Indeed, but if everyone starts thinking "No one else is lowering their emissions so why would I?", how are we supposed to ever make any sort of progress?
Someone doing something is always better than no one doing anything, can we at least agree on that?
Fair point, I agree, that isn't obvious. What is obvious to both of us (I assume?) is that pollution has to be lower, not just in the EU, but across the world. But we (Europeans) can mostly just influence what happens inside of Europe, EU and our countries. Hence, we do what we can to reduce it, where taxing it is one approach.
With that said, more investments into other energy sources are totally welcome, and I don't think that should mean we also need to tax pollution less, we can have both :)
> But it is by no means obvious that carbon taxes are the right path.
When the government says that the market should do something, people complain about government interference. When the government lets the market do something, but sets the right incentives, people are complaining about it again.
Co2 taxation is effectively internalizing the cost of co2 pollution. The price goes up the more we pollute, because we have less budget until we cannot reach our goals anymore.
Someone doing something is always better than no one doing anything, can we at least agree on that?