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The carbon tax has its critics — do any of them have better ideas? (www.cbc.ca)

submitted 10 months ago by Grappling7155 to c/canada

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

That's easy to just say, but what would the regulation be? No more fossil fuels starting tomorrow? Civilisation grinds to a halt, or more likely people just ignore the law. Corporations have to be responsible? They interpret "responsible" as a $5 donation quarterly to panda conservation. You could go through every technology that uses fossil fuels and tighten up efficiencies, but that's slow to start with, and then it turns out it causes a big problem in some niche application. Think about plastic straws and disabled people. It's far better just to add a tax and let it work out in the wash.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Actually, I would debate that we've done this sort of thing in the past. We phased out CFCs pretty fast, but that was just one sort of chemical with comparable alternatives available for it's reasonably narrow uses. Some of the alternatives did turn out to be problematic as well, IIRC, and then had to be phased out or restricted in turn.

The equivalent policy would be saying oil will be banned by 2035, figure it out investors. That's actually less interventionist than a carbon tax, and really seems like it would be ignored until 2033, when everyone goes "oops, extension please".

When you make the system complex and allow people to trade their credits, you’ve just created a system that’s designed to be abused, and of course it will be.

I mean, a complex, opaque system that works anyway do to clever structure is kind of the principle of our whole civilisation.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I don’t understand what you mean about opaqueness being the principle of our civilization. Democratic government has the express opposite goal.

Oh yeah? Without looking it up, what was the name or number of the last motion parliament passed? I'm not sure, and I pay more attention than most.

I know, you said goal, but then why bother with a rigid constitution and giant complex legal system? A lot of vague goals were mentioned on the way, and implemented in sometimes weird ways (peine forte et dure, looking at you), but in 2024 checks and balances are the clear winning design concept. Our system is a system, it's not dependent on the actions or intentions of any one person. It's complex as a result, and therefore opaque to anyone who's not near-omniscient. Ditto for markets.

Why not simply ban trucks over a certain size or weight for personal use?

Well, what about remote areas? I guarantee there's at least one dude on a farm that can't be accessed without a bit of ground clearance. That was the original use-case of SUVs. Funny enough, they became popular generally because of US regulations introduced around 2000 or so, which made small vehicles more expensive to produce, and prompted companies to hard-sell larger models.

How do you define personal, too? I know plenty of people who have a truck that they use for work, but also personally. I don't know how they've structured the ownership of their vehicle, or how you would distinguish between "my tax shelter owns it" and an actual business. You'd have to figure that out, and then enforce it, administrate it, and build in carveouts for whatever exceptions that turns up.

This derisively gets called the "why don't you just" school of public policy. There's a reason actual regulations tend to be many, many pages long, and usually still have tons of gaps.