I would only vote for it if there are tax releases in other areas because tax rate is already enormous in my country. We already have an environmental tax that was used to stuff holes in social security systems.
That said, binding environmental costs to actual prices would be terrific.
But if households only generate 1/5 of overall emissions (depending on data and negligent of consumption), we might need other mechanisms.
You can control many things through taxes, but I believe this to be inefficient. I would have no problem with paying double for fuel. But that isn't the reality for most people that are dependent on cars.
Better than nothing perhaps, but I have very low expectations for this tax.
Pretty much all the carbon tax proposals by economists and climate activists are revenue neutral. That's the whole idea: make climate-damaging activities more expensive, and to balance it out do some combination of just lowering other taxes and investing in infrastructure that helps us cope with climate change (carbon capture, electrical grid, etc.), which creates jobs.
I'm reminded of how the German word for "tax" is "Steuer", i.e. steering/control, which encourages smarter thinking about tax policy because it acknowledges precisely this effect on incentives.
> would only vote for it if there are tax releases in other areas because tax rate is already enormous in my country.
A carbon divided, which is to say redistributing the income of the carbon tax equally and directly to the people should at least in principle be uncontroversial because it is both socially equitable (richer people live more carbon intensive lives and thus contribute more), and it sets the right consumption incentive without taking money out of people's personal pockets (which should please conservatives).
It should, in principle. Canada recently introduced a carbon tax with dividend program in which about 80% of consumers receive more in dividends than they pay out in carbon tax. Despite that, opposition is very significant. It's a crazy world.
I’m all for carbon taxes too, but I always question the accounting for this.
Consumers pay some carbon taxes directly (e.g. while buying gasoline), but does this account for indirect carbon taxes (e.g. the natural gas used in making fertilizer to grow the food that the cow ate to make this burger?).
At the end of the day, a lot of our purchases are really paying for the energy used in its production at some level.
In theory, if both the burger and the natural gas is domestic, it's fully accounted. The tax is on the natural gas so the cost shows up in the burger.
In practice, it's @#%#ed up, as usual. They didn't implement a carbon tariff, so foreign fertilizer would have been a lot cheaper than domestic fertilizer. But instead of putting a carbon tariff on foreign fertilizer, they gave domestic fertilizer a 90% exemption.
Tariffs are often regulated by treaties or meet with reactionary tariffs so local exemptions are usually the most practical way of dealing with imports.
The premise is that the exemptions were selected for political reasons, and a small fish in a small industry has zero chance of getting their own exemption.
That said, binding environmental costs to actual prices would be terrific.
But if households only generate 1/5 of overall emissions (depending on data and negligent of consumption), we might need other mechanisms.
You can control many things through taxes, but I believe this to be inefficient. I would have no problem with paying double for fuel. But that isn't the reality for most people that are dependent on cars.
Better than nothing perhaps, but I have very low expectations for this tax.