Although as a type of “factor” tax it is distributed differently. And given there is an interest in distorting the relative price, this sounds more like a feature than a bug 😉

The Greens’ proposed carbon tax is equal to a 4.56% rise in the company tax in the company tax

India and Indonesia are likely to matter as well tbh, but getting China onboard would be useful

It doesn’t have much empirical evidence because no-one is doing it right – one of those situations where the theory was so compelling everyone actually avoided the issue!

Given our GST often doesn’t fall on low level imported goods, and does fall on domestically produced consumption goods, I don’t think countries are too worried – I do buy your point that GST exemptions on exports can be seen as a form of subsidy though.

I’m all for investigation of what you are after – I find it a credible idea for sure! Was just pointing out that people have pulled back from the same thing in the past, and that it is sort of a coordination issue between countries!

Yar China does this sort of thing all the time – it was definitely authorized. But an announcement had been on the cards for this week – they’d been pointing to it for a while. And what they announced was a bit disappointing, just like the US announcement.

However, both could have been worse! We’ll see what happens in a few months at their next dual climate summit!

These are good points – and is part of the reason why I think the cost involved with the scheme should be clear to the public.

It is nice for policy analysts, politicians, and me, to say we should have a carbon tax to “show we are keen”. But we should really make sure it represents the will of the people who are paying first!

Given that Chinese carbon per capita has overtaken Europe, I reckon that per-capita will become a viable option. Getting the Chinese on board will be more important than any free-riding from poorer countries.

You reckon it was unauthorised? People have been executed for less. No, the Chinese wanted to get that message out, because the other carbon event of the week was the EPA rules on US coal power plants. That’s a game-changer too : Obama doesn’t want to go to the Paris climate summit empty-handed again, after the Copenhagen disaster. China and the US will have concrete measures on the table, so any country which is proposing to free-ride is going to look pretty silly. After that… I look forward to a future joint US-Chinese naval task force sending gunboats to Australia and Canada, to enforce a carbon reduction treaty.

The international climate change conferences these days are attended by sub-Cabinet officials, bureaucrats, John Kerry and other non-important people.

There will not be an international agreement that New Zealand will have to get on board.

In any case if that agreement were to happen, there will be plenty of time to introduce necessary taxes and carbon trading systems when that treaty is signed, not now

Geoffrey Brennan, in Climate Change: A Rational Choice Politics View, Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, July 2009, argues that we will see many countries acting unilaterally to introduce carbon emission policies because expressive voters cheer for such policies.

Brennan argued that the nature of expressive concerns is such that significant reductions in real incomes are probably not politically sustainable in the long term. This suggested to him that much of the carbon reduction action will be limited to modest reductions of a largely token character.

There are many expressive voting concerns that politicians must balance to stay in office and the environment is but one of these. Once climate change policies start to actually become costly, expressive voting support for these policies will fall away.

Abbott’s big bad new tax rhetoric in the last two Australian elections split away the working class and lower-middle class labor voters who worry more about bread and butter issues.

There were 5 Republican senators who would have voted for cap and trade in April 2010: Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Scott Brown, and George LeMieux. There were 57 Democrat Senators. It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster.

President Obama could have fought harder to get the Bill the House passed through the Senate but he did not.

Yes fair points, (although the idea we would be punished doesn’t have a lot of empirical support to date.) My counter is – that figuring out was pre Kyoto. And it didn’t work. We should now be able to reassess these things. In hindsight base lining emmisions on a historic per country production basis (not per capita nor in terms of consumption) didn’t work.

A consumption based approach is now being advocated again by many people. Particularly in Europe where emissions have been “off shored”

To counter the protectionism attack we could agree to count any carbon costs already incurred by imports in the home countries. Could also do the same for exports but it would get messy. And also – is our GST seen as proctectionist? Because it works in the same way particularly if we trade with others without such a tax.