Carbon Tax, Beloved Policy to Fix Climate Change, Is Dead at 47
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Because, there you have it, folks. People will not consent to meaningful climate change policy if they figure out that the policy might have an impact on their way of living.
It's just... there's stuff where we can push back, stuff where we can do better and hope that people rally to a common understanding, and this is definitely not the case here. Politicians have utterly rejected one of the most obvious, most effective solutions we have against climate change, and people don't care.
Ultimately the problem is that people aren't going to vote for things that make their life worse. And reducing fossil fuel usage currently makes your life worse. So it's unpopular.
I think sadly the answer is that we won't do anything meaningful about climate change until it's really, really bad - and then the mild life-worsening of a carbon tax will feel minor compared to the alternatives. Sadly it might be too late by then.
It’s too bad bc financial incentives like a carbon tax would almost certainly work. But needs better PR. For instance, a tax credit for electric cars can also be considered a tax on combustion engines, but it’s not presented that way.
Electoral reform is how we debug the system.
I just hope we can make this happen in time.
I don't see how things can get any better in Canada without electoral reform, so I don't give up on it.
There is a Local Choice movement to get local municipal to chose how they want elections, eg ranked ballot, and this may have impact on future pushes for reform provincially and federally.
The PROC committee did pass a motion recently to examine a Citizen Assembly on Electoral Reform, and it had support form all the parties. Unfortunately that committee may dissolve due to a federal election. (An attempted to grab 100% of the power with 40% support. Ugh.)
There's no such thing; anthropomorphizing “the economy” — which is an arbitrary abstraction and any measure of its health is even more arbitrary — is just a cover for protecting the interests of particular elites; economic concerns are prioritized as essential to the degree they are key interests of the relevant elites.
A government that acts this way isn't a pawn of the invisible hand of the market, but of the hand (often quite visible if you don’t get taken in by the “the economy” misdirection) of the people with cozy personal and business relationships with politicians.
Saying the economy is a cover for the elites to manipulate the masses is like saying sex is just something advertisers made up to sell beer. They are taking advantage of a situation, they didn't create the situation.
The fact is that a carbon tax would be a new line item on the everyman's bill. It's fewer dollars in their pockets to go out and spend on all the things they want. Less consumer spending means lower employment, more foreclosures, higher debt, increased demand on public services, etc. All things people legitimately don't want. Even if it is for a good cause, our style of democracy makes such a proposal political suicide, even before elites start throwing their weight around.
And frankly, even the elites are mere pawns of the economy. The Koch family did not use their power to make oil profitable, the profitability of oil made the Koch family powerful. If someone finds a way to make solar panels print money better than oil wells then Big Solar is going to be able to outspend Big Oil on all these climate change PR campaigns. The smart elites on the side of Big Oil will switch over to the more profitable team while the dumb ones lose their elite status along with their wealth as they go down with a sinking ship. Being enthralled by people selected by the invisible hand is just being controlled by the invisible hand with an extra step.
ie. via import tariffs, that increase the cost of an imported product based on its embedded CO2e, if the exporting country does not have a carbon tax in place.