Following up on an paper posted earlier this week on disproportionate carbon emissions based on income. This article, by one of the paper’s authors, proposes the possibility of imposing carbon tax on investment income as a more equitable means of influencing emissions.
Instead of putting the responsibility for cutting emissions on consumers, maybe policies should more directly tie that responsibility to corporate executives, board members, and investors who have the most knowledge and power over their industries. Based on our analysis of the consumption and income benefits produced by greenhouse gas emissions, I believe a shareholder-based carbon tax is worth exploring.
Seems like a clumsy way to do an externality charge on carbon? Just charge the business
Per the article (had to update the link) - it’s the same intent, but this approach shifts the burden of the tax up the income brackets, in theory minimally impacting the cost of purchased goods and services for low and middle income families.
It’s a wealth tax meets carbon tax situation.
Increasing cost of capital which means the business needs to generate a bigger profit which means the price of the product goes up for consumers. Unnecessary dependencies - if you want to do a wealth tax do a wealth tax, if you want to do a carbon tax do a carbon tax
Yeah whatever taxation scheme we can think of, oil companies will ensure they don’t bear the cost.
That’s not quite the point I was trying to make. A company has to be about as profitable as any other in order to justify its existence. You need an externality charge (carbon tax) to drive the price of using oil to the point where people (and other companies) look for alternatives and use them instead. It doesn’t matter whether you charge oil producers or users- the end effect is the same.
Which article? Was there meant to be a link?
Also, and I must say I haven’t kept updated on the topic, I thought the idea of a carbon tax is to tax the emitters of greenhouse gases? Tax the companies responsible for most of the emissions. If they can’t find a cheap way to do it they will increase prices of their products and lose out to competitors who can cheaply limit emissions?
Just updated with the link to the article, apparently it had gotten removed when I also added an image ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Regarding the carbon tax, the article talks more about it, but in short, taxing emitters, even with a dividend, puts more pressure on lower income families, whereas taxing investors more proportionally keeps the pressure on higher income individuals, especially those in the top 0.1% who likely have significant sway over business decisions.
How about we tax the corporations and the 1% rather than some guy with $10 in the stock market?
It’s ok. This goes after their money without going after them explicitly.
This seems very interesting. Could you give a definition of producer and suplier ?
Updated the article link (had to remove the image)
From the article:
“Producer” and “supplier” reflect two different ways to calculate emissions from investments.
The “supplier” column includes emissions along the investment’s supply chain, while “producer” is only emissions connected to operations.
In short, looking at emissions using the supplier methodology is more inclusive but may result in double-counting.
