanol from corn count? Methane from waste dumps? Gray hydrogen? Wood pellets? Ammonia?

Electricity from unclear source?

Human ingenuity is infinite. It is not enough to enact simple rules, people will just produce electricity with hydrogen and claim it green if it will make them profit. If it will help them evade carbon tax. Nevermind that hydrogen came from some extremely polluting process involving damaging our planet atmosphere and everyone's health.

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Well, you don't need to tax the ethanol from corn or methane from waste dumps or wood pellets, or ammonia itself. You would tax the oil/gas/coal that came out of the ground that was used to fertilize the corn, process the corn, transport the corn, and distill the ethanol (otherwise it's double taxation). You don't need to tax the wood pellets or the stove they're burned in, or the electricity, just the carbon that is burned to make and transport them. So this is largely irrelevant.

A better question would be for imported items and services. How do you prevent tax shifting from carbon emission havens, which is no different from financial tax havens now. You tax them at entry using the most beautiful word, "tariffs". If an importing country doesn't tax carbon or carbon tariff their imports then you tariff them. Interestingly, it would then be a higher tariff for air transport than shipping. Where it actually get complicated is services, which people really don't like taxing. But if I run a LLM datacenter on coal in china or make bitcoin burning middle east oil, or consult on green projects on Indonesian gas those should be tariffed as well, and that's more difficult.

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It’s extremely regressive. You’d need to also give a rebate based on income level.
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Give everybody $1000 (or whatever) to offset that. Ends up being neutral for some folks, a net benefit to the poor, and a net cost to the rich. This is already how lots of jurisdictions handle regressive taxes.
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That’s the excuse that is used for agriculture. They sell a vision of a Fisher Price toy farm, but make policy for giant Midwest farms.

The proverbial blue collar truck owner is already screwed. Random surburban dude should be paying through the nose for his F-250. Create demand for fuel efficiency, and you’ll have cars like my dad’s 1993 Escort Wagon, that got 45mpg.

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Tax the poor for carbon emission. They'll adjust. People will walk, bike, take the bus, car pool, and buy used hybrids instead of mustangs.

PS, regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical.

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> regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical

Turns out you are wrong.

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Life-style should never be subsidized. God forbid that someone feels the repercussions of their life-style, which is the only feedback mechanism that will ever cause change.

My moral system will stop global warming and save the planet. Your moral system will destroy the planet and kill billions. Everyone needs to be responsible, including the poor. Tough.

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You don’t know anything about my moral system. I know that you declared all regressive use taxes in all cases as morally right.

But a system that makes it so you must drive an ICE vehicle to participate in the economy, makes the price of food directly indexed to gasoline costs and then provides tax breaks to the rich who can afford to buy new electric vehicles while increasing the taxes on the poor who can’t is not 100% morally right.

There are lots of ways to introduce a gas tax that are ethically sound but they aren’t simple and the idea that _any_ use tax is morally just is idiotic.

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