Dear editor,
A. Casey’s Oct. 9 letter, The only purpose carbon tax will serve is to make things more expensive, seems to attempt to up end the most pervasive and widely accepted principle of modern economic theory: The Law of Demand – the higher the price of a good, the less people will demand that good. Less demand for fossil fuels is the goal of a carbon tax.
Having made such a basic misapprehension, Casey proceeds to splatter the page with irrelevant distractions like; what will replace cheap energy in Chinese disposable parts, countries around the world are not collecting enough recyclables, industry won’t make enough affordable repair parts. If Casey had argued that we need a more aggressive carbon tax in order to even begin to shift the inertia of a world succumbing at ever-increasing rates to the ravages of out of control climate change, I would have been the first to applaud the letter writer from Port Alberni.
Though Casey may well not have meant it that way, the argument that we don’t do anything until we know all the details of the perfect solution is a defeatist argument for doing nothing — just wait and see if there are any survivors.
We have to start somewhere. We have to start learning how we can survive and prosper in an age that turns away from the all-too-useful gases that are destroying our atmosphere.
Norm Reynolds
Courtenay
