Regulation.
The carbon tax, along or instead of cap-and-trade, was the conservative alternative to straight-up regulation. “We need a market based approach!” they said, “We need something that’s responsive!” they said, “We need something that’s cost-neutral!” they said. Regulation was too hard, too strict, too ornerous, too old-school for our modern, fast-moving, market-based world.
“Trust us!” the capitalists said.
And now it’s too hard because even a weaksauce carbon tax is too much for their precious profit margins. There’s money that someone else is making that is rightfully theirs! It was their idea and now they can’t even.
So you know what? You don’t like the carbon tax? The we go back to good old-fashioned, ball-busting regulation. Because it fucking works.
Stop emissions. There’s a lot of negative effects to society for doing that, but that’s the only real answer at this point. It also isn’t going to avoid decades of worsening conditions, but there isn’t a solution for that. All we can really do is stop continuing the damage we’re still doing, even after decades of knowing we were doing it.
Stop emissions.
That’s a goal, not a plan.
Regulate. You know, we have done so for decades. Remember leaded gasoline? No credits involved. New rules instituted, companies adjust, victory.
It’s so disingenuous to ask the question, when environmental problems and solutions predate the carbon tax idea by decades, or even centuries, depending how you define things.
That’s easy to just say, but what would the regulation be? No more fossil fuels starting tomorrow? Civilisation grinds to a halt, or more likely people just ignore the law. Corporations have to be responsible? They interpret “responsible” as a $5 donation quarterly to panda conservation. You could go through every technology that uses fossil fuels and tighten up efficiencies, but that’s slow to start with, and then it turns out it causes a big problem in some niche application. Think about plastic straws and disabled people. It’s far better just to add a tax and let it work out in the wash.
We can test your argument by asking what has been done historically, and we can successfully point to dozens of examples of environmental regulation that didn’t involve a tax. There can’t be any serious debate about the fact that we’ve done this in the past, and it worked in the past.
You could be right, maybe adding a tax is more effective on average, but I’m apprehensive. When you make the system complex and allow people to trade their credits, you’ve just created a system that’s designed to be abused, and of course it will be.
Actually, I would debate that we’ve done this sort of thing in the past. We phased out CFCs pretty fast, but that was just one sort of chemical with comparable alternatives available for it’s reasonably narrow uses. Some of the alternatives did turn out to be problematic as well, IIRC, and then had to be phased out or restricted in turn.
The equivalent policy would be saying oil will be banned by 2035, figure it out investors. That’s actually less interventionist than a carbon tax, and really seems like it would be ignored until 2033, when everyone goes “oops, extension please”.
When you make the system complex and allow people to trade their credits, you’ve just created a system that’s designed to be abused, and of course it will be.
I mean, a complex, opaque system that works anyway do to clever structure is kind of the principle of our whole civilisation.
CFCs are a good reminder that we can successfully ban dangerous things, if we carefully follow up to see what the workarounds are, and if they are harmful, too.
Or consider a simple car example. SUVs and trucks in the US have led to a massive increase in deaths. And they pollute heavily. And they fill up roads making traffic worse. And there’s less room for parking. Why not simply ban trucks over a certain size or weight for personal use? Obviously people are driving vehicles far larger than they need, and it’s killing others. So ban new sales starting in five years. Why not? The manufacturers know what they’re doing is unethical, and they don’t care, so nobody would feel bad for them.
I don’t understand what you mean about opaqueness being the principle of our civilization. Democratic government has the express opposite goal.
I don’t understand what you mean about opaqueness being the principle of our civilization. Democratic government has the express opposite goal.
Oh yeah? Without looking it up, what was the name or number of the last motion parliament passed? I’m not sure, and I pay more attention than most.
I know, you said goal, but then why bother with a rigid constitution and giant complex legal system? A lot of vague goals were mentioned on the way, and implemented in sometimes weird ways (peine forte et dure, looking at you), but in 2024 checks and balances are the clear winning design concept. Our system is a system, it’s not dependent on the actions or intentions of any one person. It’s complex as a result, and therefore opaque to anyone who’s not near-omniscient. Ditto for markets.
Why not simply ban trucks over a certain size or weight for personal use?
Well, what about remote areas? I guarantee there’s at least one dude on a farm that can’t be accessed without a bit of ground clearance. That was the original use-case of SUVs. Funny enough, they became popular generally because of US regulations introduced around 2000 or so, which made small vehicles more expensive to produce, and prompted companies to hard-sell larger models.
How do you define personal, too? I know plenty of people who have a truck that they use for work, but also personally. I don’t know how they’ve structured the ownership of their vehicle, or how you would distinguish between “my tax shelter owns it” and an actual business. You’d have to figure that out, and then enforce it, administrate it, and build in carveouts for whatever exceptions that turns up.
This derisively gets called the “why don’t you just” school of public policy. There’s a reason actual regulations tend to be many, many pages long, and usually still have tons of gaps.
It sounds like you’re suggesting that because our system of government is complex, increasing the complexity even more is generally a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If that’s what you mean, I disagree with you.
It also sounds like you’re repeating basic facts about crafting legislation that we all know. I’m not a lawmaker and I’m not trying to write a law here in the comment section, so I don’t particularly care to prepare a several page document. Certainly one could do so if one were so inclined…
Not everybody knows that. If you do, cool, good to know, and I’m surprised you’re still so certain anyone could write this thing successfully.
On complexity, that we got off on a bit of a tangent, but I guess what I’m saying is that it’s unavoidable. You said… just a moment, I need to look back and repost because I’m forgetting…
When you make the system complex and allow people to trade their credits, you’ve just created a system that’s designed to be abused, and of course it will be.
Right. There’s not more complexity to a carbon tax. In fact, the point of it is that it’s really simple for legislators to implement, for industry to follow and adapt around, and we still have a strong theory that says it should work to reduce emissions, regardless of any (legal) attempts at “abuse”. The way it actually works itself out will be complex, but that’s because our technology and supply chains are intrinsically complex.
Yeah. Cancel the whole fucking thing, it only applies to provinces not historically Liberal voting anyways.
If only climate change could be cancelled.
What are you talking about?
The carbon pricing plan from the federal level applies to every province. Each province has the option to create whatever program they wish to put a price on carbon, if they don’t WANT to create their own program they can choose to use the default carbon rebate program managed by the federal government.
Any province using the carbon rebate program is doing so by choice. And if you don’t like it you should be talking to your provincial politicians and encouraging them to setup whatever system you prefer.
You can’t blame the federal government because your conservative provincial government is unable to actually solve any of it’s own problems (but that seems to be the conservative strategy these days)
No. It doesn’t
lies.
Do you have anything to actually prove any of that is lies?
I’ve given you substantial evidence that what you’re saying isn’t true. And you’re just responding with “lies” as if that somehow invalidates the factual evidence I’ve given you.
You need to either read this new information, learn something new and admit that what you were saying before isn’t true. Or you need to provide proof that what you’re saying is backed up by reputable sources.
Removed by mod
So, “no” then? Your answer is “no”. Being a cranky fuckwad in your non-answer doesn’t make it noy a non-answer.
What is your better idea for combating climate change? Because, from what I’ve seen, critics of the carbon tax are acting in bad faith even if they believe it’s ineffectual, because they all choose to ignore the associated rebate, while also refusing to address climate change in any way.
So, what’s your better plan?
my answer was clearly yes. The Liberals don’t even believe in this plan, it only applies in 3 or 4 provinces. As for a plan, mine is not raping people for tax money in a country that isn’t the fucking problem anyways.
Every province have a carbon pricing model, how did you miss that?
Provinces had the option to build their own system, or use one provided by the feds.
Judging from your other comments you have some very large fundamental misunderstandings of how the system works. I think you need to take a good hard look at where you’ve been getting your information, someone is lying to you and you’re falling for it.
You have literally no idea. I hear this all the time, almost like there’s been a disinformation campaign of some sort.
You hear it all the time because it’s how the system works.
This page has more details that will be useful for you:
There are also links at the bottom of the page to more details.
If you don’t trust it because it’s a Canada.ca address, then I think your best bet is to go read the actual bill, I’m not going to find that for you, but you’re going to have to but in some effort, you’ve been mislead (which is fine it happens) but then you’ve decided to start spreading that same misinformation, that isn’t ok. It isn’t that hard to be an informed citizen today, but a big part of that is not trusting everything you hear on the news.
Yes yes, i’ve been mislead, surely, it can’t be that i actually pay the tax and a bunch of people who rent or whatever keep saying “nuh uh”. Entire provinces are pissed for no reason at all.
… Did you read what I posted?
Yes there is a carbon pricing program, that was never up for debate. I pay it too (and get more back than I pay in).
And yes portions of provinces have been mislead because they seem to have no ability to actually validate what they hear on the news. You’re a perfect example of that. You’re clearly really angry, but the things you’re angry about aren’t actually true.
I’m assuming you’ve heard things said by the media, or conservative polititions and you just accepted it as fact and it made you angry. Which was their plan. The whole conservative strategy these days is to mislead their base, create division and make people angry. They don’t have any substantial solutions for anything, but that’s also ok because their base have been trained to not question anything they hear.
I highly highly encourage you question everything you hear in the media. Official sources (like canada.ca) are trustworthy, but you can also go even deeper and find actual bills. You can work yourself out of the hole you’re in, it’ll just take time, and you’ll have to put in effort. I the current conservative controlled media landscape it takes constant effort to get real facts about things.
