How Europe’s new carbon tax on imported goods will change global trade
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Ya know - and this is completely a personal thing for me - but considering the difficulty I've had over the last 3 months just trying to give money to my landlord for rent, if I suddenly lost my income because someone gave me money against my wishes, I would seriously just quit this whole bullshit failure of a species and hope my next life is as a dirt-farmer on the planet Oglade'oogadee'Doo.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
It simple economics, if you tax something then you make it more expensive and remove the incentive for people to do something. It’s the idea of cigarette and alcohol taxes we want people to do those less so we charge them more. Who do these regressive taxes hurt the most? The poor
No government has accountability for how money is spent. Once politicians have your money the can redirect it to various spending priorities at will. That’s the danger of giving more revenue to government. That you have to have faith a politician will keep their word.
That remains to be seen, if the regulations will stop the outsourcing of pollution. So far the regulations example carbon taxes on Volkswagen have had the effect is subsiding their competitors leading to the company in part having to downsize and shut factories in Europe. The carbon regulations have thus far pushed to de industrialize Europe and contribute to their economic woes.
I disdain the bureaucracy in Europe as an Irish citizen as to the harms it has created in perpetuating the housing affordability crises, deficit spending, the loss of good paying jobs and the other harms (unintentional?) it has done to many of its citizens. I’m also highly concerned about the IMF being forced to bail out the UK and France and with the strings that will be attached. Their governments are not sustainable.
I say give people more skin in the game, let them choose what they believe is best for their finances, environment and children.
I see this as making the affordability crisis worse for many fellow Europeans. Whom, the best and brightest will flee to lower tax, better prosperity locals. Which will contribute to the de industrialization of the continent, poverty and accelerating the economic irrelevance of Europe. What good is it to be a leader in something if no one follows, and it destroys your ability to lead? There needs to be a better balance between going green without destroying peoples livelihood.
Upvote
-18
(0
/
-18)
Wait, you're suddenly concerned about policy externalities but not pollution externalities? What's the policy harm and the externality, and what's your response to "(EU revenues from certificate sales) are expected to support vulnerable households in many European countries"? How would payments like the Canada Carbon Rebate "hurt them with bad policies"?
You're trying to blame environmental policies for problems that are at their root share-of-productivity and wealth inequality problems to be addressed through taxation and social benefits, whether directly such as by carbon tax credits or indirectly by simply not operating in an environmental, labor, and taxation regulation-free utopia.
Upvote
9
(10
/
-1)
And the regulation that you now decry eliminates that subsidy by charging based on where the products end up, not where they're made. No more 'outsourcing' to the U.S. (snicker), Korea, Mexico, China, and the like.
So, take the classical and neoclassical economic policies of the last 200+ years and do them even harder, because you'll surely get a markedly different result.
Like, where, the United States? No they won't. We're booting you lot out in a bout of xenophobia. And those that may remain will still get to pay the carbon tax because, get this, a little more than a week from now it applies to their sales into the EU too.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
Just ignore the presumably AfD troll whose understanding of any issue is so shallow it wouldn't get wet if it sat in it.
Upvote
7
(7
/
0)
I have far more faith in my politicians than I do in letting the billionaires have all the money and power. Not to mention I can replace the politician if I don't like them. Is it possible they redirect taxes somewhere I don't like? Sure. That happens today. That isn't a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You have to have faith in something. Trusting nothing because someone somewhere could do something bad is not the basis for a functioning society. Society runs on trust.
These regulations quite literally forcus on making sure imports do not have an advantage because of differing climate policies. There is no possible way that could logically make domestic production less competitive. It is possible these taxes do not go far enough to fix this, but then the solution is more taxes.
I'd like to point out that the US with very little regulation of these things also has a housing crisis. While this was not entirely created by the financial crisis, it has been far worse and accelerating since the financial crisis... which was a clear lack of necessary government regulation. At this point in time it is becoming pretty obvious that government is going to be the only viable solution to the housing crisis. The private sector just isn't interested in solving it.
To be honest, good riddance to people like you in Europe. Maybe you'll have more room for all the highly skilled people from elsewhere that would be happy to move to Europe. Honestly, I highly doubt you'd enjoy the standard of living here in the US where you don't get things like healthcare and you get very small amounts of time off of work.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
You have this exactly backwards. Failure to mitigate emissions creates an escalating series of costs borne by everyone, including the very poor people you profess concern over.
The problem with emissions is that it’s a tragedy of the commons where I gain the benefits of driving my car but the downstream costs associated with my emissions are spread across many other people. This is why we have anti-smog regulations that force car owners to pay incrementally more for vehicles that have catalytic converters and other emissions reducing technology. For an individual owner, it would never make sense to pay for any of that stuff because they experience very little of their own pollution. Fixing one’s own car has negligible effect on the smog levels one’s children are exposed to. But fixing everyone’s cars makes a visible difference in air quality that you can see clearly if you look at photos of LA from the 70’s. It’s not subtle, and it makes a big difference on things like childhood asthma. So that’s why we force drivers to pay for reducing the negative externalities of their driving. Most car owners would probably admit the cost is worth it if you could expose them to the full magnitude of their choice being applied to all vehicles. I don’t want my kids breathing smog.
Carbon emissions are even trickier because their externalities are distributed globally, and are slow to manifest such that many choose to disbelieve them. But your insurance company is too profit minded to adhere to an ideology. Homeowners insurance rates in Florida are on the rise: https://theconversation.com/how-flo...market-became-so-dysfunctional-so-fast-217055. They are anticipating increases in losses from hurricanes and flooding. And wildfires and drought are increasingly costly on the West Coast. Then there’s the actual global poor, in countries like Bangladesh, where most of the population lives within a meter or two of sea level.
Most sober economic analyses put the cost of mitigating emissions as being several times cheaper than the consequences of not doing so, discounted down to net present value. But there’s that thorny tragedy of the commons effect…
Last edited:
Upvote
9
(9
/
0)
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
You shouldn't let facts get in the way of delusions and ideology.
Upvote
12
(12
/
0)
How about heating older house? Even with most of it fixed for good isolation0, it needs about 30kWh for heating by heat pump. And for example to day I got about 1,2kWh which is fairly good given Central European winter. (Could have been worse like zero because of "grey winter")
BTW: My company has fairly large 50kW solar powerplant and today its production was barely 6,11kWh... (OK, it is older installation so it uses too long series of panels for each inverter input so its efficiency in slightly worse conditions suffers pretty badly)
Small problem, you assume that there is going to be sufficient production to charge the battery.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
You guys keep talking past each other. @Eng_wkzm said, "No amount of solar panels helps you through the night." (direct quote), and @DRJlaw countered that "batteries exist" (paraphrased), and you are now countering "Some places don't receive much winter-time sunlight" (paraphrased). And all of these are true statements in isolation. You guys are effectively arguing about which question should frame the conversation.
As I said before, the more northern EU countries are far enough North that it's very expensive to provision enough solar panels to satisfy winter power needs. And there's 0.05% of humanity that lives so far North that there are days where there's no sun at all (ie, anywhere inside the Arctic circle). So there are obviously places where winter-time solar is ineffective. We need a mix of different energy solutions.
Still, there's tremendous leverage in using solar to mitigate most of the electricity emissions for most of humanity. The vast majority of humanity lives lives between 45S and 45N, where local solar is still pretty competitive as a winter-time power source, especially as the panels continue to get cheaper:
Home solar has the advantage of reducing demand on the transmission grid, and electricity distribution is often as expensive as electricity generation, so this can be a material advantage. But utility-scale solar has better economies of scale to amortize away the overhead costs such as installation labor, which means that it benefits to a greater degree from reductions in solar panel price. As panels get ever cheaper, most observers expect utility-scale deployments to outpace home deployments.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
Upvote
9
(9
/
0)
Nice, EU leads the way again.
Don't worry, your fearless leader will respond like a 5 year old and take his ball home. Once the world realizes we don't make anything tangible, we won't be necessary for the world economy beyond sucking the life out of it. MAGA, like the old days.
Don't worry, your fearless leader will respond like a 5 year old and take his ball home. Once the world realizes we don't make anything tangible, we won't be necessary for the world economy beyond sucking the life out of it. MAGA, like the old days.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Speaking of batteries, I've enjoyed tracking their price curve over the last several years.
See here for a nice 2025 year-end report.
This graph shows the wild improvement from 2010 through 2025:
They have the 2025 pack-level price as $108 / kWhr, with this seemingly being a blend of batteries for both EVs and storage, and this is an 8% decrease in pack price despite substantial increases in the cost of raw materials like lithium and cobald.
For the storage sector, which mostly uses the Lithium Iron Phosphate chemistry, they quote a pack-level price of only $70 / kWhr.
That's only $2,450 to provision a house with enough storage for the 35 kWhr of heating need that was asserted by @DKilmax. That's less than the cost of my heat-pump. But then, the "turn-key solution" price is typically a fair bit more than this.
From the article:
See here for a nice 2025 year-end report.
This graph shows the wild improvement from 2010 through 2025:
They have the 2025 pack-level price as $108 / kWhr, with this seemingly being a blend of batteries for both EVs and storage, and this is an 8% decrease in pack price despite substantial increases in the cost of raw materials like lithium and cobald.
For the storage sector, which mostly uses the Lithium Iron Phosphate chemistry, they quote a pack-level price of only $70 / kWhr.
That's only $2,450 to provision a house with enough storage for the 35 kWhr of heating need that was asserted by @DKilmax. That's less than the cost of my heat-pump. But then, the "turn-key solution" price is typically a fair bit more than this.
From the article:
It's an interesting question why the US and EU solution prices are so much higher than the pack-level pricing, which already includes several cost overheads on top of the raw battery cells. Installation labor, maybe. It's not a simple answer of US tarrifs because the EU cost is high too.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Translating to U.S. terminology for the audience, your home needs 13 TONS of heat pump capacity?! That is easily 2x the largest set up I have ever seen for an American McMansion (5000+ sqft).
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
They handled the implementation of RoHS (reduction of hazardous substances) just fine, paper trails and check offs worked and now it’s used mostly world wide. I was involved in a circuit board manufacturer at the time and compliance was fairly straightforward. I don’t see much of a difference here.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
They said 30 kWhrs (per day), not 30 kW. So that's only an average of 1.25 kW * 24 hrs / day.
My house has a 4 ton heat pump (ie, 48,000 BTU / hr), and when it runs, it pulls up to 28 amps on a 208V circuit, which is just shy of 6 kW. Well, technically my house has 3x of those 4 ton heat pumps, but I unplugged all but one of them, and that's easily twice as much capacity as we need on the very coldest days (the prior owner got very badly upsold by the installer). Our biggest draw of 2025 was in February, when we used 3124 kWhrs, of which probably 500 or more came from circuits other than the heat pump. So we are below 30 kWhr on average, but probably exceed that on some of the coldest days. It's not a particularly large house, but it's old and leaky.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Seriously, you people measure heat pump output in tons? And I thought I'd seen the worst of those customary units.
What's that, equivalent weight of coal per furlong?
Upvote
12
(12
/
0)
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
It's exactly 12,000 BTUIT/h, or about 3.517 kW. The original definition was the rate of heat transfer to freeze or melt one short ton (2000 pounds) of pure ice at zero degrees Celsius in 24 hours.
And yeah. It's nuts. America will do pretty much anything except adopt the metric system.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
That's a completely insane and inconsistent description. It should be “melt one short ton of brine slush at 0 °F” and it would finally all make sense.
(If you need the exact definition of “brine” and “slush”, you're missing the point.
)ETA: Forgot to add: it should be solar day, not 24 hours.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
(If you need the exact definition of “brine” and “slush”, you're missing the point.
Some may be, but not in the science is cool way that one would hope.
Last edited:
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Yet another handwaver reading from the false Brexit script.
Give me a specific, quantifiable example of such a law, how much it costs to implement, and what you'd replace it with and what are the (dis)advantages of yours.
Most of the "laws" (they're no laws, BTW, they're regulations and for the ones that are EU-wide, each EU member has to pass a law in its own legislative assembly to implemenet it within its national legal framework) actually deal directly with trade issues.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
My balcony is all of 5m2, on the eastern side of the building, and in shadow most of the day
.There is also no subsidy of residential solar PV here, but installation tends to be quite cheap (*), and with high insolation and no snow, current systems for 2-story private homes (~120-150m2) tend to pay for themselves after 5-7 years.
(*)probably because direct-solar thermal boiler heaters are universal and there are plenty of installers for them -- 98% of the population has them, and they supply 5% of the country's overall energy use. With the move to high-rise apartment buildings (20+ stories), they're not going to do the job and the government is planning to phase them out with a combo of rooftop PV and heat pumps.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
According to Boris
EU passed laws to change British sausages, ban prawn cocktail crisps, introduce same size 'euro coffins', bar double-decker buses, limit the amount of cleavage a barmaid could show, one-size-fits-all condoms, and mandate a new strict regulatory shape for bananas
And Boris would never lie
/s
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
(-:
You forgot (it may not have been Boris specifically) "The EU forced the UK to accept higher brown immigrant quotas" when this was a British law.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
i believe he claimed almost 80 million Turks would be forced by EU to immigrate to UK at one point
(even though that was the total population of Turkey at the time and he himself is of Turkish decent)
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
We all have more food than we need and the price of pharmaceuticals is decided only by the industry.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
All?
Do you want to reconsider that?
I’m not saying enough doesn’t theoretically exist .. but there does seem to be a serious issue with distribution
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Once a drug is off patent protection the price is usually decided by the market.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
Which would be great, .. If the FDA would routinely test them
https://www.propublica.org/article/fda-generic-drug-testing
Some doctors and others said they believe the FDA decided against routine testing because it could undermine the public’s confidence in generics and raise questions about the agency’s oversight of the industry.
“The FDA doesn’t want to do the testing because it is afraid of what it could find,”
Last edited:
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
We'll be able to test that by seeing if Epipen, which is no longer patent protected as of 3 months ago, goes down in price:
The full retail price of a 2-pack of the US-made injector, identical to what you buy in the US, is $25 here, vs. a US price of $600-$700.
And of course, noone pays $25 here with UHI, just the $3 co-pay.
And isn't all private importation of medications still illegal by US Federal law (although IIUC commonly flouted)? That also keeps prices high.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
I had no idea this was coming. It’s pretty amazing. A continent wide carbon tax that will force the rest of the world to follow in their footsteps. If only the US had implemented something like this 20 years ago.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
Part of the problem with medicine is the need to provide an economic incentive to develop new medicines. We currently do this by offering 20 years of patent exclusivity, but this is inefficient and problematic. Let’s say someone invents a new cancer drug that turns death sentence into a cure. How do you price saving someone’s life? Do you set a price where only the wealthiest can be saved, generating revenue at the cost of saving fewer? Do you tailor the cost to half of each person’s income? Or if they have insurance, how much should the rest of us be expected to pay to save that person. A million? A billion? A trillion?
I think we’d do better to find more ways to fund / subsidize the research process, and turn drug development into a lower risk / lower upside industry.
Last edited:
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
One thing that could be done is eliminate secondary patents..
generally drug companies file primary patents on drugs/compounds/substances at beginning of the research and development phase protecting their investments in that phase,
but what had become more and more common are secondary patents, especially in US where such patents are easily obtained, in which secondary patents are filed at or just before the release/marketing phase of a new drug
Thus expanding the period new drugs are under patent and have even been used to extend a expiring patent by marketing a drug for a new (off label) use.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
You raise an interesting question.
Back in the early 2000s, after a rash of nasty train accidents in the UK, a friend of mine had an idea for (what we thought was (*)) a very inexpensive cab-based system to avoid trains colliding with people, animals or other objects on the track.
In order to check market applicability, I did some research (was working at a VC at the time), and it turned out that there was a standard amount used in developed countries to signify "how much is it worthwhile to invest to save on average one life per year?" (not taking into account any other factors: Life expectancy, chances a saved person would win a Nobel, chances they would save other people etc.)
That amount was then ~$5M; allowing for inflation, that would be ~$8.5M today. (that amount seems to have nosedived in today's USA).
Every country which has state health insurance makes similar calculation to determine which medications end up on the"funded" list.
(*)We were very wrong, not realizing initially just what the stopping distance of a passenger train is.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Currently, only 5-15% of crude used for gasoline or diesel comes from outside the US or Canada, with most of those sources not having significant US security footprint. (There are some, but the oil economy looks quite different today than a few decades ago, with the US now being a net oil exporter and sourcing a lot of crude from north of the border.)
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Despite misreading my comment, funnily enough another our house is actually heated up by 2x14kW heat pumps, one for each floor... (19th century large building with 2-3 meters thick external walls made of various materials that were available back then. Oldest three rooms have marlstone in core of walls. Also height of rooms is about 2,5-3m.) However temperatures in winter can reach -10°C and if Siberian winds get here than we can get to -20C. Very rare, but still possible...
The way this heat pump is setup it will draw about 4kW (maximum is 6kW) when operating. Unfortunately this house has still some holes in insulation so there's some leak hunt still to be done.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)