{"id":183467,"date":"2013-02-20T20:14:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-21T01:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/02\/20\/china-moves-toward-carbon-tax\/"},"modified":"2013-02-20T20:14:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-21T01:14:00","slug":"china-moves-toward-carbon-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/02\/20\/china-moves-toward-carbon-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"China Moves Toward Carbon Tax"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like the Chinese have <a href=\"http:\/\/qz.com\/55276\/china-worlds-largest-emitter-of-greenhouse-gasses-will-tax-carbon\/\">learned a lesson from their recent near lethal smog incidents in Beijing<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">China\u2019s Ministry of Finance has announced that the country will levy a tax on carbon emissions, reports Xinhua. Policy experts in the United States and Europe have long argued that a carbon tax is the most effective way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, but implementing one in most large industrialized countries has always seemed politically infeasible.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">In the same announcement, China\u2019s Ministry of Finance said that direct taxes on resources, including coal and water, will also be forthcoming.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Details on the carbon tax are scant, but previous reports indicated that it would come into force by 2015 and might start at 10 yuan ($1.60) per tonne of carbon, rising to 50 yuan ($8) per tonne by 2020. Notably, the tax would be collected by local tax authorities, and not municipal environmental protection bureaus.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>BTW, I did some quick back of the envelope calculations.<\/p>\n<p>If you look at the weight of carbon in a gallon of gasoline (4.2 lbs of carbon per gallon based on a chemical formula of C<sub>8<\/sub>H<sub>18<\/sub>), 10 yuan per gallon is a bit less than \u2153 of a penny a gallon, and 50 yuan, about 1\u2154 cents a gallon.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not a whole bunch of money, though it&#8217;s probably about twice that per BTU for coal, but it&#8217;s a start, which puts it ahead of the United States.<\/p>\n<p>Also I approve of a carbon tax, because, unlike cap and trade, it does not prevent Wall Street from using &#8220;financial innovation&#8221; to rip the rest of society off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like the Chinese have learned a lesson from their recent near lethal smog incidents in Beijing: China\u2019s Ministry of Finance has announced that the country will levy a tax on carbon emissions, reports Xinhua. Policy experts in the United States and Europe have long argued that a carbon tax is the most effective &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1054,1170,1079,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropogenic-climate-change","category-china","category-environment","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}