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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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I'm probably missing something here but doesn't putting a price on carbon just introduce a cost that will be passed onto the consumer and allow unscrupulous companies to avoid decarbonisation by just paying credits? And while we're on the subject won't credits just become another traded commodity that will become sought after and then people will demand more of them because their value would inflate another bubble?
Yes the tax gets passed onto consumers, but it’s not applied equally to all products. Products that require high emissions to manufacture and deliver become a lot more expensive, products with low emissions do not.
This influences both consumer and business behaviour, often without you realizing it. Businesses buy from suppliers with lower carbon intensity to gain a competitive advantage, consumers pick low carbon products and shipping methods because they’re cheaper. Even the most stringent climate change deniers make better choices because it’s simply cheaper.
Carbon credits and offsets generally don’t give companies a way of bypassing the tax. As the cost of sequestering carbon is still well above any proposed tax amounts. In general, it remains cheaper to pay the tax, and reduce emissions rather than try to buy carbon credits or offset.
on a separate but related note. There’s a lot of issues with carbon credit and offset systems, most are low quality and don’t actually result in permanent reductions in global atmospheric carbon levels.
The unscrupulous business practice that government and regulatory bodies need to crack down on more. Is business selling things that don’t actually reduce global atmospheric carbon levels as an offset, or using creative accounting to resell the same offset more than once.
There is a lot of greenwashing related to offsets. Lots of companies claiming to be carbon neutral, or net zero, or whatever when they haven’t actually done anything to reduce their emissions, just some creative accounting. A properly implemented carbon tax actually helps the greenwashing problem, because it stops being about your “green” messaging and strictly about dollars and price.
Honestly, the simplest thing governments could do, apply a carbon tax to those extracting fossil fuels, and use the revenue to reduce personal taxes paid by individuals. The costs that get passed onto the consumer, get offset by the taxes that they no longer pay elsewhere, but it still creates all of the economic drivers for consumers and businesses to focus on lowering carbon emissions in products.
Oooh I like that. I like it very much. I think it would make a nice ensemble with Land Value Tax.