The carbon tax has its critics — do any of them have better ideas?
The carbon tax has its critics — do any of them have better ideas?
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Regulation.
The carbon tax, along or instead of cap-and-trade, was the conservative alternative to straight-up regulation. "We need a market based approach!" they said, "We need something that's responsive!" they said, "We need something that's cost-neutral!" they said. Regulation was too hard, too strict, too ornerous, too old-school for our modern, fast-moving, market-based world.
"Trust us!" the capitalists said.
And now it's too hard because even a weaksauce carbon tax is too much for their precious profit margins. There's money that someone else is making that is rightfully theirs! It was their idea and now they can't even.
So you know what? You don't like the carbon tax? The we go back to good old-fashioned, ball-busting regulation. Because it fucking works.
So, echoing my response to the other guy saying this, how well did that work for plastics? Everyone knows paper straws are worse and unnecessary, and it just makes them want to go back to the old way, microplastics be damned. It's easy to say "regulate", but when it's as complex a problem as the energy source for our whole technological civilisation there's not a clear way to actually write such a legislation.
The issue with the carbon tax isn't that it doesn't work, it's that it's unpopular.
Are plastics use really regulated? I don't mean at mcd's, I mean plastics industry wide.
So, like, except for the regulations? That seems like an unfair question.
There's probably ones other than the straw and bag ones we're all familiar with. I don't know how many, or how many you would consider enough, though.
Your complaints are the straws and bags don't do enough. My point is that's NOT strict industry-wide regulation. We agree!
Okay, sure. So my favored policy on that is EPR. You could still get straws made out of uber-indestructible wonder materials, but you'd have to pay for the cost of disposing of it permanently somehow, as well as just the manufacturing cost. As a result, we probably would still see less disposable plastics in stores, because they don't like burning money, but you could still get them for a bit extra if you have a specific need, like a quadriplegic that needs one that can bend.