This is worth reading: BC enegy guru Mark Jaccard argues in The Tyee that the province’s new carbon tax hits a sweet spot. Not to hard, not too soft, but just right.
Apparently, the tax has been attacked from both the left (doesn’t do enough to curb emissions, too hard on consumers) and from the right (hurts businesses, so high that it’ll spur runaway inflation).
The fact that it’s taking heat from both sides means nothing, of course. Sometimes, the critiques from one side or the other are simply wrong—so policymakes simply can’t gauge whether they’ve achieved a balanced policy based solely on the tally of hate mail that lands in their inbox.
But in this case, Jaccard makes some pretty compelling arguments that BC’s recently announced carbon tax is just about as good as it gets in a democracy: not too fast, yet far-sighted enough to prompt genuine emissions reductions over the long term; effective, without creating the sort of economic disruptions that stir political opposition; and perhaps most importantly, more fair to low-income folks than the carbon taxes that have been levied in Scandinavia and the UK.
Read it for yourself, though. I’m sure that the debate over BC’s carbon tax is far from over, and in the meantime, I think it’s good to get some exposure to the different perspectives on the debate—since I’m sure that the same arguments and talking points will be deployed in other jurisdictions that decide to follow BC’s lead.
observer
Why bother insisting a tax on something that is still yet to be proven to be causing so called global warming. I have been doing some research and it seems like only folks that advocate the idea of climate change is Al Gore and his mob at UN’s IPCC. Anyone pay attention to ice core data which shows carbon concentration lagging temperature by rougly 800-1000 years? Anyone paying attention to sunspot activity? And not the least contaminated temperature measurement station data that UNIPCC used to construct its warming trend showing data. A few weeks ago i was a firm believer in global warming and yet now i have completely had changed my view on it. Keep the government out of people’s pocket, dont introduce a tax that is regressive hurting the poor the most, driving unit costs of most basic things in life up making them unoffordable.
Barry
Nice try “Observer”.I guess now that the delayer-in-chief has left the White House, the fossil fuel industry is resorting to spamming websites with partisan bile and fully discredited psuedo-science.The thousands of IPCC scientists from nations around the world are a “mob” controlled by Al Gore? Uh, huh.Of course rising temperatures increase CO2 in the global climate. That is the climate feedback disaster waiting for us that scientists like James Hansen of NASA have long warned us about. It is not a cause for joy. It scares the pants off people who understand what it means for our future. Of course people are paying attention to sunspot activity. Lots of scientists are. Over and over scientific studies of the sun have shown no correlation to our clearly warming climate.Ditto for the fake “contaminated temperature” controversy.Anyone wanting to read what climate science has to say about all these fossil fuel funded pseudo-controversies might want to start here: gristmill.grist.org/skepticsThe climate doesn’t care what what people “believe” and isn’t swayed by how many people are “firm believers”. It reacts to how much energy it has in its system. We are increasing that energy by adding a century of heat trapping CO2 from fossil fuels to the air and oceans. We need to stop before we trigger the much larger and uncontrollable CO2 releases that come from rapidly warming ecosystems themselves.