The Oil Drum

Don't forget Natural Gas generated electricty.

Rick

I think the simplest solution is to remove the subsidies for roads.
If the full cost of road building was passed on to the driver it would have a impact.

Next the now private road maintainers could easily charge by weight for travel on the roads since heavier cars cause more damage. Note this would put a quick end to shipping via truck also which is a good thing.

Finally the only tax needed is a environmental carbon tax so you pay for the co2 you produce this can be easily applied as a heavy fuel tax. Of course this also means environment taxes on metal etc used to manufacture the car so the bigger the car the tax.
It could and should be progressive.

Thus the government is doing what it should which is protecting the commons i.e the environment while the auto industry is thrown to the free market.

This sort of taxing scheme could also be applied to all waste. A progressive tax on large private homes and a heavy environmental taxes on non-renewable energy generation.

So basically if governments make maintaining the commons of which the environment is a big part we can and will change. The approach is simply to ensure you pay your fair share for consumption.

As long as consumption and environmental degradation is subsidized we will never do the right thing.

As far as taxing multiple children goes realistic and effective methods of birth control are readily available male contraceptives are close. The answer here is being frank about
the need to curb unwanted pregnancies. And along side this raise the educational and economic level of the population. Almost all advanced economies move to negative growth rates over time naturally so draconian measure are probably not needed.

For example my parents had three children one died and one will probably never have children. I have three children but as you can see the chances are that we will remain below the replacement rate since my brother has no children.

You can of course extend this over larger groups the important point is that the overall population needs to trend negative for years to come. Simple improvements to the quality of life result in this overall trend.

Finally you can't crash a population with draconian laws as China will find out I'm sure.
A over abundance of retiree's is a major strain on and economy. Japans economy is basically dead now because of the demographics the US is going the same way. Balance is the key.

This mean we need to work out ways to deal with a large population for the foreseeable future. Generally this means reducing the environmental impact of each individual.

The first step I see is requiring all private land to be productive or it reverts back to public land. This means it must be farmed or leased to someone who farms it.

Farming itself should be environmentally sound and could consist of simply using the land as a renewable wood lot or renewable harvesting of a intrinsic resource of the land like say edible wild mushrooms. As long as you show good stewardship an that the land produces enough to pay its taxes you get to keep it. Buildings would be heavily taxed and considered part of the land.

Townships would get a fixed amount of land to build on based on the ability of the surrounding land to support the inhabitants and the quality of the land used to site the town. Next they also have and added burden of supporting larger towns this can be done by
taxing larger towns and sending the revenue out to the supporting villages.

The whole idea is to encourage correct demographics which is villages built on the poorest soils with reasonable sized towns scattered at a much lower density.

Finally these towns should be linked with electric rail powered by renewable energy sources. Internally electric trolleys can be used if needed. A solar/wind powered train is basically free after fixed costs. You can line the rail track with solar panels and gain far more energy than required to run the trains if the the population densities are
correct. And you can use mixed freight/commuter trains. So generally you will be running enough trains carrying goods that and additional car for the small number of passengers
is not prohibitive.

And last but not least we can eliminate the 9-5 job cycle for many and move to distributed robotic/expert factories for goods production. So technology can readily remove the need for the twice daily mass migration of people. Functional teleconferencing
and other communication methods can eliminate a lot of travel. We still have a need to meet people face to face just for human bonding if for nothing else but personal meetings can be called for the real reason we meet which is we need the physical interaction.

Finally the end goal is to determine how to maintain a productive renewable society. Every year the solar energy falling on the earth is enormous if we use a small part of this energy to increase the quality of life for everyone I think we will find that as we adopt this approach and the population decreases we will eventually reach a high standard of living for all. Its not a closed system but we have to become wise stewards of our photons. The reason I went through the whole scenario is I think its critical that society start working from where they want to be in 50-100 years and work backwards.

By getting a consensus on how we want and must live its trivial to accept changes we need to make to achieve those goals. Until we convert ourselves into such a long thinking culture I think you will find any measures designed to achieve this goal will be subverted. So I have little hope in band-aids unless I see a dramatic change in the way people think.

Don't ever forget the other stable culture is one where the king owns everything and the serfs live in misery. Its easy to go back to a king/slave culture. I question if we ever really escaped it. I think oil just allowed fat and happy slaves and a few more kings.