- Only 57 fossil fuels and cement producers have been responsible for most of the world’s CO2 emissions since 2016, according to the Carbon Majors report by InfluenceMap
- Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, and Coal India were the top three CO2-emitting companies during this period.
- InfluenceMap’s database aims to increase transparency around climate change contributors for legal, academic, campaign, and investor purposes.
Do taxes reduce emissions?
In theory, making the commodity more expensive changes some decisions about how much to use
In theory, the vice tax goes toward mitigating the effects of the vice, or preventive efforts.
So, no. The tax isn’t enough to change behavior nor is the money raised enough to help prevent or mitigate, even if it were targeted to those efforts
The tax isn’t even nearly enough to cover road maintenance, although a little more should help
I might argue that demand for gasoline is relatively inelastic. You can adjust the price quite a bit before people change their consumption habits, simply because transit options are inflexible and relatively small portions of one’s overall budget.
A better alternative might be to invest in mass transit infrastructure - rail, bus, and bike/pedestrian options - that undercut the existing private car market. In cities like Tokyo, London, Moscow, Amsterdam, Shanghai, and NYC, where rail/bus/pedestrian options are abundant and commercial real estate isn’t obligated to accommodate one car per visitor, you have much lower energy consumed per capita and much smaller amounts of waste generated when moving people and material equivalent distance.
We incentivize consumption based on our most cheap and abundant available mode of transit. I might argue that raising gas taxes and funneling that towards new road construction would have the opposite intended effect if your goal was reducing emissions.
That wasn’t my main point. However one of the criticisms of EVs in particular is they don’t pay for road upkeep via gas taxes. While true, gas taxes generally don’t cover maintenance anyway so that’s a weak point. There’s also a minor point that infrastructure that is overloaded or in poor condition does contribute to a variety of sustainability issues, including excess CO2 emissions. It’s definitely not the main point though.
Personally I would want a gas tax mostly targeted to transit or personal mobility but the key point being that it be scheduled to increase every year. Gasoline use is relatively inelastic in that you still need to get places and that may be your only choice, and the gas tax is low enough to not be a decider anyway. However, maybe the threat that it will continue to increase will help drive different decisions for the longer term. This lets us avoid punishing low income people with a large increase, while hopefully having a similar impact on decisions
You could make a very similar argument about 18-wheelers and other super-heavy vehicles. Road erosion scales geometrically to vehicle size, but gas consumption is - at best - linear. So the excess weight of the vehicle is effectively a free rider when you scale up from your Geo Metro to a Hummer.
I mean, shy of a Gas Stalin doing environmental dictatorship shit, I don’t see how this is politically feasible. A gas tax is already fairly regressive. Raising it annually would create a popular outburst with every turn of the ratchet. And you wouldn’t even have the Mega-Corps/Banks on your side, unlike when landlords raise their rents.
Seems like an invitation to riots, not unlike what we’ve seen in Europe and the Middle East.
If oil/fuel/emission is taxed, yes.
It IS taxed. Virtually every state has a gas tax. California has one of the highest gas taxes in the nation, at $.51/gal.
Tax them more. Until burning oil for energy isn’t economically feasible anymore.
Does the tax rate by state influence the energy consumption per capita?
Yeah, US states are a bit too independent imo.
Isn’t that used for building and maintaining the roads?
In part.
They do if they are high enough.
Taxes in theory reduce consumption because the price increases, like the 25% tax on Chinese EVs levied by the U.S. to protect… the fossil fuel industry.
If you want to talk about US fossil fuel protectionism, check out the patient on the nickel metal battery - first used in GE’s EV1 to great success - which was purchased and squatted on by Texaco/Chevron for over twenty years.
Modern regulation is far more about insourcing the production of Lithium Ion batteries (a highly lucrative market for auto manufacturers because of the crazy market ups) than shielding the fossil fuel industries from a technology that’s been widespread globally for over a decade.
No but they make liberals feel good, which has the same effect.