We are in desperate need of a carbon tax to continuously push the economy away from global warming emissions. It's crazy that we let Saudi Arabia's oil whims dictate our transportation policy.
Maybe. (FTR, I support carbon taxation on balance.)
Many carbon taxation implementations would amount to a regressive tax. Poor people on average drive more and spend more of their income on gasoline than the wealthy. Add in the fact that it becomes a hidden consumption tax as well and it could end up being a fairly regressive tax.
Then the question becomes: are the ecological advantages worth the economic harm from the regressive nature?
Since my wife buys about 200 gallons of gas per year, my daily driver is electric, and our income is enough that we'd never notice a carbon tax, it's easy for me to support it personally. That's far from true for many others.
Saudi Arabia was imposing an extra $400 tax on your wife a couple years ago but we didn't have any say in it.
My favorite idea is a dynamic gas tax that maintains a constant slowly increasing price level. And using the tax revenue to invest in shifting the economy to be less carbon intensive.
> Many carbon taxation implementations would amount to a regressive tax.
So, set a national overall target CO2 production, divide it by the taxpaying population, and issue an fixed income tax credit of the carbon tax for that per-capita share of the target production. The poor spend, on average, a greater share of income on things that would pay the carbon tax, but if you rebate it that way, they still aren't usually going to end up seeing a net tax increase, though they'll still have all the socially beneficial incentives of a carbon tax.
You can mitigate the regressive nature of the tax by making the carbon tax "revenue neutral" and funnelling the revenues of the tax completely into credits and tax cuts for those most impacted, which includes low income persons.
British Columbia's carbon tax is claimed to be revenue neutral though I've noticed some criticism about the balance of resulting tax cuts.
Other carbon tax jurisdictions such as Alberta are taking a different approach and are using revenues on green projects.
Or, even better, you could use the money from the tax to build decent public transit so fewer people need to drive to work. This would enable to poor to avoid the tax by driving less.
If you don't build transit, people will have no choice but to drive just as much as they did before the tax was implemented, so the tax will have a minimal effect on vehicle emissions.
Sure, people will cut back on non-required trips, but the vast majority of driving people do is commuting, and they can't stop doing that unless they have an alternative means of getting to work.
Exactly. I don't drive, because I don't have to, but the vast majority of people I know live so far from their sources of income (and in some cases, grocery stores etc.) that even taking public transit, if there are routes to get them from A to B, would be laughable (i.e., 3 hours on five buses versus an hour and 10 minutes in a car on one highway to go one direction).
I've seen some divergent figures, but as far as I can tell, cars emissions are 20-30% of total US carbon emissions.
The only way to reduce driving significantly is to create useful public transit, so any carbon tax scheme that does not increase funding for public transit is just going to take money from peoples' pockets without giving them a realistic way to avoid it -- and as other posters have noted, it will disproportionately harm the poor. This could make carbon taxes so politically unpopular that they will be repealed, and new ones will not be created. That could be pretty bad for the environment.
Fracking started the war, but it's not profitable at current prices. SA is holding the prices at the current very low value to make sure fracking doesn't become more profitable.
