I would love to be more environmentally friendly but unfortunately the financial cost of entry is too high. The answer isn’t to keep making gas more unaffordable, it’s already way more expensive to drive an ICE car than an EV. The issue is the people the carbon tax hurts the most are precisely the same people who can’t afford to buy something electric. There have got to be other ways to incentivize the switch for people who can afford it (and therefore don’t really notice a few extra bucks to fill up) while not overly punishing those who can’t. Maybe we should be putting a tax on new ICE vehicles proportional to their pollution, and put that towards a means tested/non-luxury ev subsidy so that they become viable to those who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford a new car.
The carbon tax is currently 14.31cents per litre, that’s about 10%. It’s an incentive. To fully wipe out that cost, you don’t need to buy an EV, you could drive 10% less, or buy an ICE vehicle that is 10% more efficient (or some combination). That’s very easy to do in a country where most of us drive large vehicles, and make too many un-combined trips. Drop one trip in 10, or combine it with one of the other 9 and you get to spend your rebate money on beer instead of gasoline.
Subsidies and special taxes are super in-efficient. Besides requiring a whole slew of bureaucracy to administer it, it never applies to everything fairly. That tax you suggest on new ICE vehicles doesn’t dissuade anyone from parking their jacked up f150 one day a week, and it doesn’t reward the person who buys a used car for their commute instead of a used SUV. All those little decisions get incentivized, and they allow people to make their own decisions about how to pollute less, instead of doing the 1 thing some government has decided to be the official, subsidized solution.
Kinda hard to feel sympathy when it seems every other ICE vehicle is an f150
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. Should the fact that people like trucks take away from the unaffordability of every other vehicle? I’m sure if you only counted EVs since the rivian and lightning were released you’d see a similar proportion of trucks. Until you can get decent condition EVs under $10k there will be a group of people who are simply priced out of the market.
We can’t even get ICEs under 10k these days, it’s wildly unthinkable to expect we’d manage it with EVs.
As for everything costing more, this is capitalism, every business out there is trying to extract every dollar they can from consumers. Until and unless a paradigm shift happens (ex: we stop trusting the private sector to solve issues, like housing for instance) we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting.
The animal ag industry outputs more emissions than the transportation sector but we’re getting screwed at the pumps while the meat industry gets billions in subsidies.
And the construction sector puts out more emissions and waste than the animal ag industry.
True, it would be nice if we had enough caves for millions of people to live in unfortunately we need things like roads and buildings.
It would be nice if more focus was put on the sustainability and longevity of these projects unfortunately most people don’t think about infrastructure until its too late.
The best way to capture and storage carbon is with wood. So why do they still build houses with concrete instead? And no, concrete is not that much cheaper, neither is it more flame resistant.
Pretty sure it’s going to be the cost of living.
I think single-issue elections are a myth, but there’s no doubt that that’s top-of-mind for a lot of people right now.
It’s not a single issue, though-- It’s many:
- Inflation, especially cost of necessities (groceries, etc.)
- Buying property is well out of reach for many people
- Renting property is increasingly out of reach for many people
- Stagnant or declining job markets
- Interest rates and the cost of debt
- (To a lesser extent) Carbon taxes and cost of energy
And so on. Those problems are related in many ways, and well-summarized by the umbrella term “cost of living,” but I think it’s a mistake to think of it as a single issue… Both in general, and in the context of “single-issue elections.”
That list shows why the carbon taxes will be the target. Those first 5 account for basically all of the increased cost of living, but they are HARD problems. Not one of those presents a simple policy change that could even make a meaningful dent, and no one agrees on even the general approach governments could take to chip away at those.
However, for the last one, politicians can promise to scrap it or carve it up like a thanksgiving turkey and, despite that having almost no effect on the overall cost of living for the average Canadian, it seems like an easy solution.
It won’t be because people don’t care. The predictions right now show a conservative majority. Of course the other parties will try to make it about climate change but the reality is a lot of people simply think it’s not their concern. Rather it will be angled on cost of life and inflation and whatnot
The predictions show a conservative plurality not a majority… that’s a significant difference because it’s extremely unlikely that the CPC will be able to form government.
338Canada seat projection | November 5, 2023
Cons 169-226 seat projection (170 for majority)
If this is from one of those phone surveys, then the only people answering the phones and actually doing them are boomers. Highly suspect numbers.
I don’t know anyone that actually answers those surveys, even the people that initially pick up the phone.
Multiple elections have established that people do care. As the article points out, every federal election since 2008 (whoops, except 2011) has been won by a party that either promised a carbon tax, or had already implemented one.
“promised” is the key word. We will eventually need to make lifestyle changes, but no party wants to wear that at election time. So we have delays:
the federal government is internally tracking progress on as many as 115 climate-related policies. But “delays” in implementing some of the most significant policies are endangering Canada’s chances of meeting that 2030 target.
One of the major causes of delays is provincial resistance. With the major provinces having conservative governments, roll outs are stonewalled at every opportunity. Friggen Sask over there threating to break federal law and refuse to collect a legal tax, for example. Alberta would rather burn the country to the ground than even think about something other than oil extraction.
It’s ridiculous.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Pressed by reporters on Monday to explain what a Conservative government would do to reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change, Pierre Poilievre again demurred.
But there’s also no reason (beyond partisan political considerations) for waiting to have a real debate on Canada’s response to climate change until the writs are dropped.
The environment commissioner’s latest report on the Liberal government’s climate agenda, released Tuesday, is a decent starting point for that debate.
Indeed, the mere existence of the commissioner’s review is due to the reporting mechanisms built into the Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act passed in 2021 — government legislation the Conservatives voted against.
When a long-time environmentalist — Catherine Abreu, who is also a member of the government’s net-zero advisory body — remarked at a conference in Ottawa this week that climate policy in Canada has gone through a “revolution” in the last seven years, she had solid grounds for saying so.
But the precise measure of that revolution, and Canada’s chances of getting to within sight of that 2030 target, now depend a lot on the actual implementation of policies that have so far only been promised or proposed.
The original article contains 1,073 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
