I don’t support a carbon tax.
But possibly not for the reasons you might think. A tax on the environment commodifies that environment, and the environment is a public resource that shouldn’t be for sale. Fine the heavy polluters.
Taxing everyone who uses fossil fuels is ridiculous. There are no realistic alternatives to fossil fuels, certainly none that are cheap and ubiquitous. Punishing people for using the only energy source they can afford is a copout, and providing an after-tax rebate for the poor is counterproductive (that money could be going to green programmes, and giving people free money certainly won’t encourage them to curb usage).
In my opinion (full disclosure: I’m no economist), I think a better solution would be to eliminate all subsidies, tax breaks, and other financial incentives to all fossil fuel businesses. Transfer those incentives to greener programmes, like encouraging more electrical vehicles and charging stations, making biodiesel more available, making transit free of charge and more reliable, switching to mass renewable energy, and so on. This will make so-called dirty energy solutions more expensive and clean energy solutions cheaper. People will switch on their own.
Without a tax.
