What, the consumption of planting trees? It’s a flawed implementation not a flawed concept. It still functions like a carbon tax but they subsidized a failed tree planting campaign instead of building solar farms or something.
Given Australia’s carbon tax policy was a complete failure and was revoked in 2013-ish - because costs were just passed on to consumers who had no alternatives due to market capture - that’s probably not the comparison you want to use.
That just sounds like a carbon tax working as expected. Yeah the cost of buying carbon intensive stuff goes up, that’s kinda the point, de-externalizing the cost of carbon emissions.
Carbon taxes are only effective on goods or services with elastic demand where less/no carbon alternatives exist.
If there are no alternatives, or demand is inelastic, the producer is able to pass all costs on to the consumer. The consumer is over a barrel, and the producer continues to make as much profit as before. This does not disinsentivise production, nor does it facilitate a reduction in demand in any but the most extreme scenarios.
So, no, it was not working as intended, which is why it was dropped.
I’m not convinced there are many goods like that. Lower carbon alternatives exist for most consumer products. But the data also does show that Australian co2 emissions dropped when they had a carbon tax and went back up when they got rid of it. I imagine the right wing Abbot government had more reasons for getting rid of it than just being ineffective.
What, the consumption of planting trees? It’s a flawed implementation not a flawed concept. It still functions like a carbon tax but they subsidized a failed tree planting campaign instead of building solar farms or something.
Given Australia’s carbon tax policy was a complete failure and was revoked in 2013-ish - because costs were just passed on to consumers who had no alternatives due to market capture - that’s probably not the comparison you want to use.
That just sounds like a carbon tax working as expected. Yeah the cost of buying carbon intensive stuff goes up, that’s kinda the point, de-externalizing the cost of carbon emissions.
Carbon taxes are only effective on goods or services with elastic demand where less/no carbon alternatives exist.
If there are no alternatives, or demand is inelastic, the producer is able to pass all costs on to the consumer. The consumer is over a barrel, and the producer continues to make as much profit as before. This does not disinsentivise production, nor does it facilitate a reduction in demand in any but the most extreme scenarios.
So, no, it was not working as intended, which is why it was dropped.
I’m not convinced there are many goods like that. Lower carbon alternatives exist for most consumer products. But the data also does show that Australian co2 emissions dropped when they had a carbon tax and went back up when they got rid of it. I imagine the right wing Abbot government had more reasons for getting rid of it than just being ineffective.