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Carbon taxes for the poor

Carbon taxes have always been a contentious issue.

There are those who believe that, just as devotees of the Roman Catholic church confess their way to heaven, the human race can tax its way to environmental harmony.

Well, to be honest, I think both concepts are flawed.

Neither a few Hail Marys nor a fist-full of penance dollars will do anything to change our position with respect to the afterlife or this one.

What's more, when it comes to carbon taxes -- it is those who can least afford to pay that are being stung the most and those who can most afford to pay who seem to get off scot-free.

Here in NZ, our biggest polluters - the farming industry, have a "get out of jail free" card that exempts them from the worst of their greenhouse emissions in a way that those of us who are merely consumers can't avoid.

We effectively pay carbon taxes on our fuel, our electricity and a raft of other "costs" -- simply because we have no alternative but to do so -- it's the law.

We're told that we can't make farmers pay a carbon tax on their emissions though because it would cripple their profitability. So instead, they're exempted -- at least for the time being.

But hang on a minute...

Haven't we been crowing to the world that our farming industry is subsidy-free, surviving and thriving solely on efficiency and the quality of its products?

Well I guess that's a lie now.

But I'm not advocating that we place carbon taxes on the massive amounts of methane our dairy industry produces -- in fact quite the opposite. I'm saying that carbon taxes per se are just an utter waste of time and seem to be nothing more than a money-grab by governments around the world.

This whole concept of placing a bounty on the head of carbon is silliness in the extreme.

For a start we had a carbon-trading system that was supposed to reduce emissions -- but what happened to that?

Well the arse fell out of the price of carbon credits such that they're now "cheap as beans" so heavy polluters can simply buy as many as they need and it works out cheaper than actually reducing their emissions by way of better processes or technology.

So then we decided to tax carbon emissions -- and now we're left with massive injustices that see impoverished blue-collar workers in South Auckland effectively subsidising the business activities of well-to-do Waikato dairy farmers who are each sitting on land worth many millions of dollars and deciding how to invest the new-found wealth that has come from world-record dairy prices in recent times.

Surely it's time to call a halt to this nonsense (as they have just done in Australia) and either tax everyone fairly for their emission -- or even better, just ditch the whole lame concept.

There are far better ways of reducing this nation's carbon footprint (an indigenous EV industry, taxing incandescent bulbs to subsidise LEDs, etc, etc) that would produce very positive outcomes in many ways.

Unfortunately, as we all know, taxes are the tool of governments that lack imagination, innovation and courage.

Sigh.... more taxes to come then, I guess.

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