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Originally Posted by #-3
Yep, literally the core premise of a carbon tax is to have Coal pay back the damage that it is doing to the environment at such a rate that it prevents them from doing further damage.
The problem not so much pricing coal out of the market, it's pretty much universally agreed we would like to do that. But collective action, where you need to ensure you are not diminishing your economic potential as compared to other economies that aren't pricing things this way.
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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