Posts by Moz
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
I'm not so much annoyed as confused. You're bringing up stuff from points I thought were clear to both of us, with entirely new approaches.
scale of centuries rather than financial years or electoral cycles. See, in all honesty, I don’t ever remember mentioning any such thing.
Again, two tracks:
Physically, I thought that the long timescale was the whole point behind taxing everything as CO2 rather than having separate rates for all the different gases of concern, specifically methane? I thought you were arguing that since CH4 and CO2 have one carbon each, they pay the same tax. Or at least you seemed horribly confused as to how they could work differently in the short term when over a few decades the CH4 decays to CO2 and they become identical. That was where I got lost in working out what timescale you cared about, because that matters a lot.
Politically, you're clearly working on a timescale where taking a few extra years to talk before starting to act is acceptable. Otherwise this proposal would start from where we are today, not from scratch, and it would be concrete and largely political rather than abstract.
If this was 1970, you'd be kinda right and we did have a couple of decades to get our shit together. But it's 2016, we passed 1.5 degrees this year, and you don't seem bothered that the difference between you and Key on this issue is that no-one believes his delays are intended to solve the problem. You're still "if we work through the details ... we could eventually transition to a better system"... that's decades, David, not this year.
I don’t see that the flow of embodied dirty energy across borders has to be evaluated via a tariff.
I dunno, that was the term I used to summarise "charge the importer at the border". I'm not a sophisticated user of the language of international trade negotiations. My experience is mostly from turning up to the post office and being told I have to pay money before I get my parcel.
It would be a brilliant stroke of engineering if you could end-run any political problems with a tariff by calling it a consumption tax, but this is the first time you've bought it up, when I would have expected it to be the main point.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Moz,
Which leads me to: the political problem.
The reason we exclude farming and a whole pile of other emissions is not technical, it's political. Our government wants not to tax certain parts of the economy, and we can't make them.
Politically the problem with "a carbon tax with tariffs" is that "new tariff" is philosophically unacceptable to most of the powerful international trade and financial institutions, as well as many of the hard right neo-liberal governments in power around the worlld (arguably including NZ). Regardless, NZ may find that part of imposing those tariffs is withdrawing from trade treaties, or compensating every single company that exports to NZ for the cost of the tariff. Or being dragged through ISDS procedures, then paying compensation.
At a broader level, NZ will find itself facing up against global industries when it comes to expanding the carbon tax. Like the problem we have taxing Google or Uber, but with more powerful industries. If you want to tax oil, or airlines, or Chinese exports, you are up against it. We could easily find ourselves like Australia in 1975, or Chile in 1973.
Even at a purely democratic level, climate change has been shown to be an issue people care about, but won't change their vote on. People may even be passionate about the issue, rate it as "most important", but in the privacy of the ballot box they overwhelmingly vote on other issues (to be charitable - the other interpretation is that 80% or 90% of them vote for more climate change). I'm reminded of some vox pops I saw of merkins, asking about their cops murdering black men. The pops agreed that that was bad to terrible, then when asked if they'd vote for change they said nope, no way, those candidates are nutters. Same here - Labour, National, in Oz the Liberals, say "we are sensible people who will do nothing to avoid the climate emergency"... people vote for them anyway. I liken it to Chamberlain before WWII - he sold a comforting message to people who wanted to believe him.
Those are the real obstacles to your tax proposal, any technical issues are so minor they're almost irrelevant.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
Wow, I must suck at explaining this stuff. The border issues are the whole point that I’ve been trying to make
Yes, but that doesn't make your system any different from the existing carbon taxes - it's widely accepted that at some point tariffs will have to be applied to bridge the gap between economies that tax carbon vs ones that don't.
This reply focuses on the technical side:
I was mislead, then, by all the stuff about it being inherently different from a carbon tax because it operates on a scale of centuries rather than financial years or electoral cycles. Which simplifies things, at the cost of making it less effective.
I'm still confused by the apparently important difference between the PGST and a carbon tax when it comes to the point of sale tax calculations. I thought you were taxing inputs directly as a way of avoiding the complex carbon tax calculations at the point of retail sale, which is a strawman argument but I was trying to avoid derailing into that. When a "feature" of your scheme is that it works differently in theory but the same in practice, that's not really worth discussing. But it seems to be important to you.
But if you're happy to summarise your approach as: a carbon tax with border tariffs, then I agree. We should have one.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
carbon tax when applied to dirty energy in New Zealand is that it would increase greenhouse gas emissions for the world as a whole
Yes, as would your system... without the border tariffs that also fix the carbon tax. So the question to answer is: would we be better applying that fix to the existing system, or should we throw it all away and start the process again with the PGST? That's where the "-100 points" thing comes from.
The idea of doing both seems silly to me, but I fear that exporters would be forced to or their would be taxed twice on exports (which may happen anyway, since the point at which tax is applied is different).
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
I would point out that all the other proposals I've seen seem a lot worse...
Except that for all its faults, a carbon tax is widely known and discussed. A whole new approach would both create confusion and give excuses for further delay. As OldNewThing reminds us, new features start with -100 points. They don't just have to be good ideas, they have to be very good, to be worth considering at all.
Also, "no incentive to release fuel" is just wrong. Oil wells only burn it because otherwise it might explode, and the whole fracking industry is built around capturing most of the gas rather than all of it. Leakage from coal mines is so bad that there is a whole sub-industry built around preventing methane building up and suffocating or detonating miners. The methane doesn't stop existing in coal seams when you open cut mine them, it just becomes easier to ignore. Also, harder to quantify, especially when you're asking an industry to collect hard-to-quantify numbers in order to tax them on the numbers... expect them to systematically bias low.
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I suppose the core problem is that you use "averaged over time" rather than naming a period, so it's not clear whether you mean over the next thousand years or million years. You've ruled out anything much under a century, though. Your ranges are inappropriate, IMO, since the solutions we need have to start now and operate over at most decades.
In terms of trying to avoid the worst of the effects of AGW, 1.5 degrees is starting to look too generous (just 1.5 degrees in the air is looking scary), and likely we should be aiming for less than one. But current policies are premised on long-term warming of 5-10 degrees, with a goal of 3-5 degrees in the immediate future (10-20 electoral cycles). While it's clear to me at least that somewhere in that range technological society becomes impossible, it's not clear where. I vote not to carry out the experiment. Unfortunately the overwhelming majority vote to give it a go. Which raises the question of whether people who will be dead soon should even be allowed to vote on issues like this. The evidence suggests not. Perhaps voting on climate policy should be restricted to those likely to live more than another 50 years?
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
It’s illegal in New Zealand, of course, to release synthetic refrigerants into the atmosphere, so that’s not an issue that needs to be covered by my demonstration proposal
No, but it does need a container deposit levy style system to make sure that there's no systematic "accidental" release (at the dump, if nowhere else). That's where refusing to have tax refunds for destruction makes the system more complex, not less.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
The methane emitted at the landfill, for example, would be charged on a carbon-dioxide-equivalent basis
The reciprocal problem I was using as an example was the one where companies were paid for destroying a gas, but not charged for creating it. Profit!
The PGST tax has the problem that if a process creates a GHG they're charged for that, but there is no way to recover that tax if the gas is later destroyed. So with the landfill, they pay for the methane production, but if they sell that methane to someone who burns it, there is no tax refund for the methane but there is tax on the CO2 produced by burning. There are also nasty edge cases along similar lines (I assume that other intermediate products that are consumed during production are not taxed, for example, unless they are sold or shipped during production. It gets very complex).
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The idea of using forests for carbon sequestration seems like a wholly separate issue
Yes, once you rule negative emissions out they are. You also rule out embodied energy as sequestration, which makes some substitutions difficult (plantation vs old growth forest, they're identical to you)
I think I'm struggling with your time scales. To me, it doesn't matter whether, say, the 400 year old trees we're burning are swamp kauri (PGST taxable) or standing timber (not taxable), they both burn to CO2 and that's what we care about. But to you, one 400 years is geologic time which matters, the other 400 years is just normal carbon cycling so can be ignored.
Part of the issue is that politically, geologic time does not exist, and any apparent problem that can be deferred to the next electoral cycle can be solved that way. So there's a clash between "we must make this a political problem right now today immediately" and the engineer-speak of "in the long term". Politically "the long term" is the budget estimates that stretch way off into the far distant future... sometimes as far as 10 years. In that 10 year context, methane emitted now is permanent.
The engineering problem we have is that we don't have a socipolitical system capable of dealing with anything much beyond 10 years reliably, but we engineers are good at producing systems that require active management over much (much, much) longer timescales. It's not a "bah, puny humans" situation.
This is why I prefer to express everything in electoral cycles, and keep trying to emphasise that politicians count like dogs "one election, two election... thre? ... lots and lots of elections".
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The PGST you’d pay on the tree would mainly consist of
Right, so in this view there is no energy storage in the tree per se, so there's no negative tax applied for planting trees or any other carbon-negative activity. That makes the system much simpler, but it makes negative emissions a separate problem. Since it looks as though we definitely need those, that's kind of an important lapse (I am deliberately not using the future tense here).
I'm also concerned that transformation isn't apparently considered. If I capture CO2 and turn it into methane, I pay PGST on the energy used to do that, but not on the net warming potential in the gas produced. This is much more of an issue if I make a refrigerant that is stable and a more effective GHG than methane... which is another "loophole" in the current rules that was being exploited by some companies. I think and hope it's been shut down.