Asklemmy

43936 readers

516 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Would you support your country joining an 'open invite' Free Trade Agreement with the only stipulation being the implementation of a Carbon Tax? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago by Yondoza to c/[email protected]

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The way I see it, the major barrier to countries implementing carbon taxes is the fear their economic competitors won't do the same, therefore hindering their economic growth needlessly. A valid concern.

Why don't some nations build an 'opt in' style Free Trade Agreement that allows any country to join as long as they prove they have implemented and enforced a carbon tax. Those countries then have high financial incentives to only trade within the 'carbon tax block' and any country outside is at a serious trade disadvantage.

I've (quickly) looked and have not found anything like this proposed (which is frankly crazy).

Would you support your country jumping into this FTA?

What are the unforeseen downsides or objections to a plan like this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How? Are you going to put ambulances out of service because they burn gas? I'm guessing not, so there's one exception. Eventually you'll have so unmanageably many exceptions you'll wish you had just used a tax to encourage the transition.

[–] Yondoza 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Constructing economic incentives is generally more effective at driving desired actions than completely disallowing things. It also allows for 'crowd sourcing' the decision making process for what is low hanging fruit and what is difficult or 'expensive' things to change.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Exactly. Like, you could theoretically make the call for every single use case as the government, but in practice that's really hard and hasn't ever worked out well. I have as much of a bone to pick with our economic system as the next Lemming, but markets are actually very good at adequately meeting (effective) demand without incurring unnecessary cost.