Friday, February 25, 2011

carbon tax

my initial response to the carbon tax is ... yay!
the increases in the price of electricity and petrol will hopefully force us to be energy wise, and less car-reliant.

my hesitation is that this is just a tax dressed up in green. how many dollars of tax to be paid by the industrial polluters will be refunded them in subsidies? i fear that it will be almost 1 for 1.

and this carbon tax will only be appropriate if the money is used in helping rehabilitate the world we've polluted, and in investment in green energy sources, in particular solar.

1 comment:

byron smith said...

Yes, a poorly designed carbon tax could be worse than useless through distraction and giving people a (false) feeling that something is being done.

Making us all (including and especially corporations) feel the real price of fossil fuel use and so reducing that use has to be the primary point of any carbon tax.