• krayj@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Corporations should be held responsible for the emissions caused by their employee’s commuting.

    This would really change the discussion about return to office.

    • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Lol they spent decades doing the opposite, generating the vast majority of emissions with big manufacturing and big livestock, and then successfully shifting blame on poor peasants claiming the planet is heating because they’re not sorting their recycling well enough.

      • Chivera@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yes and also by telling us to buy expensive electric cars because the environment needs us to.

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Companies should be on the hook for all negative externalities. Make them internalities and watch how quick things change

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yes, but we need to see everyone in person!!!11111 There are intangible benefits and impromptu synergies, etc… /s

    • ntzm [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      In Nottingham, UK they made it so companies have to pay for every parking space per year over a certain amount, and that money gets invested in public transport. Over time congestion has grown much slower in Nottingham than similar cities, I’m amazed that more cities don’t do the same.

    • solstice@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Modern accounting techniques are amazing and super effective, barely unchanged since their codification in the 1490s by an Italian scholar named Luca Pacioli. The biggest weakness of accounting though is its inability to capture externalities. How does one company record the cost of their employees commute? How do you even begin to calculate that? How do you measure the cost of extra leukemia cases in a town ten years after a train derails nearby? How do you record that in your books? How do you calculate and record the distress these huge noisy shipping vessels cause whales? It’s just so subjective and impractical.

      • krayj@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        In the city of Seattle, for example, every year, companies over a certain number of employees are required to participate in an annual transportation survey. The employees are surveyed. The questions ask how far the employee commutes to work, how long it takes, and by what method (private vehicle, car pool, public transportation), how many days a year they work from home, or take off, etc. The effort is to assess the impact on environment, parking infrastructure, public transportation, roads, etc.

        Obviously, there isn’t a 100% response rate so the data is extrapolated from the responses to the total number of employees employeed at that site (probably why they only poll companies of a minimum size and larger).

        If they wanted to implement something like this in seattle, then the next step would be to take the data they already have and start sending those companies a new bill for a new annual tax based on the assessment.

        Lots of taxes work off of an estimated assessment rather than having to account for every nut snd bolt of the thing (property taxes, for example).

        So how do you do it? That’s how you do it. This isn’t rocket science, and you don’t need to invent new accounting methods or worry about the accounting-sky falling to accomplish it.

          • krayj@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            The point of my earlier comment was that the inability to account down to the last carbon atom isn’t a valid reason not to start with more generalized high-level estimates and work just from those until/if a better way of doing it is either becomes available or becomes a necessity.

            It’s like arguing that we might as well not accept the existence of circles because we can’t calculate to the final digit of pi…when really, for most things, we don’t need that level of precision to still do a good job discussing roundness.

            • solstice@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Pi can be rounded. It’s infamously difficult to compute externalities in any meaningful sense. Even more difficult to implement a fair and actionable policy for it. You can google “accounting for externalities” and read a bunch f articles and academic papers on the subject, which has been debated for decades.

              Beyond fines for dumping chemicals in rivers, and carbon taxes, etc, stronger EPA, etc, I don’t really have any good ideas for codifying a real actual plan into law. Probably easier to raise corporate tax rates up a few points from 21% to whatever and use it to fund green energy and cleanup projects etc, rather than change accounting methods to try and capture the costs that way.

      • krakenx@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Simpler perhaps, but not really better. High gas prices hurt the poor disproportionately because it’s a larger part of their income, they don’t have as much control over WFH policies or their locations for reducing commutes, and they can’t typically afford to upgrade to fuel efficient vehicles. Plus since almost everything is transported by truck, high gas prices make the cost of everything else go up too.

        I think part of the labor shortage is from people who did the math and quit after realising that they weren’t actually earning anything after subtracting transportation costs.

        • Asifall@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          If we’re talking about some sort of tax on employers based on the commute of their employees, it’s going to disproportionately affect the poor anyway. If you tax employers though you’re incentivizing further control of their employees lives.

          Yes, higher gas prices would increase the cost of shipping and therefore most products, but there’s no world in which we hold corporations accountable for their externalities and consumer goods remain as cheap as they are.