How do people feel about the carbon tax? 14 cents per litre of gasoline, about $5.60 extra per 40L tank. 17 cents per litre of diesel/furnace oil. The carbon tax is a ‘market solutions’ approach to climate change; by increasing the cost of carbon, it reduced the demand, and moves us away from carbon consumption….
One of the incessant ‘Trudeau must go’ posts includes this feature chart. It pegs Canada’s total debt as $1,163 billion, and each individual debt as $31K. These numbers are supposed to frighten us. But what struck me is how low they are. Compare this, say, with total Canadian consumer debt of $2,200 billion. Average consumer…
the commentators oppose tariffs not because they hurt consumers, but because they hurt producers. They increase costs to producers, and reduce demand for their product, which means they need to become more efficient in order to compete.
If you don’t want people pouring sewage on your lawn, if you don’t want people dumping carbon into the air, the answer is the same. You either force them to stop, or make them pay for the cleanup.
Sure, taxes raise money for the provision of common services, but this is something we’d need to do no matter what. The main beneficial effect of taxes is to limit the gap between rich and poor, to ensure that we don’t reach unsustainable levels of inequality.