Quote:
Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
Kind of. I'm no economist, and I may be wrong (though that's never ever happened), but looking around the world at how carbon prices are introduced it looks like they're financial mechanisms to signal to business some idea that they can plan their business around in the future rather than stop emitting sources immediately and throwing the economy into chaos. You cannot easily put a price on the carbon for what damage it's causing as that would be highly variable depending on how you look at it. Rather, if you need to go to 50% GHG emissions by 2030, you get economists to figure out what costs would spur innovation and make high emission sources less profitable.
If you're an energy company that owns coal plants for example, it gives you some concrete ways to plan your future while leaving options up to you. If you're a large company that owns commercial real estate, it gives you some idea of what options you can do to cut heating costs in the future. If you're an industrial/commercial HVAC suplier, you now have a good idea of what business is going to look like as investment dollars come flowing in to GHG emission cutting technologies to install causing the proces to go down.
I know they're dirty words in Alberta, but it's absolutely needed to cut GHG emission in any type of time frame to have a Carbon Tax
|
Fair, I was a little over simplified. But saying 'damn Carbon Price, you moved coal form $40 to $120'. At the end of the day that was the point, to 'artificially' make coal cost more than other things, because the industry has no way of capturing it's negative externalities.