Some related reading from The Conversation that I liked when I was doing exploratory background reading for some related uni work a few months back:
- Let’s tax carbon: Ross Garnaut on why the time is right for a second shot at carbon pricing (Oct 2024)
- Researchers analysed 1,500 climate policies to find what works. These are the lessons for Australia (Aug 2024)
- Australia now has a $70 ‘shadow price’ on carbon emissions. Here’s why we won’t see a real price any time soon (Apr 2024)
I thought it was particularly funny how the first of these articles is saying that it is/was a good time to try for a carbon tax again and that the alternatives are essentially inadequate, while the second one says:
[…] Importantly, they found most emissions reduction relied on a mix of policies. The results point to a way forward for Australia, where an economy-wide carbon price is currently politically impossible.
I don’t think I made use of that juxtaposition in my assignment but now I can use it to write a comment which four people will read :'D
Whether the author of article 1 is right (it’s close to a silver bullet policy and is politically feasible) or whether the author of article 2 is right (it’s both not a silver bullet and politically impossible) I don’t know.
I’m fairly ignorant about carbon taxes. How do they work roughly?
the government charges carbon emitters for their emissions - this is done in multiple ways, but the gist is big polluters (power generation, industrial, etc) are charged at the source and things like petrol is charged at the pump
as part of taxes, or whatever other means, the revenues from that tax is evenly distributed back to the population
this makes the cost of carbon-heavy products more expensive, making carbon neutral products cheaper relative to them
it also means that if you live a carbon neutral life, you’ll end up paying no tax, and just getting a nice payout to offset the slight extra you paid for eg green energy
carbon trading schemes are different
it’s all very elegant imo, but the language is bad (nobody likes new taxes) and the govt didn’t do a good job at marketing the chunk of cash they were giving everyone
