Comment by panarchy
6 months ago
And the first person to come along screaming "I will cut the carbon tax that is making your life unaffordable!" will be elected
6 months ago
And the first person to come along screaming "I will cut the carbon tax that is making your life unaffordable!" will be elected
Well, make life afordable then, a simple solution. After that is achieved, make de-carbonated energy naturally cheaper than the carbon-based alternatives - there will be no need for carbon taxation and the right won't be able to mount a successful attack.
The problem isn't the affordability of life, it's the perception of affordability of life.
If Fox News spends $200M of screen time telling everyone that the tax is making all the prices of everything go up then that will be the predominant talking point.
That's the whole issue with "post truth" - perception _is_ reality at this point, at least effectively.
Certainly and that speaks to the problems of democracies. At least in theory if you ensure the tax is progressive as I suggested it shouldn't make the life of the majority unaffordable. However, monied interest would of course try, and maybe succeed, to convince voters of that anyway (thanks Citizens United).
I was referencing Canada where they implemented a carbon tax with a rebate. Facts didn't matter because the majority conservative media landscape just uncritically blasted out "carbon tax bad" for months/years on end. Most people were making money off of it but the perception that it was making things expensive (things were expensive from covid-era inflation) won out. It also didn't immediately solve global climate change so it was apparently bad policy too.
It didn't help that there were some very influential and sympathetic constituencies that were getting hurt by it, like farmers.
The carbon tax is supposed to be a three tier system: tax, rebate & tariff. There's supposed to be a tariff on the carbon content of all imports from any jurisdiction that doesn't have comparable carbon policies. It's the "carbon club" that William Nordhaus won the Nobel Memorial prize for. It sounds like Canada was close to setting this up with Europe, but the sticking point was the US -- nobody wanted to piss of the US by putting a tariff boundary with the US. Of course hindsight is 20/20 here. We should have slammed it in place the instead Trump starting being Trump, but by that time the carbon tax was gone. With the carbon club system, Canada's exporters wouldn't have been hurt by the carbon tax so badly.