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?
Phasing out fossil fuels entirely and quickly for starters…
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.
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.
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.