If you want to tax net carbon emissions, I’m all ears and, unless you work very hard to come up with an intentionally terrible plan, I’m very supportive.
If you instead want to tax specific conveniences to help inconvenient services survive despite their inconvenience and lack of improvement, well, let’s just say that I’m significantly less receptive.
Most of the major issues with Amtrak in the US come down to not actually having control over the track that's in use, and that's never going to be fixed without a real big money infusion.
I want to tax something that is very bad for the environment and fund something that is very good.
The free market is great for many things, but not for core infrastructure. What’s missing in the US is a basic passenger rail infrastructure. Once you’ve built that, fine, let operators work in a free market environment
If you’re still talking about the environment at the end of your first sentence, rail is not “very good”. At best it’s “less bad” for the environment; to that end, it seems like a broad carbon emission tax provides a better balance (and is easier to ramp up on a schedule needed to effect change) than a quilt work of individually targeted taxes against things you don’t value.
Everyone emitting ancient carbon is a problem; tax it all.
Rail is amazing for the environment. A Marseille to Paris on the TGV emits less than 2kg of CO2 per passenger. That’s 80 times less than a plane, and 20 times less than a car!
And how is this CO2 miracle achieved? Public spending on core infrastructure, namely nuclear power plants and high speed rail
We will need to tax CO2 to oblivion, but before we do so we need to make sure that people can still move around, that’s key to a healthy economy. Public transport is the only viable option for cheap mass low-CO2 transport
If you instead want to tax specific conveniences to help inconvenient services survive despite their inconvenience and lack of improvement, well, let’s just say that I’m significantly less receptive.