From Steve McGiffen
John Bush’s single carbon tax is an attractive idea on the surface (1 July, p 26), but probe a little and the huge flaws begin to emerge.
Firstly, as income differentials between individuals are not fully reflected in fossil fuel use, the tax would be insufficiently progressive – in fact it would likely hit the poor harder than the rich. Fixing this would merely be the first and most obvious in a series of necessary adjustments that would ultimately make the new tax as complicated as the ones we have now. Taxation systems aren’t complicated merely in order to generate work for accountants and bureaucrats; they are complicated because society is complicated.
Secondly, some people would find it far easier to reduce their fossil fuel consumption than others. Investing in solar panels is, for example, an expensive business. People living in parts of the world where alternatives were readily available (lots of sunshine, lots of wind, fast-running streams, and so on) would have an immediate advantage.
Thirdly, it is very likely that I would end up well in pocket from this. Except for a fairly limited amount of travel, I probably use no fossil fuels at all (in any direct way). We burn wood to keep warm and reluctantly use nuclear-produced electricity for everything else. We grow much of our own food and prioritise buying locally, easy to do in this fertile part of France. Being exempt from tax would be very nice from my own point of view, but surely hardly just.
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Fourthly, the scheme would only work if the World Trade Organization backed it. Otherwise, we’d all simply spend our extra cash on goods from countries not operating the tax, thus using up carbon. As the WTO is hardly a green crusader, its cooperation does not seem likely. This is, of course, part of a wider problem: the idea is utterly utopian, and we’d all be better off thinking up ideas that might actually be put into practice here on planet Earth.
Things would be even worse if I were wrong about this, however. The more successful the tax proved, the more impoverished would be the state. We’d have lovely clean air and a stabilising climate, but no schools where children whose parents could not afford to pay could learn how these things were achieved or hospitals for people (other than the rich) who got sick despite these gains.
Bourre, France
