Question on proposing a tax for climate change.?

[Mr A]

You tax carbon and you are taxing EVERY aspect of life, even down to each breathe your draw.

Co2 isn't a pollutant and infact more Co2 is beneficial.

And I'll answer the usual charge by communists / socialists posing as environmentalists that I'm in bed with the oil companies. No...they are proposing and back a carbon tax too! = More profits.

I'll be damned if I'm going to have some snooty-nosed cafe latte sipping gravy train environmentalist tell me I should live like a peasant and control / tax every aspect of my life so they get fat from their front organisations like Greenpeace, WWF, UN.

It's quite ironic that actual environmental problems like toxic waste, waterways etc are taking a back seat to the fat cash cow that is man-made climate change.

Former Co-Founder of Greenpeace:

”The other reason that environmental extremism emerged, was because world Communism failed, the Wall came down, and a lot of peaceniks and political activists moved into the environmental movement bringing their neo-Marxism with them, and learned to use
green language in a very clever way to cloak agendas that actually have more to do with anti-Capitalism, and anti-globalisation, than they do anything with ecology or science.”

This is relevant to your question because it's yet another way of controlling and manipulating people into accepting a lower standard of living at the expense of betterment of society.

 

[CrazyConservative]

Yeah, you have figured out the best way to send our economy into the basement. Taxing energy is the same as a tax on every single item produced in this country. An increase that will be passed on the every person. Heating bills and gas will necessarily sky rocket. Remember when gas was $4.00 and that along had a negative impact on the economy? Imagine what happens if, in addition to gas prices spiking up0, everything else also spikes up.

I suggest reading up on the effects of inflation and what it does to your purchasing power.

 

[Trevor]

ORIGINAL RESPONSE

There is already such a system in place in quite a few countries around the world. It's known by various names - often Carbon Trading.

In esence Carbon Trading penalises companies that produce more than their allocated allowance of carbon emissions (or the equivalence of in other greenhouse gases) and it rewards those that produce less than their limit.

The mechanism involves the purchase and sale of Carbon Offsets (or credits). Companies coming in below their quota can sell their surplus credits to companies that go over their quota.

A simpler system simply penalises companies for exceeding their quota by way of a fine levied by the appropriate government. In this scheme there is no trading, just fines.

There is much talk of carbon taxes, these are taxes that are imposed on goods and services that produce high levels of greenhouse gases. Similarly, there are discounts and rewards for manufacturing or purchasing low emission products. Here in the UK for example, drivers of high emission vehicles pay more tax than they used to, those who drive low emission vehicles pay less than they used to.

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IN RESPONSE TO YOUR ADDITIONAL DETAILS

Personally I don't think that carbon taxes are a reasonable or realistic way to reduce carbon emissions.

The overwhelming majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from the more economically developed countries. In general these countries are getting richer and people have higher incomes and higher disposable incomes. As such, increasing the cost of goods or services does not reduce demand. Demand would only reduce when there is a cheaper, viable alternative.

To give you an example. I'm in the UK and here we have the most expensive gas in the world, it's currently around $10 a gallon, nearly 4 times the price in the US. Year on year the price has gone up, including the imposition of green taxes, and year on year demand has also gone up. The reason for the rise in demand being simply that there is no viable alternative. Whilst we don't like the price and are constantly harping on about it, it's something we have to accept.

I believe the same would hold true of any product or service that people wanted. Because carbon taxes are industry-wide it would mean a comparative price rise across the board, thus all suppliers would have to put their prices up and the consumer would have no choice but to pay the added premium.

Unfortunately the record of governments in this respect is not a good one. The revenue that has been raised through green taxes has often been used to subsidise spending in other areas of the public sector (if we didn't pay green taxes the governments would have had to impose other taxes).

My own feeling is that there is no simple solution to climate change. It's wholly unrealistic to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to a naturally sustainable level (that would require a 92.5% reduction). We are nowhere near to providing a scientific or technological solution, there are dozens in development or at the concept stage but it will be many years before anything that makes a significant impact becomes available. Much of the funding for these projects has come from the private sector (and not, as skeptics so often claim, the public sector). There's more about the scientific approach to counteract climate change in this answer I provided http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AqpiLnPZzFnkCBRkMOw9vtgjzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20070702233029AAMohzb

I'm not averse to the idea of carbon trading provided that the system is in balance - for each $ imposed in fines someone else is rewarded with a $ for reducing emissions.

I also beleive that we need to be looking into the scientific approaches more. We should do what we can to reduce emissions but have to accept that this will never be to a sustainable level (6.8 billion people on the planet simply breathing and farting every day produces almost the same amount of CO2 that the natural processes can absorb).

I would like to see more money being put into research projects and developing alternatives to fossil fuels. If we don't come up with a suitable solution shortly then we could go beyond the 'tipping point' (where the situation becomes irreversible and irepairable).

The IPCC have calculated that if climate change is left unchecked, the global economic cost will be $4 trillion a year by the end of the century. The scale of investment needed now is a drop in the ocean compared to the price we'll have to pay if nothing is done.

 

[Erika M]

I was asked to do an essay on how to reduce Greenhouse Emissions. Although I have several options they all need financial support. I was wondering if anyone thought that taxing businesses and manufacturers a tax depending on how their product affected the environment(how much CO2 emissions they release .. etc) would be a good way to receive this financial support.
I know that this Caron Tax exists, but I was wondering if it is the MOST reasonable way to reduce GHG’s. I was thinking that the tax money should be directed towards research, technology and restoring the environment.