I think we all want to improve the way we treat the environment. How far will we go to ensure that we are doing all we can? On July 1st, BC will be adding an extra 2.4 cents per litre of gas at the pumps as part of introducing its new carbon tax. The carbon tax will also apply to virtually all fossil fuels, including gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane, and home heating fuel. This is an attempt to create a “greener budget for 2008” which would see consumers paying for their carbon use. Laura Jones, vice-president at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business stated that, "We know from our surveys that over 80 per cent of business owners are already taking action to get cleaner." By putting a price on carbon, people will theoretically use less, thus helping reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change. Is taxing people as a way to enforce more environmental choices an incentive to move us in the right direction or should we be left to making green choices on our own? I mean really, aren’t we taxed enough?
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Carbon Tax - Good or Bad?
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2 comments:
Deposition into the atmosphere of "ancient sunlight" is an activity carried out by industrial civilization which currently has no monetary costs associated with it. That we are taxed enough already is a question we're duly cautious and right in asking, but the other side of the inquiry involves the application of the same sober-minded caution to our collective appraisal of the monetary value which inheres in living systems. How do you put a price on those? How do we accurately assess the costs that may be incurred in decades or centuries due to our continued systematic deposition into the atmosphere of substances found occuring in the Earth's crust? The carbon tax may be inconvenient, but our collective incredulity at its seeming inanity should be tempered by the realization that industrial civilization's use of ancient sunlight to power forward its continued growth is decidedly unnatural. No other living organism does what we do, and this factity of human behaviour has shaped the world to the extent that the current geological epoch has been termed the anthropocene by some geologists, to account for the impact human civilizations have had on the biosphere, soil and water since the advent of the agricultural revolution. The carbon tax may be interpreted as an early signal of how the teeming masses of humanity will live, survive and hopefully thrive through more efficacious useage of fossil-derived fuels.
That we're taxed enough already is only one half of the current appraisal of living systems and our collective impact upon them. We might alternatively ask whether it's that we're not acually taxed enough for the carbon being expelled into the atmosphere as a result of economic activity. The realization of the former is why we're now seeing in provincial legislatures a preponderance of legislation to assuage our European friends, many of whom are by now much further ahead of us than we realistically need to be. Our collective incredulity at the seeming inanity of yet another tax ought to be tempered with the sober realization of what the Earth's ecosystems do for us, at absolutely no monetary cost onesoever. No other organism sustains its living organization through the use of fossil fuels, or "ancient sunlight." The scope and extent of the threat posed by industrial civilization to living systems that has been realized of late has compelled governments the world over to introduce such measures as carbon trading so as to lessen the intensity of emissions increases which invariably accompany economic growth. It's a more complicated issue than can be parsed within the context of a "good vs. bad" dichotomy. We might rather opt for such polarities as "necessary vs. inadequate." The carbon tax may be interpreted as a means of building some inertia and transferring it to carbon-intensive industrial activities, ideally only temporarily and not beyond the timeframe required to affect the transition in the coming decades to a model of economic sustainability affecting a far more parsimonious use of fossil-derived energy resources.
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