3 ms·
You personally don't have a say but the market does. If it artificially costs more to produce a good, the market would ideally find a way to produce the same go
by wildzzz 5y ago
You personally don't have a say but the market does. If it artificially costs more to produce a good, the market would ideally find a way to produce the same good in a manner that doesn't involve heavy carbon taxes. For carbon taxes, the company can either eat the cost and cut into profits or pass it onto the customer and hope their goods are inelastic enough to still make the same margins. If the demand was elastic, a company may decide to either not make that product any more or find a way to make it so that it costs less than the carbon taxed version. Unfortunately, researching new processes costs money and a company may just decide it's cheaper in the short term (which is only what Wall St thinks in) to just continue business as usual.
The problem is that at the end of the carbon tax equation, what does the money go towards? Can we significantly offset carbon emissions with the tax income? Is it already too late? Without some significant rebalancing humanity's greed and feelings towards nature, I'm not even sure any of this would ever work.