009jim

Australia has just introduced a carbon tax. I figure that people who cycle to work and thereby cause less pollution must somehow benefit from the carbon tax. However, as yet it seems the tax merely increases the cost of our electricity. Can anybody enlighten me? Surely the objective is to encourage people to reduce activities that produce carbon, i.e. driving to work?

Mos6502

Maybe it is meant to reduce electricity use.

But then it unfairly punishes those who charge their electric cars.

adamhenry

Generation of electricity produces carbon or nuclear waste.

Mos6502

A tiny IC engine producing small amounts of power is less efficient than a giant generating plant producing lots of power. If somebody decided to switch from an electric car to a gas engined one, they'd end up producing more carbon.

Mondo734

Are you sure that there wasn't a small inclusion of tax to gasoline as well?

cooker

I don't know the details of the Aussie tax, but in theory here is how carbon taxes should benefit low carbon users like bike commuters: If the carbon tax is a tax on all carbon, then it should include a new or higher tax on gasoline. If it also replaces other taxes, then the bike commuters benefit because don't have to pay the higher taxes on gasoline, because they don't buy gasoline, but they do get the reductions in other taxes.

009jim

The Australian government has stated that the carbon tax won't have any affect on the price of gasoline! Seems like a bung system to me. I think the government figured that if they put the tax on gasoline, people would reduce their driving. However, put the tax on electricity and there's nothing you can do. You still hafta cook your dinner and take a shower every right.

wolfchild

It's just another cash grab by the government. I think it's just a matter of time before it comes to North America. Any person who thinks that carbon tax is gona prevent global warming is a stupid moron.
The cost of everything is gona go up, even if you don't drive it will still have an effect on you. And yes the price of bicycles and cycling gear will also go up because it takes dirty energy to produce bicycles and cycling gear. I am tired of all this global warming propaganda. Taxing people to death is not gona prevent global warming.

cooker

It's not a carbon tax, then, it's misnamed. That's really too bad.

acidfast7

AUS needs a 180% sales tax on Autos like Denmark.

that gets people to ride

https://www.xmel.com/denmark14.html

cooker

You know as well as I do we will never get rid of taxes. Governments all around the world are running huge deficits and have debts they have to pay down, and voters expect to be bribed with services.

So all we can hope for is better taxes than have now, and a carbon tax would be a better tax, because it would lead to reductions in many other government expenditures, and thus potentially lower the overall tax burden, and it would help individuals reduce personal expenditures and waste

The carbon tax would be paid in higher prices for gasoline, as well as higher costs of food and manufactured goods since they include a carbon cost, which would be taxed. However the government would get all that revenue which would be used to reduce other taxes like income taxes and sales taxes, so people would see trade-offs. More important than that, the carbon tax would spur individuals, corporations and governments to find ways to reduce carbon usage and that in turn would actually lead to many personal and societal cost benefits.

For example a couple or family who now buys a “cheap” house in suburbia 40 miles from work, might find it makes better economic sense to buy a smaller house on a smaller lot, closer to work, or even live in a downtown apartment. The family would manage with one less car, their kids would walk or bike to school, instead of being driven or taking a bus, which would actually improve their marks, and neither parent would be spending two hours a day in the car, so one of them might even have an opportunity to work a few hours a week at a second job using “found” time they used to waste on the highway. Their car purchase and depreciation costs, insurance costs, maybe even health care costs, would spiral down. If the government used the revenue from a carbon tax as a replacement for – say – income taxes, the family would get that benefit too. If thousands or tens of thousands of families did the same, it would reduce urban sprawl, so the region would end up saving hugely on infrastructure costs for building or maintaining highways, policing them, providing air ambulances for them, etc. so that could justify further cuts in income tax, or perhaps sales tax. Less farmland would be plowed under for cloverleafs, so that could lead to agricultural efficiencies that would help offset the increased carbon costs incorporated in food. People would tend to buy locally because of the transportation costs of imported food and products, and that would also reduce the government spending on roads, because transport trucks do most of the damage to roads, and would also stimulate the development of local industry, which would increase the tax base, again leading to opportunities to reduce tax rates.

I could go on…

degnaw

Yeah, it would make much more sense to have it include gasoline. That said, electricity usage isn't as fixed as you imply - you can switch to CFLs, turn down the A/C or heating, etc, just as you can buy fuel efficient cars and/or reduce driving.

Certainly not as flexible as gasoline usage, but still flexible nonetheless.

fietsbob

Don't know about AU, but there already is a Gas Tax.. earmarked decades ago
to fund highway infrastructure, though that is never enough
so Bond Measures show up on the election ballots sometimes.. ..

is there a carbon tax on Cement kilns? how about mining and refining Uranium?

CB HI

Don't you guys know that higher carbon levels are good for trees. It makes them stronger and healthier. Why do you guys hate trees?

fietsbob

Well carbonic acid is changing the Ph of the Ocean already, Washington Oyster farms
are having a hard time raising their shellfish, the shell fish are having a hard time growing shells.

CB HI

I assume you mean carbonic acid.

Have the Washington Oyster farms stopped producing carbon dioxide themselves?

sm1960

Brought to you by the cult of global alarmists. Thank you Al Gore.

contango 

Assume carbon taxes have precisely nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with coming up with some form of words to get people to accept new taxes.

It always used to be that insisting that Someone Else would pay the taxes would get the support of the masses. Now under the guise of reducing carbon output it's still encouraging people to stick the bill to Someone Else while also appealing to the idea that "we should all play our part".

Unfortunately the effect is that gas-guzzling cars become more expensive to run and therefore even more of a status symbol while the poorest people end up stuck with a rising bill to keep their older car on the road, and the price of everything constantly rises as nobody has invented a means of teleporting goods from factory to outlet.

jon c. 

I thought it was a tax on certain frame materials to encourage people to ride steel.

bigbenaugust 

Actually, a CF frame would be taking carbon out of the system and as such is a good thing according to the carbon tax crowd. But then, so would steel, but not as much as the carbon would.

It's the aluminum and titanium frames that are the problem.