Many governments take the view that voluntary national targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are sufficient to avoid negative climate effects. In the absence of independent verification, however, pledges are unlikely to be sufficient for a rapid and strong reduction of emissions. It is often claimed that a global carbon tax could be an effective instrument. However, such a tax is difficult to set and to collect, especially in countries with poor administrative infrastructure. Here, we formulate and discuss a novel approach, the Global Carbon Surcharge (GCS), that mimics a carbon tax but does not require tax collection by governments. We define GCS as a requirement or a voluntary commitment encompassing all companies extracting carbon-carrying raw materials, namely coal, oil, gas and limestone, with the aim to burden their extraction with costs proportional to their carbon intensity. GCS mandates all companies to store these materials immediately after mining for a given period of time in the vicinity of the production site. Thereby, GCS generates additional costs that propagate through all sectors of the global economy. We elucidate how the investment costs for the storage infrastructure translate into surcharges on the raw materials. We show that by a proper choice of the storage time and the size of the storage unit, GCS becomes equivalent to a carbon tax in the range between 50 and 100 € per ton of CO2 that is assumed to be necessary for the transition to a carbon-neutral energy system. An attractive feature of GCS is that it can be verified, in particular by citizens themselves, using publicly available satellite data. Finally, if compulsory storage is coupled to blockchain-based smart contracts and a mandatory (expensive) mining of cryptocurrency, GCS can be operated without governmental protectionism, corruption and fraud. However, the main uncertainties of the GCS approach lie in the substantial expansion of infrastructure and the fact that the induced price effects must be sufficient to achieve a rapid and far-reaching substitution of fossil fuels.

中文翻译：

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减少人为排放二氧化碳的全球碳附加费

许多政府认为，减少温室气体排放的自愿性国家目标足以避免负面的气候影响。但是，在没有独立核查的情况下，认捐可能不足以迅速而有力地减少排放。人们通常认为，全球碳税可能是一种有效的手段。但是，这种税收难以设定和征收，特别是在行政基础设施薄弱的国家。在这里，我们制定并讨论一种新的方法，即全球碳附加费（GCS），该方法模仿碳税，但不需要政府征税。我们将GCS定义为一项要求或一项自愿承诺，涵盖所有开采含碳原材料（包括煤炭，石油，天然气和石灰石）的公司，目的是用与碳强度成正比的成本来负担提取费用。GCS要求所有公司在开采一定时间后在生产现场附近立即存储这些材料。因此，GCS产生了额外的成本，这些成本在全球经济的所有部门传播。我们阐明了存储基础架构的投资成本如何转化为原材料的附加费。我们表明，通过的存储时间和存储单元的大小的正确选择，GCS每吨被假定为是必要的过渡到碳CO2的变等同于50和100之间的范围内的碳税€ -中性能源系统。GCS的一个吸引人的特点是可以使用公开的卫星数据对它进行验证，特别是由公民自己进行验证。最后，如果强制性存储与基于区块链的智能合约和强制性（昂贵）加密货币的挖掘相结合，则GCS可以在没有政府保护主义，腐败和欺诈的情况下运行。但是，GCS方法的主要不确定性在于基础设施的大幅扩展，以及所诱发的价格效应必须足以实现快速而深远的化石燃料替代这一事实。