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[smjjames]

;-;

my thread's real and important ;-;

Couldn't find it, honest. Tried to use the search, but it broke when I tried to go to the second page of results.

[smjjames]

;-;

my thread's real and important ;-;

Couldn't find it, honest. Tried to use the search, but it broke when I tried to go to the second page of results.

I think he's talking about the Canadian Politics thread.
Also, the search was broken for me too earlier today, but I didn't put two and two together until now.

TO THE BUG-THREAD!

I knew he meant the Canadian politics thread, yeah. Search results were blanking out when I tried to go to the second page.

[PTTG??]

Yeah, taxing CO2 is stupid, and sets a bad precedent (the whole "being taxed on the right to exhale" thing will never stop bothering me) but regulating actual pollution (i.e. shit which isn't a critical component of the biosphere, and especially shit which actually harms the biosphere) is very important.

See, this is how easy it is to get wrapped up in misinformation. Nobody wants to tax human exhalation. Even if it were somehow monitored and taxed exactly the same as any other CO2 source, a given human metabolism produces only ~0.11 ton of CO2 per year. The average individual car produces 6 tons of CO2 per year.

At $0.04 per ton, that means you'd pay $0.12 for your car, and an additional $0.00 for your own personal CO2 emissions. But that's besides the point; CO2 taxes are not, and never were, about taxing individual humans for breathing. It's been about preventing corporations from using the air that is rightly yours.

It just plain makes sense. Imagine you live in an apartment building and your upstairs neighbor's toilet is broken, so he shits out the window and onto your patio. If you ask him why, he might say "hey, fixing toilets costs money, but this is free." Maybe if it wasn't free, he'd get his toilet fixed.

[Reelya]

Taxing CO2 emissions actually has the indirect concequence of causing companies to develop ways to pollute less.

Also, you can invest the tax raised in pollution reduction technology. And grant money is very competitive - therefore free market mechanisms play a part in research grants, increasing efficiency and tending to weed out the weaker proposals. Whereas if you look at industry's R&D priorities, it's not a "free market of ideas" at all - they invest mostly in special-interests research that props up some other aspect of their business, regardless of the value to the economy as a whole.

The counter-argument is that who knows better than polluting industry how to allocate research dollars and clean up the mess they made. But by that logic, toddlers must be the world's greatest cleaners. My view is that if your industry made a mess that's proof that you are not able to clean up after yourself. That's like saying if you leave a toddler sitting in their own shit long enough they'll invent diapers for themselves ... Any day now.

[smjjames]

The 'CO2 tax' thing could probably be relabelled as 'carbon emissions tax' or something that specifies what it's actually taxing because just saying CO2 is nonspecific as to what you're taxing. Nobody really thinks of breathing as an emission*, so, that could work.

*In the most technical definition, you are emissioning, but that's not how we generally think of breathing out, we don't call breathing out emissioning, we call it exhalation.

[Shadowlord]

PTTG, I think that was sarcasm on shadowlords part.

You meant Max, right?

[smjjames]

PTTG, I think that was sarcasm on shadowlords part.

You meant Max, right?

Not sure if Max was actually being sarcastic, but I realized you were responding to Max and deleted that part.

[Shadowlord]

PTTG, I think that was sarcasm on shadowlords part.

You meant Max, right?

Not sure if Max was actually being sarcastic, but I realized you were responding to Max and deleted that part.

Gotcha. I was too quick with the quoting, heh.

[scriver]

Isn't it from Scandinavia And The World?

That is a pretty good indication that a joke isn't funny.

[Rolan7]

Counterpoint:  It makes fun of our nation.
Therefore it's funny to the rest of the world regardless of anything else

Bitterness aside, it's also pretty funny.

[Max™]

Yeah, taxing CO2 is stupid, and sets a bad precedent (the whole "being taxed on the right to exhale" thing will never stop bothering me) but regulating actual pollution (i.e. shit which isn't a critical component of the biosphere, and especially shit which actually harms the biosphere) is very important.

See, this is how easy it is to get wrapped up in misinformation.

What I said has nothing to do with misinformation.

Also:

Metabolic  CO2 release  can  only  augment  as  population size increases in the future.  This is a component of the CO2 flux that must be recognized in future analyses of global CO2 dynamics and that must be considered to represents a component of the perturbed C cycle,  as human population has increased – and will continue to increase – greatly since pre-
industrial time.  Yet, the direct and indirect metabolic CO2 emissions by humans is not considered explicitly in the scenarios  conducted  by  the  IPCC  (2001),  and  is  not  incorporated,  therefore,  into  current  strategies  to  mitigate  the  climatic consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.

What are current strategies again? Taxes and such? Isn't that kinda pointing out how exhaled CO2 isn't currently considered, and in the next paragraph doesn't it suggest that it might be something to look at?

At $0.04 per ton, that means you'd pay $0.12 for your car, and an additional $0.00 for your own personal CO2 emissions. But that's besides the point; CO2 taxes are not, and never were, about taxing individual humans for breathing. It's been about preventing corporations from using the air that is rightly yours.

Weeeell, more about trying to force certain things to happen, even assuming CO2 is actually worth going all chicken little over, taxing it doesn't prevent emissions, it just raises the cost of anything associated with it. Myself, I don't expect an entity driven by profit maximization to do something for "the good of humanity" and I don't expect them to just suck it up and pay some additional cost without doing everything possible to divert or defer or otherwise get around it as a profit reduction.

More to the point: where on Earth did you get those numbers?

If a carbon tax is in place, as I recall there's usually the argument about the future cost of that ton being emitted and whatnot, with the idea being that the tax and future cost would be linked... let's check!

Yup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax#Social_cost_of_carbon

According to economic theory, if SCC estimates were complete and markets perfect, a carbon tax should be set equal to the SCC. Emission permits would also have a value equal to the SCC. In reality, however, markets are not perfect, and SCC estimates are not complete (Yohe et al.., 2007:823).

The values given there range from $10 to $100+ per ton(ne) for the most part, actual existing carbon taxes are in that range too, mostly in the $10~60 range from a look around different sites. So it would be $60~360 for your average car, and $1.10~$6.60 for you, plus a buck or so for each family member/maybe pets/etc.

Is $1~$7 a year a problem to you? It is to me, not the amount, but the fact that I could not in good conscience accept the rightness of paying for the right to breathe out, though I am curious what would happen in this hypothetical if you were charged on this count.

Yeah, I know that human exhalation isn't a huge amount, and it would be crazy to think any government would seriously push to tax all CO2 emissions... still not exactly something I'm going to be comfortable with, too many fucked up sci-fi stories include ideas along those lines to just kick it out of my head.

It just plain makes sense. Imagine you live in an apartment building and your upstairs neighbor's toilet is broken, so he shits out the window and onto your patio. If you ask him why, he might say "hey, fixing toilets costs money, but this is free." Maybe if it wasn't free, he'd get his toilet fixed.

Uh, I would expect that there are all sorts of civil and legal remedies available in this situation, but I'm not going to google "what can I do if my neighbor shit on my porch" to find out.

The real problem is that you're living downstairs from a horse trying to disguise itself as a really rude human or something, the noise must be terrible, clopping around up there.

[PanH]

Also:

Metabolic  CO2 release  can  only  augment  as  population size increases in the future.  This is a component of the CO2 flux that must be recognized in future analyses of global CO2 dynamics and that must be considered to represents a component of the perturbed C cycle,  as human population has increased – and will continue to increase – greatly since pre-
industrial time.  Yet, the direct and indirect metabolic CO2 emissions by humans is not considered explicitly in the scenarios  conducted  by  the  IPCC  (2001),  and  is  not  incorporated,  therefore,  into  current  strategies  to  mitigate  the  climatic consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.

What are current strategies again? Taxes and such? Isn't that kinda pointing out how exhaled CO2 isn't currently considered, and in the next paragraph doesn't it suggest that it might be something to look at?

So what ? The sacred right to breathe is so holy that it's taboo and we shouldn't even consider discussing it ?
Tbh, the 2nd paragraph is not even saying "we should discuss it" but rather "it is not discussed currently".

Anyway, as far as I'm aware, carbon tax is intended only as a corporate tax for now. You wouldn't be paying for exhaling, but for buying products that pollute (as is the cases for other pigovians taxes like cigarettes, you pay for negative externalities).

[Reelya]

There's a reason we don't look at human CO2. Because human-exhaled CO2 comes from CO2 absorbed by plants. Therefore it doesn't matter how much one person exhales, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere overall isn't going to grow.

Fossil fuels emissions are different, as well as being much higher than the amount you exhale. Since they come from sequestered sources, it increases the total carbon in the biosphere. Natural or animal-respiration CO2 doesn't lead to long-term changes in CO2 concentrations, only artificially adding it (fossil fuels) does that.

[DJ]

Methane is a whole different beast, though, so we should definitely tax farts.

[Phmcw]

Carbon tax is supposed to tax fossil fuels anyway. There is no point in taxing human breath since the carbon in question is taken from the athmosphere by plant and the process is carbon neutral in the end (carbon emission cause by vehicles used to produce and transport the food are already taxed).