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15 comments on The Bullroarer - Thursday 6 December 2007
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15 comments on The Bullroarer - Thursday 6 December 2007
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GAIA Host Collective
I don't see why a farmer should get it cheaper than a regular person. That's what we do with water - the more you use, the cheaper it is. And that's got us our current water shortages, which I don't think is a good result.
A relatively small carbon tax could actually raise quite a lot of money without common people even noticing, while large carbon users could with small efficiencies make up for it. For example, the average emissions per Australian are about 25 tonnes of CO2e annually. $0.01/kg would raise
25,000 x 0.01 x 21,000,000 = $5.25 billion
We could raise about half that simply by taxing the major emissions causers, for example it'd be about $0.01/kWh for coal-fired stations, $0.022/lt for petrol, $0.25/kg for meat, and so on. This would be charged at the retail end of things, like the GST. We could raise from this about $3 billion annually.
With that money, we could invest in renewable energy, mass tranist and so on. And that amount - a couple of hundred bucks per Aussie - is not going to bankrupt any common people, while it will force large companies to seek efficiencies in fossil fuel and electricity use.
We'd just raise the tax by a couple of cents a year. Pretty soon everybody would be clamouring for renewable energy, more mass transit, and so on. The market demand combined with the carbon tax-generated subsidies would deal with things very effectively.
I agree - a steadily increasing carbon tax is the engine that can solve both global warming and peak oil (given enough time).
I like the idea of a carbon tax to reduce demand, but if there is not enough petrol to go around how can you justify price being the method of allocation rather than need?
Should the Porsche hill climb club have preference over Meals On Wheels?
Food rationing in war-time seems quite morally defensible.
Do you think the military, police, emergency services etc will bid in the open market for ever diminishing supplies at ever higher prices? I think not. They will have first bite of the cherry and the scraps will be thrown to the public chooks.
I stick to my point that some uses are more important than others and we must discriminate on that basis rather than merely fighting it out in the market place. The good guys don't always have the most money.
The thing is that if you have a relatively small tax, it hits small users lightly, and heavy users heavily. Petrol already jumps up and down five cents just on a weekly basis through the strangeness of the servo market, so if you've a carbon tax of five cents, the people who use 45 litres a week won't even notice, but the people who use 450 litres or 450,000 litres certainly will. So Meal on Wheels and Bob driving to his minimum wage dishwashing job will be fine, but taxi drivers and trucking companies are going to start looking at alternatives and efficiencies.
Rationing's quite morally defensible, but I don't see that it's needed right now. And the flipside to rationing (or high taxes) is the creation of a black market - and black markets favour those who are already wealthy, so again this time you really do get the problem that the Porsche driver gets fuel but the Meals on Wheels people don't.
I do think it's likely that government services will be given preference over private citizens in a limited supply situation. But again, that's a problem with rationing, not with carbon taxes.
And we're talking about what we think should happen, not what we think will happen. Neither a carbon tax nor rationing is politically likely.
Rather, I think that as the oil supply dwindles and its price rises, governments will actually stop taxing it and start subsidising it to try to keep the price low and the public's howls of outrage quietened. The prices will rise nonetheless and we'll have a recession, with many cities in the West looking a lot like a good chunk of Detroit, with abandoned homes and factories. Some cities will do better, and manage to get a good supply of fuel to keep everything going, and shanty towns will build up on the outskirts of these cities.
But we're talking about coulda woulda shoulda, not about willya.