A society for a sustainable economy by cborn

Many thanks for adding this; delighted to see a youth proposal here. (Maybe there are others but hard to know?) Well presented and loads of helpful actions tied together with the tax proposal. Do you think a micro-tax on one industrial sector can fund macro-actions through the whole society and economy fast enough? I wonder how the budget would balance. James

The meat of this proposal is: "The carbon tax would create imputes for reductions in carbon emissions through sequestration technology investment and creation on carbon intensive industry alternatives and in turn contribute to bringing global carbon emissions down to 350 ppm, by the year 2100. Instituting a carbon tax of €.001 per pound of C02 on carbon intensive industries would be able to raise approximately 1 billion euros per year." which includes 100% of the numbers in this proposal. The proposal does not say: - how many ppm of carbon there are now in the EU - how much they need to reduce to get to 350ppm - how much carbon is produced per year in the EU - how much reduction per year they expect their solution will enable. - what technologies they will use for carbon sequestration - how much each costs per ton of carbon capture - what alternative technologies they expect to be deployed - how much those alternative technologies will cost per ton of CO2 reduction - what the balance of sequestration to alternatives they are expecting will get us to 350ppm by 2100 - how to allocate that eu1B to help reduce CO2. I did some web searching to help answer some of these questions for myself, since without them, this proposal is too shallow to effectively evaluate. There are 500 million people in the EU. This proposal will allocate eu2 per person per year. I don't know what the average person in the EU now spends on energy, but that sounds like an insufficient amount of money to solve the problem. According to http://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/2009/Global-CO2-emissions-annual-increase-halves-in-2008 the EU produces 4Billion tons of CO2 per year (see the graph, 4 x 1,000 x 1,000,000) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890407000520 describes a technology that costs eu77/ton of CO2 sequestration. I don't know if there are cheaper technologies out there but since this proposal provided NONE, I'm putting a stake in the ground with 1. With eu1B we can sequester 12,987,013 tons which is 0.325% of the annual CO2 output of the EU. The first URL above says that in 2008, CO2 emissions increased by 1.7% so if this proposal plowed all of the eu1B into sequestration at eu77 per ton, we would still be increasing CO2 every year by 1.375%. Now the article does say that the increase in CO2 in the EU has been decreasing over the last several years, but that's happening WITHOUT this proposal. In fact the decreases have been several times the 0.325% that this proposal indicates. Well perhaps this proposal is hoping that alternatives will reduce the CO2, but again, it gives none, so let me put another stake in the ground with the best one I know of, described in detail in the Personal Rapid Transit Grids proposal in this contest. It proposes to reduce the CO2 output by the transportation sector in the US by 50% at a negative cost. There are the upfront costs of $20M for a test track and a $200M loan guarantee, but this $220M, is a one time cost, not an annual cost. So at an exchange rate of 1.3 dollars per eu, we get the one time PRT cost of eu169M, whereas the 88 years (2100 - 2012) cost of this proposal is eu88B. Furthermore, because the PRT saves money for transportation, I propose a small fraction of that savings be used to pay back the initial eu169M so that the PRT plan costs, after a few years, NO money but in fact saves money all while providing a better transportation infrastructure than now exists. I think the overall idea of having people pay for what they use is a good idea and imposing a tax is an indirect way to accomplish that, but by itself it doesn't do it. We need an actual, physical plan which is what PRT Grids is. PRT Grids doesn't attempt to get rid of all CO2 and I would be in favor of something like this tax to further clear up our air. If we could do just one proposal, I'd suggest we grab the low hanging fruit first. But even better would be to move in parallel as is mentioned in the last paragraph of the PRT Grids proposal. One of the parallel paths that sounds promising to me is this kind of tax. [Note: the PRT Grids proposal is for the USA, and this tax proposal is for the EU, so they are not in direct competition for this contest. But I see no reason why each of them isn't also a good idea for both continents. It is a credit to the organizers of this event that it enables us (humanity) to take advantage of creativity across the globe!]

Overall assessment: This proposal’s strength was its ideas for how to use the funds generated by the micro tax, and the team is urged to flesh those out in more detail. The carbon micro tax idea seemed less valuable, and the judges suggest that the team might want to consider other potential funding sources for the activities outlined in the proposal. Specific comments and suggestions for improvement: - Proposed microcarbon tax will be too small to have a direct impact on emissions. Funds are to be used for educational awareness projects. Difficult to assess climate effectiveness of proposed actions. - There are a number of good ideas in this proposal that would merit further development.

Link to Euro Parliament news about green vat adjustment: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/en/pressroom/content/20111012IPR29115/html/MEPs-call-for-VAT-reforms-to-target-fraud-and-help-small-firms-and-green-goods This proposal simply extends the EU's low-carbon reduction with an additional high-carbon increase in vat. The % increase probably needs to be bigger than suggested in the proposal in order to raise meaningful amounts of money and raise more than the admin costs of collection. A simple scheme would use the same amount of reduction and increase for low and high carbon goods/activities. For example low carbon vat could be 15% and high carbon 20% when the regular rate is 17.5%. Even when the amounts collected are small, it can still be possible to have large impact with targeted action. The proposal's ideas on standardised education is a good example of how a small effort to rethink the process of education could have big impacts on innovation, creativity and the quality of discussion about issues including the climate. See for example http://bit.ly/2ndswitch It would be great to see a comment of explanation and encouragement from the judges here please so young people are not unintentionally misled towards thinking that there is no real opportunity for their voices to be heard on important issues that actually affect them more than us oldies ;-)