Emissions trading or environmental taxes?

Question

Climate change is one of the most serious threats of the ongoing and future human society. During the last years, UN and other organizations have tried to design and implement certain economic environmental policies to adrress the issue. Between the two measures, mentioned in this question, which do you prefer and why?
Thank you for your time in advance!

Answer 1

Climate change is real. Yes it would happen with or without humans - no one is debating that. The point being pushed is that we humans are ACCELERATING the change.

I prefer taxes to trading BUT if I had the option, I would go with something else altogether.

Emissions trading does not solve the problem, it merely allows a country to CONTINUE doing what it did before when we really need change.

Yes the emissions are offset by the carbon credits bought from a small developing nation - but that nation wouldn't be emitting that much ANYWAY and how would you punish a country that sold their credits and then emitted anyway?

Taxes raise the price of goods and hurt consumers - BUT they also reveal the TRUE cost of carrying out business. To date we have NEVER paid the true cost for using gasoline. Companies that pollute rivers should be made to pay the true cost of doing business, then and only then will they change their business model.

Mandating efficient business (below is a link to a case study in Denmark) is the way to go. Force companies to find ways to better deal with their products effects pre- and post-manufacture.

Full Article - http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/113/open_fast50-essay.html

Below is a segment from an article in this month's Fast Company Magazine as well as the link to the full article to better explain my position:

Making markets "tell the ecological truth," to use environmentalist Lester Brown's elegant phrase, will require a complex blend of policy change and entrepreneurial activity. A good start would be reducing the income tax and augmenting it with graduated taxes on ecologically harmful activities, along with federally consistent mandates requiring companies to take greater responsibility for their own waste streams and for their products at end-of-life. These reforms would align both consumers' and businesses' understanding of a given product's total cost to the planet, and allow both to make more informed decisions.

Practicing such "true cost" economics will unlock a powerful wave of product redesign, much of it hidden from the consumer's eyes, as companies seek to lighten their own burden when they get a product back at the end of its useful life. A focus on the total life cycle will amplify an entire nascent branch of creative engineering:

Answer 2

We are not causing global warming and taxation will not stop it. It will only make some people wealthy.
Below is the forward to Jurassic Park. There's an audio somewhere on the internet where it is read by Charleton Heston. It is worth a read because it puts many things in perspective.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time.

It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. Might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. You think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.

When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. Hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Answer 3

Most of the emissions trading schemes that I have seen are preferable to environmental taxation, for one reason:

Emissions trading normally includes a firm cap on total emissions. Companies can sell these "rights" back and forth to each other, but in the end emissions are still fixed (one company would be reducing emissions for every company that is increasing).

Taxing emissions does not place an upper-bound on the total emissions from an economy.

Answer 4

Emissions trading, but only where the structure is in place to support it (ie, an independent market, no chance of corruption, sufficient and equal access to information).

Emissions trading leads to a more efficient result, and leaves less room for corruption and waste, whereas environmental taxation generally incurs waste because taxes are involuntary and imbue distortionary effects. Markets, being voluntary, do not tend toward distortion.

Answer 5

we've a smaller abode and we are guessing that this is going to be approximately $a hundred a month. the subject is that we actually, rather don't have an further $a hundred a month out of our internet pay to spend. that's worse than a tax because of the fact it comes out of our internet pay. we could have been greater useful off if Obama had raised taxes. Even greater useful yet, in the event that they ditch this fairly costly thought. With the charges of each and every little thing else going up and our wages have went critically down, we honestly won't have the ability to have the money for this.