Thursday, September 09, 2021

Tax the Woke - Climate Change

Climate change politics have converged on presenting supply side caps as the solution, but there is another.  A sales tax approach allows independent states to tackle climate change better than any globalist.  Woke multinationals and institutions can be targeted to save the planet. 

Supply capping requires total global coordination - the globalist left ideal.  It also advantages multinationals that can shift production globally for maximum profit and minimal local competition - a globalist right priority.  This globalist bipartisan political consensus has made supply capping their solution to climate change.  However now these same globalists have gone woke.

Carbon Added Tax (CAT) is taking account of all of the climate change pollution inherent in making a product or service, then charging consumer sales tax set to the local market - user pays for carbon.  The CAT covers all of the climate change pollution of a product, more comprehensive than supply caps.  The CAT subject only to enforcement within the local state and not subject to global cooperation or negligence, more reliable than supply caps.  The CAT is priced to local conditions in wealthy nations, allowing for local carbon charging more aggressive than globally set supply caps.  CAT is a more effective approach to tackling climate change than supply capping. 

Carbon Added Taxation tackles climate change as a problem of consumption waste, a strong metric against inefficiency.

The largest service provider in any country is the state.  CAT sets a metric against which all services are measured, allowing carbon waste to be found and quantified.  Some services are diffuse and some are consumer specific.  The woke bastion of education is the most consumer specific and young people get concerned by climate change.  Applying CAT gives students a way of making climate defining choice in their education and provides a driver for increasing school choice.  Carrying administrative overburden to create social justice the more woke schools are not highly carbon efficient and disadvantaged by a CAT. 

CAT can hurt multinationals by making it harder to avoid taxation.  Under a CAT the profit or loss of the sales will be irrelevant to the level of taxation.  The act of migrating profit to places with lower corporate tax rate will itself be open to CAT charging as enlarging the climate footprint.  Every additional layer of corporate structure may add carbon cost.  

Taken to its full extent a CAT could eliminate the need for any global climate change response.  A global climate change response that is less effective, by the logic of carbon consumption monitoring, should be stopped as it is wasteful.