Re:Big Coal Plants Begin to Close
by gambiting on Friday August 16, 2019 @02:44PM
(#20718263)
And don't forget that there's still a huge number of private homes which use coal fired boilers. Even if all coal power plants closed tomorrow, Polish towns would still be consuming huge amounts of coal just to stay warm in winter(and there's practically no regulations about emissions from those, it just goes straight up your chimney).
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There is a lot of funding available for replacing those - one of the largest chunks of cash provided by eu do far.
Sure, but there's still a lot of people who don't want to, simply because coal is cheaper than both eco-pellets and gas. My grandparents only changed theirs from coal to gas last year, and only because grandpa was getting too old to go and add coal to the boiler every few hours - but they've been complaining about the fortune that the gas is costing them ever since.
A carbon tax would fix that.
And one won't be implemented for the same reason why coal boilers haven't been banned yet - "think of the poor people - if they cannot afford their coal for winter how will they stay warm?".
Any serious carbon tax scheme proposed is income neutral; a tax-and-dividend system.
Can you explain how it would work in this case please?
Re:Big Coal Plants Begin to Close
by godtoldmetodoit on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @09:42AM
(#20746895)
You tax carbon at say, $40 a ton. You then distribute any revenue from the tax as a dividend to every adult in the country.
It results in a net increase in purchasing power for your most vulnerable citizens.