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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • [ ] Climate change isn’t real. [ ] Climate change is part of a natural cycle and not related to humans. [x] Climate change is caused by humans, but we can’t do anything about it for whatever reasons. Note how all 3 lead to the same actual behaviour, and that benefits the very same people, but the first one works on conservatives and the third one works on liberals. You’ve fallen for the same gambit. There’s a big-ass sliding scale between “fuck it” and “techno utopia” both on climate mitigation and adaptation. The next 100 years are going to be hard, yeah, but those 3 propoganda tacts are designed to just make some rich twits richer before we all hit the wall.






  • It’s the least painful, most economically efficient way to encourage those things and other transitions. When it comes to transportation, higher gas prices have historically resulted in a market for more fuel efficiency (and inflation-adjusted low gas prices have lead to oversizing of vehicles). Unlike the 70s, this time, the carbon tax is brought in slowly and smoothly over many years to encourage conservation (including the things you mention), drive demand for more fuel efficiency, and in the long term, encourage the electrification of the remaining fleet.

    The vast majority of Canadians want the government to do something serious about climate change, but they don’t know what that thing is. Economists said a carbon tax and rebate was the most efficient, but public support isn’t driven by economic papers, but by propaganda machines. It’s just too easy to blame the carbon tax for everyone’s problems. It’s the perfect boogeyman for inflation. Heavy handed regulation of industrial emitters would probably be the most supported by the public, but it would have a terrible impact on Canadian industry, and actually be limited in it’s effectiveness, as most of Canada’s emissions would still be “free.”




  • The carbon tax is currently 14.31cents per litre, that’s about 10%. It’s an incentive. To fully wipe out that cost, you don’t need to buy an EV, you could drive 10% less, or buy an ICE vehicle that is 10% more efficient (or some combination). That’s very easy to do in a country where most of us drive large vehicles, and make too many un-combined trips. Drop one trip in 10, or combine it with one of the other 9 and you get to spend your rebate money on beer instead of gasoline.

    Subsidies and special taxes are super in-efficient. Besides requiring a whole slew of bureaucracy to administer it, it never applies to everything fairly. That tax you suggest on new ICE vehicles doesn’t dissuade anyone from parking their jacked up f150 one day a week, and it doesn’t reward the person who buys a used car for their commute instead of a used SUV. All those little decisions get incentivized, and they allow people to make their own decisions about how to pollute less, instead of doing the 1 thing some government has decided to be the official, subsidized solution.



  • That list shows why the carbon taxes will be the target. Those first 5 account for basically all of the increased cost of living, but they are HARD problems. Not one of those presents a simple policy change that could even make a meaningful dent, and no one agrees on even the general approach governments could take to chip away at those.

    However, for the last one, politicians can promise to scrap it or carve it up like a thanksgiving turkey and, despite that having almost no effect on the overall cost of living for the average Canadian, it seems like an easy solution.










  • And if people are suffering, the solution is to increase the rebate (or increase it’s frequency). If it ends up being revenue deficit temporarily, fine, still better than vanity exemptions like this. This breaks the whole model. It removes the incentive to switch for people already looking replace old equipment, it removes the reward for those who did change, and it creates a whole inefficiency of administration for figuring out which fossil fuel burning is “free” and which is taxed. That bureaucracy is just going to burn money that could have went into the rebates.

    Almost ALL brand new furnaces being installed even the most heatpump friendly places in Canada are NG or propane right now, and will continue to be for years to come. Even new home builds are virtually exclusively gas. This is taking away event he slightest incentive to change that.