Firstly, you’ll have to refresh my memory on where I praised Australia’s carbon tax.
More to the point however, a carbon tax does at least provide some direct financial incentive for the price to go up and for the body tracking companies emissions to proactively look into dodgers, while a company selling carbon credits is directly incentivized to both lower the price and to overstate the actually sequestrated carbon (if any). As such a tax is far more likely to rise in the long term compared to the stated price of maybe sequestrating carbon or limiting emissions elsewhere, and without giving the illusion that a company isn’t responsible for putting carbon into the atmosphere so long as it pays another company to say they took care of it.
Add on to that the government is in a far better place to use that money for catalyzing emissions reductions/social good and that of course you ideally want to keep money within the local economy/prioritize domestic reduction rather than the profit margin for a carbon credit scheme and I feel that you get far more benefits with a direct tax than with cap and trade.
Finally, ideologically I just don’t particularly like private rents and tolls on common goods, in this case dumping rights to the atmosphere we share.
And this goes back to the first post I made, about the difference between carbon markets and carbon offsets. The EU ETS does not have offsets and does not allow for emitters promising to emit less to be paid for doing so. There are a capped amount of carbon credits auctioned by a government body, which companies emitting within the EU and some other member countries have to buy to be permitted to emit. The amount of credits is lowered every year towards zero by 2050. The money paid goes to the government to be used to support green projects or be paid out to citizens. To put it another way:
No private company benefits from selling any sort of carbon credits in that system
Companies who purchase credits have to do so, due to emitting, so no pretending to not doing that
It is raising in the long term depending on how much emissions decline, due to the cap being lowered
a clear path towards zero emissions within the system(unlike a tax for example)
Firstly, you’ll have to refresh my memory on where I praised Australia’s carbon tax.
More to the point however, a carbon tax does at least provide some direct financial incentive for the price to go up and for the body tracking companies emissions to proactively look into dodgers, while a company selling carbon credits is directly incentivized to both lower the price and to overstate the actually sequestrated carbon (if any). As such a tax is far more likely to rise in the long term compared to the stated price of maybe sequestrating carbon or limiting emissions elsewhere, and without giving the illusion that a company isn’t responsible for putting carbon into the atmosphere so long as it pays another company to say they took care of it.
Add on to that the government is in a far better place to use that money for catalyzing emissions reductions/social good and that of course you ideally want to keep money within the local economy/prioritize domestic reduction rather than the profit margin for a carbon credit scheme and I feel that you get far more benefits with a direct tax than with cap and trade.
Finally, ideologically I just don’t particularly like private rents and tolls on common goods, in this case dumping rights to the atmosphere we share.
And this goes back to the first post I made, about the difference between carbon markets and carbon offsets. The EU ETS does not have offsets and does not allow for emitters promising to emit less to be paid for doing so. There are a capped amount of carbon credits auctioned by a government body, which companies emitting within the EU and some other member countries have to buy to be permitted to emit. The amount of credits is lowered every year towards zero by 2050. The money paid goes to the government to be used to support green projects or be paid out to citizens. To put it another way: