 | The Bullroarer - Tuesday 8 July 2008 | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | Australian Senate: New Select Committee on Fuel and Energy |  |
User login
Contact
- anz at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Archives
GAIA Host Collective
A carbon tax though would raise the price sure, but would it raise it enough for people to really change their behaviour significantly enough to actually reduce emissions. Did the GST stop people from buying stuff? No. And the way pricing was deliberatley designed to conceal the tax was a bit sneaky but the GST was never designed to act as a brake on people consuming. Thats why they didn't call it a consumption tax.
Carbon taxes have an entirely differnet purpose. Their primary goal should be to get the market to change its behaviour, not necessarily raise revenue. In order to do that you have to take the revenue raised by the carbon tax and effectively destroy it. You can't pump it back into the economy as compensation to the poor consumers and industry who paid it in the first place. The same goes for any money raised by an ETS. Compensation to the miscreants that are the beneficiaries of the pollution is not going to encourage them to change their ways.
Turning off the power or gas after 28 days in the month becasue they have used up their ration, would get their attention a lot faster. But alas we are not the elected PTB so the Termoil plan must remain consigned to an internet footnote here on TOD.
(BTW I think that your personal plan of reducing your own carbon footprint, driven primarily on the morality rather than the economics is is where the greatest impact is to be had.)
The GST wasn't designed to reduce consumption, nonetheless it had that effect for the first several months. This is the pattern with all taxes whatever the ostensible purpose: when you introduce or raise the tax, people drop their spending, when you remove or lower the tax, people raise their spending.
Logically, then, you'd have to bring a carbon tax in and increase it year by year until you'd reached your overall carbon emissions target.
With the revenue you should invest in options to the things which emit carbon. Obviously it's no use making petrol or coal more expensive if people have no public transport and can't change to renewables. Not only is this reasonable and logical, it would also make raising the tax more politically palatable. "Yes, you have to pay another 5 cents a litre now, but the extra $500 million we expect to raise from this is going to be invested in railways - so you don't have to drive. And yes, coal-sourced electricity now costs 22c/kWh, but wind is 21c/kWh, you can always change to that just call up your retailer, and whatever you buy they have to invest in more turbines." Etc.
A ration has the appeal of firmness, but simply isn't going to happen. We Aussies already have a sense of entitlement matched only by Americans, turning the tap off would just make it worse.
As well as reducing my carbon footprint from a sense of morality - some things are right to do whether they do any good for the world or not - I do it to slowly spread the idea that (a) it's a good thing and (b) it's possible to do without living in a cave. Having such ideas spread makes it politically easier to bring in measures like carbon taxes at government level. Ideas are powerful things. Things seem impossible, but people just keep talking about them as though they're possible, then others decide they're possible, and then they happen.
Change is like a cup with a tap dripping into it in the dark. We never know when, but eventually a single drop will cause the cup to overflow. Things like this
are just single drops, utterly insignificant in themselves, but helping to contribute towards overflowing the cup of change.