this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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The Carbon Tax Is Good for Canadians. Why Axe It? (thewalrus.ca)
submitted 5 months ago by girlfreddy to c/canada
40 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The year 2023 was by far the warmest in human history. Climate extremes now routinely shock in their intensity, with a direct monetary cost that borders on the unfathomable. Over $3 trillion (US) in damages to infrastructure, property, agriculture, and human health have already slammed the world economy this century, owing to extreme weather. That number will likely pale in comparison to what is coming. The World Economic Forum, hardly a hotbed of environmental activists, now reports that global damage from climate change will probably cost some $1.7 trillion to $3.1 trillion (US) per year by 2050, with the lion’s share of the damage borne by the poorest countries in the world.

And yet we fiddle.

In today’s Canada, there is deception, national in scope, coming directly from the right‑wing opposition benches in Ottawa. In 2023, the populist Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre adopted “Axe the tax” as his new mantra and has shaped his federal election campaign around that hackneyed rhyme.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (17 children)

On December 11, 2008, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson said that a carbon tax is preferable to a cap-and-trade program which "inevitably introduces unnecessary cost and complexity". A carbon tax is "a more direct, more transparent and more effective approach". Tillerson added that he hoped that the revenues from a carbon tax would be used to lower other taxes so as to be revenue neutral.[13]

Wtf, how is this possible? If your carbon tax doesn't convince your biggest polluters to divest from fossil fuels, you're doing it wrong.

The whole point is that it is not revenue neutral

[–] lazylion_ca 9 points 5 months ago (16 children)

The biggest polluters just pass the cost onto their customers by raising prices.

[–] thanks_shakey_snake 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

And their customers (e.g. manufacturers, transportation providers) factor in both those price hikes and the carbon taxes that they themselves need to pay, and pass those costs on to their customers, and so forth until finally end consumers are paying for several rounds of carbon tax that's priced into more expensive goods and services.

In many cases, there's nowhere for market forces to displace the inefficiency, so things just get more expensive without changing supply chains much.

[–] ahal 1 points 5 months ago

If there's one thing you can count on, it's the greed of corporations. That means they will try to cut costs every means possible in order to maximise profit. If going green saves them a dime, they will do it. This isn't a hard concept to understand.

Will they reduce prices rather than pocket the change? Probably not.. But y'all are acting like the carbon tax is meant to reduce prices??? It's meant to save the fucking planet.

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