This is a fantasy and completely regressive. How do you plan on dealing with the ensuing riots? Housing supply doesn't appear overnight, especially in the US where building, worker safety and environmental standards slow the process down to a crawl. Most of the new urban housing is 4 story wood construction because of the above reason, not nearly the density needed to eliminate cars without massive mixed rezoning efforts that are politically unfeasible or massive mass transit infrastructure investments that would also suffer the same issues as higher density housing developments listed above, also throw into the mix that there is a cultural aversion to mass transit in the US that won't likely get resolved in time to fight climate change effectively.
You will be displacing 10s if not 100s of millions of people with such a policy, you need a place for them to go if you don't want severe civil unrest.
I would implement it with a cash rebate to everyone in America for the average number of gallons used by an American in a year * $10 and call it the "green rebate" or something like that and make it clear that it paid for by a gas/car emissions tax.
Australia tried something similar with a carbon tax a few years ago - not for fuel, but for carbon emissions generally. The policy was very well designed and ensured that lower income earners were compensated for any increase in costs to the extent that they had a net benefit, and in the short time it was operating, was successful at reducing emissions.
Unfortunately for us (and the world) this was too complicated for many Australians to understand and the political right exploited that to tell a scary story about a 'new tax', leading to their election and the removal of the scheme.
While economists (and rational thinkers) generally love carbon pricing schemes, they have been pretty unsuccessful politically because people are generally too stupid to understand them and cynical politicians in bed with the fossil fuel industry are happy to play to that.
Edit: For clarification, if it's the type of rebate typical in the US, that means I get it later and I can't afford the fuel now. If it's a rebate that's done at the time of purchase, then it wouldn't seem to make much difference, on average.
Let's say it's annual (or if they have the capacity, monthly) and paid at the start of the passage of the law, so you get the money first before the gas price increase.
It's not done at time of purchase because it is not a gas subsidy.
This is a good solution, but it needs to come with some significant cash transfers for people most immediately harmed (e.g. via universal basic income), and with a significant public commitment to build affordable walkable neighborhoods with world-class public transit.
This assumes that people have a choice in their daily commutes. Unfortunately the majority do not, if gas went to 30 dollars a gallon many would be forced to sleep in cars/tents closer to the office.
Starbucks won’t cover 400 dollar daily commutes for baristas in downtown SF.
I wonder if there is anything we can do to affect those who do have a choice. I know a lot of people who drive and are perfectly able to take public transport or live closer but they chose to live a far way away and drive because they can afford it.
The only solution IMO is urban planning. If cities and towns are designed for cars, then people will drive. If they are designed for feet or bikes they will use those. If you look at the layout of popular North American towns built prior to the 1800s you'll see very few cars even venturing into town.
Cars are also one of the few greenhouse emissions sources which we have a plausible market driven path to eliminate over the next 2 decades via battery electric vehicles.
The problem is people who have the ability to move closer to work or who have a working PT system still choose to drive because they can afford to because they value not sitting next to a stranger above protecting the environment.
We need good planning but then we also need to factor in the environmental costs of driving to eliminate it.
I own a car, but live on an inner city rail line. I drove 9000 miles in 2 years, which was exclusively done for nature trips on weekends.
In my case driving would increase my commute time by about 20 minutes due to traffic. My city has no appetite for improving driving options or reducing congestion through the addition of new roads.
Because driving is unsustainable and destroying the planet. It can not be allowed to continue in its current form so the easiest option would be to push people away from it when they are able to.
Better options need money, unfortunately. And barring a complete change in how the US works [1], that money isn’t there at a federal level. That leaves cities with no other option than to pay for a better option on their own — by raising taxes (e.g. congestion pricing, gas taxes, tolled roads), which also has the side effect of disincentivizing driving
[1] the infrastructure bill that’s looking to pass, while it gives much needed funding to public transit, still centers car-centric planning, and nothing paradigm-shifting (e.g. a comprehensive regional high speed rail network, a dedicated bus line on every street, a protected bike lane on every arterial) will likely come from it.
If I say "I will give you $20 to not drive" or "I will take $20 from you if you drive", the only thing that really matters is that there is a $20 price differential between two actions so you will be at a $20 disadvantage to do the current thing regardless of how you word it.
Money and wealth is relative so the actual final amount doesn't matter as much as how much you have compared to the average person.
7.5% or so of total greenhouse gases isn't destroying the planet, but it's not helping either. EV's going to take this to about 1% this in about 10 years.
The number of electric cars sold in 2020 was ~250k.
The average age of a car in the US is 12 years.
If electric car sales quadruple each year until they reach the total number of cars sold in the US (around 16 million cars per year), it will take at least 18 years to replace all the combustion engine cars on the road.
And this is wildly optimistic, electric cars are too few and too expensive, even as second hard cars, for the general population. I estimate that they'll reach a sort of break-even point with combustion engine cars around 2025 or so. So you can probably add 3-4 more years to those 18 I counted. So at least 20 years to have a mass replacement of existing cars on the road.
And in the rest of the world it's even worse. The rest of the world is poorer, has lower disposable income, cars are around for longer, and electric car sales are ramping up even slower.
I'd argue installing more solar panels is way more important than EV's. It's way cheaper, offers way better ROI (EV TCO are just barely cheaper than gas, especially without gov incentives) and helps with main problem - power generation. Sure it's boring af, regulated, politicised (Uighur solar) and inconvenienced in every possible matter...
I think both are needed. Nothing on its own will work and we need to be doing everything that we can at the same time right now. The current models are showing if we make every improvement we can right now we are only just barely scraping by. There is no time to do everything sequentially.
Well, it would actually be a good start and maybe push Americans to smaller and more efficient cars. The average price of gasoline is ~$7 in Europe, in poorer countries, and people seem to make do.
But I doubt the average American will give up the quality of life of owning a car that probably weighs have half a ton more than the average European car.
Maybe for some occupations in some cities. No way I could carry all the tools I need with me on a bus that rarely takes me within walking distance to the job site in the cities I live near, if I still lived in one of them.
Sure, for some jobs you will need a car and in that case you bump your prices to match. Since everyone doing this job is hit with the same fee, no one is disadvantaged. While if you work an office job or similar, you can get ahead by not driving and eventually everyone capable of not driving will not drive.
The actual price of fuel does not matter much, only the price you are paying relative to others with the same job title.
It works better for the "poor" people if these taxes/incomes go towards immediate public transit. And work closer to homes (it raises the visible costs of restrictive zoning).
The cost of owning, operating, and insuring a vehicle is a pretty high tax.
Funny thing about public transit too, if you build transit to businesses in walkable communities you don't just help the poor.
All this does is siphon money from people, and increase people's desperation.
It's not like you can just choose to not work anymore. If your job is a long commute away that's money you have to spend no matter what on transport.
There often aren't other options. Most transit in North America sucks inside cities and doesn't serve outlying areas very well at all.
Long commutes are an effect of companies centralizing in big urban areas. They don't care how long it takes their workers to get to the office as long as they don't have to pay for it.
Maybe make companies responsible for their employees gas, insurance, and commute times, you might see satellite offices spring up all over the place in more rural areas so their workforce has smaller commute times.
If a goal of transit is to reduce emissions from single occupancy vehicles commuting to and from work, then it seems to me that it should service outlying areas because those people are commuting too, and further
They need workers, so either they pay workers more to make it worth commuting, or move location to be nearer to workers. Or go remote.
People are not going to lose money to go to work.
That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder.
Maximizing the speed of implementing renewable energy that can power EV's, and scaling EV production to more affordable levels are much less likely to stomp on the poor. And unlike trying to raise gas prices to $30 it's actually realistic from a social/political standpoint, especially since we're already on that path, just not as fast as we could be.
This is not a simple problem, and it's exceedingly rare that a complex problem has such a simple solution as this. Even the renewable/EV combo has inumerable variables behind it that have taken decades to get us to the point we're at now.
> That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder.
Yes, the purpose would be to reduce consumption of basically all things, since cheap fossil fuels are the basis of manufacturing and transporting almost all things. Hitting people hard would be a necessary effect of reducing carbon emissions, although wealth transfers from the rich to poor via taxation can modulate how much the poor are hit relative to the rich.
> That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder.
In the short term, but it may incentivize more local production chains in the future. A large part of the reason food is grown in such large, factory farm setting is because transport is a fraction of the cost of the food itself. As you say it's a complex problem and there aren't any simple solutions.
It would return food to local grown again. Making it no longer the cheapest option to ship food from the other side of the planet rather than growing in the same state.
Local isn't available everywhere in the quantities needed to feed large local (city) populations. That might change over a long enough period of time, but waiting for market forces to adjust the food supply to to closest locations available would leave a lot more poor and hungry people in the meantime.
If we're going to tinker with things in that way, it's better to do it on the side of pushing renewables and EV's as fast as possible. Until then, things like raising a gas tax are regressive, falling significantly harder on people least able to bear the extra burden.
Then we shall continue on the road we have been on, consuming enough fossil fuels to affect climate change. Hence the conclusion one comes to is to live it up while we can.
That's a false dichotomy. It's not "raise fuel prices 5x to 10x or fail". We should be working on a constellation of initiatives that move things forward but without leaving significant chunks of people behind.
If the bottom 25% of the economic ladder get stomped on and pushed into poverty (when not already there) how does that help? It will set things back: Because the people getting stomped, going hungry, working 2 jobs and 60hours a week-- they're not going to sit back and suffer in silence as things get worse. The backlash would be enormous and political pressure insurmountable.
We need solutions that account for the people impacted by them or we'll get nowhere. Throwing your hands up and saying Fine, "live is up while we can" because a simple solution doesn't solve a complex problem is defeatist. And stops you-- likely a very smart person-- from contributing to the dialog of how to solve an extraordinarily complex problem and implementing some of those countless big and little things we can do to keep moving forward.
great way to make the poors poorer and make poors pay for a problem that richer folks tend to create. This would effectively create a tax on the poor, as poors are the ones that live further away the pockets of work.
You’re missing the point. Fossil fuel usages is largely paid for by the poor. Gas to go to work, gas to transport food and cheap plastic goods to Walmart, etc. Poor people don’t have a choice in how they shop or how far away they live from their job, yet they are the ones paying the fuel tax whether it be by buying gas directly or by paying higher prices at Walmart.
Raising fuel prices just fucks over the poor, and transfers wealth to the owners of the businesses they shop at who keep the same margin of a bigger pie.
One is excess fossil fuel consumption, causing people to be able to live further away then they should be if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It does not matter how rich the person consuming them is, total consumption needs to go down.
A separate problem is a rich person being able to consume far more fossil fuels than a poor person. This is solved by taking from the rich person and giving to the poor person.
There is no “fucking over”. Based on the amount that fossil fuel consumption needs to be reduced, everyone will need to feel pain while cities are rezoned, people’s expectations of how much space they have are changed, and hence, politically, there will never be a solution to fossil fuel usage without the advent of technology that replaces it.
The market didn't find an efficient solution to this problem, so you want to use non-market forces to influence the market and then double down on relying on the market to find an efficient solution again?
How much do we have to sacrifice to the market before we'll admit that maybe we should consider other solutions?
"The market" only cares about things that are factored in to prices. External costs like the environment are currently not factored in so the market will never optimize for them.
If you simply set a carbon tax, overnight the whole market puts a huge effort in to lowering their environmental damage because now that damage has a number next to it and can be optimized for.
The housing stock is what it is because of low fossil fuel prices. Most families prefer detached single family homes with two car driveways and quarter acre lots, away from all the homeless and in the most exclusive school districts they can afford.
Do you think this is politically viable, particularly in the US, which has a lot of open space and long commutes? Are you going to apply this tax to rural communities and farmers as well?
Of course not. Reducing carbon emissions and avoiding climate change has never been viable, because it lowers people’s quality of life now for the benefit of people not alive now (or in decades past).
The only viable solution within the timeframe humans had was to reduce fossil fuel consumption in total, from some combination of reducing per capita consumption and reducing population itself.
However, it is a prisoner’s dilemma, and there was never going to be unity in reducing everyone’s consumption and hence quality of life, especially not from the 80% of up and coming people around the world who are looking forward to enjoying life like the upper 20% have been.
