Broken out per-pound, I suspect that private passenger vehicles represent a disproportionate amount of unnecessary global emissions.

Or another way: heating and cooling, farming, etc. are all essential (if not necessarily optimal). Commuting in your own private car is not; one only has to spend 15 minutes on the average American highway to observe that the overwhelming majority of car traffic is one person driving a car that can fit 5 or more.

Sounds dubious considering the amount of CO2 emissions caused by uneaten / wasted food is similar to personal transportation emissions.

I also don't think the idea that we should strive to limit our lives to that which is absolutely necessary to only survive or generate economic activity is valid. To me, my drive to the beach with my dog is more essential, valid, and valuable than your commute to work.

But regardless of whether true or not, environmental destruction caused by CO2 emissions does not care if the emissions were "necessary" or not, by any definition of necessary. So it simply isn't personal light trucks that are what's destroying the world.

There is a simple way to find out what is “destroying the world”.

Keep increasing fossil fuel taxes until the target amount of carbon emissions is achieved. The consumption that goes away is what was “destroying the world”.

>To me, my drive to the beach with my dog is more essential, valid, and valuable than your commute to work.

And this is why efforts to curb emissions and other pollution is hopeless.

Emissions and pollution are a function of energy consumption. Energy = force times distance. Force = mass * acceleration * distance. So you either reduce the mass that is moving (including you, your dog, and your 5+ passenger vehicle) and/or reduce the distance you move, or don’t worry about pollution.

> Keep increasing fossil fuel taxes until the target amount of carbon emissions is achieved. The consumption that goes away is what was “destroying the world”.

You haven't arrived here by any reasoning, you're just working back from the outcome you want. I.e., you want to define "unnecessary emissions" or "least expensive to cut emissions" as what is destroying the world. But if carbon pollution is destroying the world, then any carbon pollution causes basically the same damage to the world as any other. That's the climate and environmental science. When you bring economics into it you're bringing in arbitrary wants, desires, what people inherited at birth, etc., that has nothing to do with the impact to the world of additional carbon in the atmosphere.

Here's a concrete counter-example. If you raise carbon price, virtuous billionaires and politicians will continue to fly their private jets to climate conferences while more people starve from increased food costs. That doesn't mean the meagre eating habits of those now deceased poor people was what was destroying the world rather than the exorbitant consumption by the ruling class that could have been a zoom meeting. In fact both were equally contributing (ton for ton) because the climate doesn't care where the CO2 came from, if it was ethical or economical or necessary or fair or anything else. Either the carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, or it isn't.

> And this is why efforts to curb emissions and other pollution is hopeless.

I think it's only hopeless so long as those pushing it are massive hypocrites. Nobody likes a hypocrite. Nobody likes injustice.

> If you raise carbon price, virtuous billionaires and politicians will continue to fly their private jets to climate conferences while more people starve from increased food costs

You offset the carbon tax with a universal tax credit or refund or UBI or whatever you want to call it. Give people all of the money back that was generated from the carbon tax. Poor people don't fly on private jets or buy yachts so they'll come out ahead. Or at least, less behind than those who do spend money on those things.

You can put a blindfold on and throw lots of darts at the board, sure. I was specifically addressing the idea that economics somehow determines which CO2 producing activity is destroying the world and which isn't. CO2 is CO2.

I don't know what your first sentence means. A carbon tax puts into focus which carbon emissions are truly essential, and which ones are optional, expressed by the spending choices consumers make. If you have it in place and most voters agree with the principle (because they make money) then you move the tax rate slider up or down to get carbon emissions to whatever level is enough.

My first sentence means that UBI doesn't change anything to somehow make the offered definition of what kind of carbon pollution is destroying the world valid.

"Essential" doesn't mean anything to the physics of climate change, it just means something like "what people choose to do".

Again, no idea what you're saying. You're just repeating "essential" over and over, with a heavy dose of cynicism.

> Here's a concrete counter-example. If you raise carbon price, virtuous billionaires and politicians will continue to fly their private jets to climate conferences while more people starve from increased food costs. That doesn't mean the meagre eating habits of those now deceased poor people was what was destroying the world rather than the exorbitant consumption by the ruling class that could have been a zoom meeting.

You going to the beach with your dog in a big pickup truck, along with a couple hundred million other people, is the same level of non essential as people flying in private jets (of which there are very, very few).

People in the developed nation’s middle/upper middle class like to think they not consuming multiple standard deviations above the mean, because they don’t fly on private jets, but they do.

> But if carbon pollution is destroying the world, then any carbon pollution causes basically the same damage to the world as any other. That's the climate and environmental science. When you bring economics into it you're bringing in arbitrary wants, desires, what people inherited at birth, etc., that has nothing to do with the impact to the world of additional carbon in the atmosphere.

Yes, obviously any fossil fuel tax that meaningfully reduces consumption has to create a floor for quality of life, such as a minimum level of nutrition, shelter, healthcare, education, etc. The amount of wealth redistribution necessary to get there very well might make it so many people cannot (regularly) drive to the beach in a pickup truck with their dog.

The fact that increasing gas taxes in the US is a political nonstarter should indicate how much we (the broad voting populace) value our standards or dreams of consumption, which are multiple standard deviations above the mean.