this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Carbon taxes are a red herring. It just becomes a cost of doing business that is passed onto the consumer. Carbon taxes just legitimize pollution if you can afford to pay the fines.
Im not sure what you are talking about, carbon taxes are one of the best ways to mitigate co2 emissions.
If two producers produce the same good, but one of them emits less co2, that one will have higher profit margins.
This is just one of the levers to nudge industries (who, let’s be real, are the main polluters) towards cleaner operations, and as far as I am informed, it’s one of the most effective ways.
So this is good news. It’s good. We have to celebrate that, too, lest we all suffer from doomerism. Can more be done? Yes, there is always more to be done.
But is this a good, important step?
Definitely.
One of the issues with carbon credits is they can be bought and sold. So if my company is more efficient, they can sell their remaining carbon credits to some other company which ends up polluting more.
Carbon credits are basically a fine for polluting. If you can pay the fine, it’s business as usual.
Which makes the environmentaly friendly company more profitable - encouraging others to do the same.
As more and more companies do this, the number of credits can be reduced to increase their price and keep the total emissions on a downward trend.
Yeah a lot of Tesla's revenue is selling carbon credits because their processes are less polluting. They make ungodly amounts of money by doing this.