A carbon tax is supposed to change a lifestyle that creates pollution, to a lifestyle that does not.
That says that it is a training tool that will save our world from a perceived disaster. Part of that plan includes a ‘cap and trade’ system that allows a polluter to purchase ‘carbon credits’ to offset their ‘carbon footprint’. I wonder how that reduces pollution when it allows a ‘polluter’ to pollute.
The carbon tax certainly does have a big impact on financially marginalized people who cannot afford fuel for their vehicle, whether for work or personal use (and home heating in this arctic country). The overall plan is to create incentive for people to get rid of their carbon-polluting vehicle and purchase an electric vehicle, but then they cannot afford this new vehicle (even with a paltry government grant) and so they just suffer, and do without other things to pay for transportation that everyone needs in this great country.
Then there are the rich who fly around using multiple planes. Oh, but their carbon footprint is zero for burning all this fuel because they purchased carbon credits with their abundance of financial wealth. So the rich can pollute, but the poor cannot; that is the system.
Another training system is to provide positive incentives, like tax credits, to those who develop better ways to reduce their carbon footprint. This is a positive way to provide an incentive to industries to develop better ways and systems. How about a vehicle conversion system that would also save the energy (pollution) to build a new one?
How many teachers and parents believe if you spare the rod, you spoil the child?
That’s nineteenth-century thinking. How many really believe that the carbon tax ‘rod’ will really work? How many believe that positive incentive training will work? How many people believe that a massive manufacturing (energy and pollution) of new products will be better than a sustainable phasing in?
Then there are those who believe that we must throw everything away and go back to how people lived centuries ago, before the industrial revolution. How many of those would want to be part of the six billion, or so, people who would have to die so that the remainder could live that way because that technology could not support all we have today? We do have a problem. Think with your brain, and beware of politics for power.
Jerrilynn DeCock
Penticton
