Quote:
Originally Posted by Regorium
I wouldn't mind seeing a federal carbon tax or other climate change policies. The O&G industry should pay its fair share.
However, I'm just very very skeptical as to how he's going to go about it. O&G is only ~25% of our emissions. The other significant factors are transportation (cars), heating (houses), agriculture and other industries.
Those 4 factors, while emitting a similar amount to O&G, are basically political hand grenades. Adding a carbon tax would probably roll into gasoline, and people are weirdly sensitive to changes at the pump. Agriculture and manufacturing are two "protected" industries from a political standpoint. I just see a carbon tax policy that basically exempts everything except large producers and pipelines, and in order to have the O&G industry bear the load of the entire country's emissions targets, it'd have to be a crippling amount of tax.
For me, that's really the only worry, but again this is all hypothetical and most likely untrue, but something to think about.
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And to protect exports we should only tax carbon at the tail pipe. Oil that is exported outside of Canada should have the carbon implications go to who ever burned it. If the Saudi's aren't going to tax the lifecycle emissions of oil burned in the US we shouldn't either.
Any carbon tax should be attached only to the final user of the good.