This is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and for very good reason.
When the only "solution" to "fighting" global warming is to levy more taxes on the middle class, increase food and construction costs, and cripple developing nations' ability to build industry -- when elites fly around the world on private jets (that spew more CO2 in 6 hours than I will create in 10 years), and "researchers" rake in grant money based on promoting apocalyptic levels of fear -- well... put it like this: If you want right-wing populist governments, that's how you're going to get them.
It would also be a very informative trial run for a UBI (though in this case the amount would be smaller).
The "problem" with this is strictly politics: a) It would actually work, so the fossil fuel energy companies hate it; b) There is no opportunity for graft because the money is distributed to everyone and not just the politically connected, so there is no special interest lobby trying to make it happen.
What would be the cost of administering this tax?
There would be a minor one-time cost for the small minority people none of that applies to, to fill out a form specifying where you want the money to be deposited or the check mailed. But the fundamental process of distributing the money would be a transfer of a fixed amount to each citizen with a social security number, which is easily computerized.
If you want to only tax fuels, that's a start.
And a more efficient way to handle imports would be to impose general tariffs on imports from countries that don't themselves impose a carbon tax, rather than trying to calculate the effects of something happening in a foreign country. Which would have a more significant effect anyway, because causing the entire country to reduce its own emissions would be a much bigger win than causing only their exports to do so.
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...
It's also not clear what local deference is buying you here, because this is one of the very few cases of a national issue where the right solution is clear and simple and makes sense to implement uniformly at the national level.
The only sense of doing it at a local level is if the national government fails to act.
And local control can still "work" even when the same solution should apply everywhere because they can each individually adopt the same solution, the same as different countries can. In theory a province could even counteract the effect of the federal government trying to get them to spend 10% of the money by just distributing it to the population as it should have been, though of course politicians rarely have that much willpower.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't understand how taxing and redistributing the money does anything besides shifts the consumer power a bit???
I mean, wouldn't a better solution just be to have a carbox tax and then destroy the taxed money?
Bob is average. Bob pays $100 in carbon tax and then gets a check for $100. He doesn't have any more or less money to spend than he did before. He is able to continue his existing behavior and make no change whatsoever, if he wants.
But now he has the incentive to make a change. Because if he installs electric heat pumps instead of heating his house with oil, now he is only paying $50 in carbon tax but still gets a check for $100. If he can get the heat pumps installed for a monthly payment of less than $50, that's what he's going to do. And that's the goal.
Bob needs a new furnace. Heat pumps are more efficient and save on energy costs, but also cost more up front than a new furnace. That basically evens out, so maybe right now the heat pumps still cost $5/month more than the furnace, at least in the short term. Until the cost of operating the furnace goes up $50/month because of the carbon tax, in which case he wants to immediately save $45/month.
And Bob is average. Alice is a heavy user. She has a big old house that she likes to keep at 90 degrees all winter, so the carbon tax would increase her heating bill by $500/month, which she can save by switching to heat pumps and installing solar panels on her roof. So she's going to do that right away.
Presumably there would be some wrangling about how to measure CO2 emissions in certain harder to objectively measure contexts, but they're still not getting any of the money, they might just sneak in a way to not pay their full share. And we know with low variance how much CO2 is emitted by a unit of motor fuel or natural gas or coal, which represent the bulk of emissions.
This is a bad take. We are currently living in apocalyptic levels of REALITY.
The people saying what you just said, but twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, were speaking out against the warnings that--if we'd acted in them instead of attacking the messenger as you did-- could've kept us from global wildfire and heat domes.
The world didn't end after the Black death and it did not end after WW2. And it will not end after a nuclear war.
So we should never do anything because the world is never going to end.
(/s but there certainly is a strain of the media/public that blasted right past “it’s not real” to “welp it’s real and it’s too late to do anything about it, let’s do nothing”.)
You want poor people to switch to an electric car? Do what California is doing with car buybacks and grants for new and used EV's. A low income person in some counties can get a couple of grand to trade in his old gas car for a used EV's like a Bolt. That's better because instead of feeling attacked people feel like they got a decent deal.
E-bikes and trains can save the world.
I think this is part of the reason why the EU economy is pretty stagnant, but it is livable. Unfortunately, it also shows that it doesn't make people cut back too much on gasoline use.
Implementing a carbon tax that increases that cost along every step of a supply chain increases the price of everything, not just gasoline.
See: Price of groceries (and all other CPG) in Canada. People will blame the retailers and lazy headlines about record profits, but if you look at their actual margins, the value of CAD, and the fact that the government is increasing the population faster than anything else can catch up… it’s not surprising that they’re posting record numbers. People need to eat. The oligopoly issue definitely plays a part but that’s another can of worms.
Ye, and CEO consumes more of everything, so anyone lower income will receive more from re-distrubtion than they wil pay in tax.
Unfortunately our current government doesn’t realize that they’re not comparable to California.
Everything else is green theater.
Yes, and that's the fucking point of it. If producing a pound of steak emits 20 kg of CO2, then either whoever's buying the steak is paying for it, or the rest of humanity is paying for it when climate change comes back knocking at the door.
* From quick Google search, a pound of steak might be somewhere between 20-60 kg CO2.
It’s not about being fair, it’s about keeping the politicians out of it as much as possible. It costs very little money to let the 1% get theirs, because by definition there just aren’t very many of them. Thats a tiny price to pay for the major advantage of less political football.
Under such a tax the distribution to that $20k a year bike commuting kitchen worker would probably be significantly more than the amount the carbon tax has raised their costs.
That CEO on the other hand would see the costs to operate their jet go up way more than their share of the carbon tax distribution.
Mandating a “living wage” makes some things noticeably more expensive: Burgers, rideshares, lawn care, …
A serious, effective carbon tax will make gas more expensive. Maybe 50 cents/gallon.
If the voting public felt the same way about gas prices as they do about the minimum wage—if you can’t afford it your financial model is immoral—an effective carbon tax would be a political slam dunk.