A phased-in revenue-neutral carbon tax of $30/ton would increase electricity rates in (most of) the US by < 10%. And could lower income taxes (or if not revenue neutral) reduce the debt. What's not to like?
A few states, and therefore a motivated group of Senators, would be hit disproportionately hard. Places like Wyoming and West Virginia drive a considerable part of their economy from coal, and fracking has led to natural gas windfalls in states like North Dakota.
You would imagine that some large carbon-intensive companies, like Koch or ExxonMobil, would also be impacted significantly.
EDIT: The counterpoint is that a gas tax in particular is quite regressive. The poor pay a larger portion of their income toward necessities like fuel to drive to work. They also are less likely to be able to afford that Tesla. Entry-level service workers can't work from home. They might be commuting large distances from cheaper outlying areas. There are many reasons why (if not managed properly) a carbon tax could hurt the wrong people.
It still seems like the right idea to me, though! We need to avoid calling it a 'tax' though, to avoid the Grover Norquist influence...
As usual, probably the poor & lower middle class unless the income tax reduction were explicitly directed to the lowest tax brackets to limit impact on working poor.
Those below the poverty line would see an increase in their energy costs at the pump and and home electric bills as energy producers raise rates to compensate (and the impoverished are the least able to convert their use, so will be the longest affected by the transition).
The answer used to be "aluminum smelters" (aluminum, aka "frozen electricity").
Interestingly, the aluminum smelters in the mountains behind Portland closed down when the datacenters moved in and bought all the cheap hydro electricity they used to use.
My guess is that a tax increase on electricity will hit the Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft and other "cloud businesses" pretty hard...
Aluminium smelters in Germany are actually getting a big subsidy. They're varying their electricity usage based upon the output of Germany's solar/wind farms and getting paid a hefty sum to do so (possibly too much).
This is having a negative impact on other smelters across the world.
Effectively they're doing the same job we were always told batteries would do.
If they're paying a fair amount for electricity, it's not a subsidy. And it's probably not a minute-timescale change like batteries. Energy storage and batteries are quite different things.
The big victims are the owners of fossil fuel deposits and infrastructure. Have a guess who is funding all the FUD about global warming.
Personally I think we should just buy the fossil fuel owners out at current market prices and shut them down as soon as possible. FUD in this area is just too effective to counter with logic or science so lets pay them off. If we wanted to be really clever we could do a 1 for 1 swap - Exxon we are buying your oil field and here is a wind farm in return.
You should stop casting these guys as villains, it obscures the main point of your argument. You would probably do the same lobbying if you were in their position. (Rather, if you were a major shareholder in Exxon, you would demand that managers do it.)
Just think of this in terms of Exxon &c having an effective negotiating position for blocking the carbon tax. We don't have to buy things at current market prices, but at a discount. Recognizing that there's room for negotiation is what everyone overlooks.
I didn't mean to cast Exxon and co as villains, just explain why. Yes I think we need to recognise that they have a very strong hand and deal with it head on. Trying to fight them will only mean we all lose.
The proposed tax is basically a spending tax, much like a sales tax. It would effectively raise the price of any products/services that rely on carbon-based energy to be made/delivered.
Remind me: how does a spending tax disproportionately affect the poor? The tax goes into a local/federal budget, where poor disproportionately benefit from it (compared to what they put in).
Also, the arguably biggest global challenge in the next decades is going to be to slow/reverse the adverse effects of the global warming, which WILL disproportionately affect the poor (which have less ability to adapt or move). So how is doing something about global waring really disproportionately affecting the poor on the long run?
Some people need to scrape together cash to buy enough gas to get to work. Poor people spend a disproportionate amount of their income on necessities like fuel for an aging inefficient vehicle, electricity or natural gas to heat a cheaply-constructed home, and factory-farmed food created with cheap nitrogen fertilizer.
All of those necessities get more expensive with a carbon tax, so we need a way to cushion the impact on those who struggle to pay for the basics.
While the impact of global warming does impact the global poor quite heavily (think of places like Bangladesh) it doesn't really hurt the poor in developed places much more than the rich in developed places. I was a lot less worried about El Niño when I rented an apartment, for example.
> how does a spending tax disproportionately affect the poor?
Because they need to spend more of their income in order to survive.
If you spend all of your income, a 10% sales tax reduces your income by 10%. If you only need to spend half of your income, a 10% sales tax reduces your income by 5% - or less, if the money you don't spend earns interest.
Poor living in rural/exurban areas, spend more of their money on utilities & transportation overall
You're assuming here that the money will be spent on the poor, but we really have to make sure that will actulaly happen if we want the carbon tax to have fair distributional implications
One of the fun things about this "debate" is that people complain about exactly the things in the proposal that are designed to benefit the poor, as affected by this tax. It's almost as if everyone assumes the worst possible implementation, instead of looking at the actual proposal.
