Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [See also the follow-on post entitled “Why Revenue Neutral Isn’t”
I was pointed by a commenter on another blog to the Canadian Province of British Columbia, where they put a carbon-based energy tax scheme into effect in 2008. Before looking at either the costs or the actual results of the scheme, let me start by looking at the possible benefits of the scheme. I mean, on my planet if there are no benefits the costs are kinda beside the point. The BC carbon-based energy tax was sold on the basis that it would help in the fight against the theorized CO2-caused global warming. So how much will the actions of our northern cousins affect the world temperature?
Well, that’s hard to answer, but we could set an upper bound on the possible cooling by a thought experiment. According to the current climate paradigm, CO2 rules the global temperature, and the change in temperature is about 3°C for each doubling of CO2. That means if we know the emissions, we can calculate the resultant temperature change.
So here’s the thought experiment. Suppose British Columbia had been founded in 1850 as a separate country with the high ethical aim of achieving freedom from evil carbon based fuels. And instead of calling it “British Columbia”, the early colonists decided to call it “British Utopia”, because they were going to make the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against evil carbon dioxide. They weren’t going to use any fossil fuels ever, their country would be a true utopia. So they built a wall around British Utopia and didn’t trade with anyone, to keep out nasty carbon from trade. To avoid CO2 emissions they didn’t use any oil, either their own or from elsewhere. They didn’t make any cement, or import any, too much CO2 released in the manufacture. The Utopians didn’t use coal for heat or transportation or making steel, just wonderful organic renewable wood. Since the carbon in wood was recently taken from the atmosphere, burning it doesn’t add CO2 to the atmosphere, it just replaces what the tree removed from the atmosphere. And suppose further that they had kept true to that until today …
To me that sounds like they’d lead short lives under brutal conditions, breathing a hazy brown atmosphere from all the wood smoke. And if you run your country on wood you might well end up looking like Haiti … but we’ll let all that go for the moment and ask the important question:
If the British Utopians had made that noble sacrifice for humanity in 1850 and foresworn fossil fuels … how much cooler would the world be today?
Fortunately, given the assumptions made by the IPCC under the current paradigm, we can calculate how much cooler it would be if the British Utopians had given up emitting CO2. The CDIAC has data for both Canada and the World ms showing CO2 emissions since 1750. And since for a given country the CO2 emissions are a function of population, and we know the historical BC population as a fraction of the total, we can figure the total BC emissions, and thus, the amount of Utopian cooling. So here’s the true Canadian hockeystick, showing how much cooler, year by year, the world would be from the British Utopians’ self-sacrifice:
Figure 1. How much cooler the world would be if the British Utopians had abjured the evil carbon habit in 1850.
Now, the blue line in Figure 1. shows how much the virtuous actions of the British Utopians have cooled the planet over the last century and a half. If they had “Just Said No” to fossil fuels, the blue line shows how much cooler we’d be today. That would be about five thousandths of one degree … man, those Utopians really know how to get the most bang for their buck, huh? Give up all the modern comforts for a century and a half, live in the dark ages for decade after decade while everyone else is partying down, and what do they have to show for a hundred and fifty years of self-deprivation?
Five thousandths of a degree of cooling.
But wait, it gets worse … think of the grandchildren!
Over on the right hand side of the graph I’ve shown another fifty years of projected emissions. For a young couple just starting a family today, in fifty years their grandchildren will be in their thirties. So what might the BC carbon-based energy tax achieve for these grandchildren?
I’ve shown two possible futures. One is fifty years of the “Business As Usual” scenario in red. This continues the post-1970 trend, which has been an average of about a 1.5% annual increase in British Columbia emissions. That’s what we might pessimistically expect if there were no carbon-based energy tax of any kind. That’s worst-case.
And in green, I’ve shown what would be the absolute best-case result from the carbon-based energy tax. This is the total fantasy outcome, where the BC emissions remain at their 2008 value (the date of the BC tax), and they don’t increase at all for fifty years. Of course atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise because of the constant annual addition of the same amount of CO2 emitted in 2008, but not so much as in the “Business As Usual” scenario.
Now, the difference between those two possible scenarios, the worst-case and best-case scenarios, is the theoretical maximum possible cooling that might result from the carbon-based energy tax. That is shown by the black line in the lower right corner … and that cooling is three thousandths of a degree.
So there you have it. All of the pain that the folks of BC are going through, all of the miles of paperwork, all of the sacrifice, all of the damage done to the poor, all the taxes collected and bureaucrats coddled, for all of that, what the good Canadian folks have achieved for their grandchildren is three thousandths of a degree of cooling.
…
…
About all I can say is, I certainly hope than the grandchildren show a proper appreciation for that fantastic inter-generational gift, and that they send the old geezers a nice thank-you card like Miss Manners recommends. After all, it’s the thought that counts, and it’s not often you get a present that’s that significant …
Seriously, folks, the anti-carbon zealots must have hypnotized the masses. I know no other way to explain such idiocy. Here’s the thing:
Suppose someone came up to you and said “I can guarantee you that I can cool the planet by three thousandths of a degree over the next fifty years.” And suppose you checked them out, and found that they were telling the truth, in fact they could guarantee the three thousandths of a degree of cooling in fifty years.
How much would you personally pay for that?
Would you pay a thousand dollars to be guaranteed that amount of cooling, 0.003°C, and not today but in fifty years?
I wouldn’t. Not worth it. Too much money for too little benefit.
But the collective madness of the BC citizens has reached the point where they’re willing to establish an economy-slowing tax accompanied by a whole bureaucracy, with enforcement officers and piles of paperwork, and spend millions and millions of dollars in the mad pursuit of a best-case benefit of three thousandths of a degree cooling, not now, but in fifty years.
All I can do is shake my head in astonishment, and wonder at the madness of crowds. A plan is proposed, someone does a cost-benefit analysis, the benefits are too small to have a hope of being measured and don’t occur for decades … and in response people say “Great plan, let’s implement it immediately”???
Ah, well … I’m an optimist, I figure at some point our Canadian neighbors will wake up and go “Wha?” …
Best to all,
w.
PS—As I mentioned above, I wanted to take a look at the benefits, the costs, and the effects of the BC carbon-based energy tax. I’ve only discussed the (lack of) benefits in this post, so as you might expect, there will be a couple of additional posts to cover the effects and the costs. In fact they’re mostly written, because this started as one post and got unbearably long … so I’ll cover the costs and the effects of the BC tax in future posts.
PPS—Please don’t tell me that this is just the first step. The BC taxpayers have already spent half a billion dollars on this farce and that’s not the half of it. If your wonderful first step costs a billion dollars for a cooling of 0.003°C, I am not interested in your second step whatever it may be.
NOTE: This is one of a four-part series on the BC carbon-based energy tax. The parts are:
British Columbia, British Utopia
Fuel on the Highway in British Pre-Columbia
Why Revenue Neutral Isn’t, and Other Costs of the BC Tax
Willis Eschenbach says:
July 13, 2013 at 7:46 pm
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With a spokesperson like you Willis, I can go about my business without being frustrated. I was thinking, “Where do I begin with my countering all that Jan’s said. Seriously, you raise all the right points to consider. From what I’ve read and thought about, I consider it intellectual dishonesty to argue in favor of Hansen’s and Jan’s perspective.
If given this explanation of reason, Jan still disagrees, then there is nothing more than a shallow ideology guiding his statements.
You seem to attack me of several things that I do not mean Willis, so I begin by clarifying those:
Firstly, my only reason for mentioning Norway was that we for a long time have had a high fuel tax and a strong economy. That was an answer to your claim that carbon tax is so destructive for the economy. Nothing more than that.
Secondly I do not think carbon tax is a good idea in the worlds least developed countries like the Solomon Island. I think that it may be reasonable in the most developed economies like BC.
Thirdly, I am not in favor of shafting the poor. Neither poor countries nor poor in rich countries should bear the burden of carbon taxes.
So to the essence of my objections. It is these three:
1. You make a point out of BC small contribution to the global emissions. Because they are so few they will only cause 0.003 C differences. I think it is rather odd to make a point of BC’s population size.
2. A tax is not a cost; it is only a way to transfer money to the government. Only the administration part of the tax should be regarded as a cost and carbon tax does not need to be more costly than other taxes.
3. I do not think a carbon tax will be any sacrifice for a well-developed economy like BC. To justify that I show to the Forbes magazine which make a list of countries after how good they are for business? See: http://www.forbes.com/best-countries-for-business/list/ important factors are stuff like property rights, corruption, investor protection and tax burden. Energy prices are not on the chart.
” A tax is not a cost; it is only a way to transfer money to the government. Only the administration part of the tax should be regarded as a cost and carbon tax does not need to be more costly than other taxes.”
Oh, my. That’s like saying “my food bill is not a cost. It’s just a way of transferring money to the supermarket owner.” It’s nonsense. If you don’t think that taxes cost people (and companies) money, why not just give all of our money to the government and be done with it?
Your comments on the Norwegian economy are way off. Norway was a poor country until it found a bunch of fossil fuel deposits. The fact that it heavily taxes domestic consumption of fossil fuels is just a tribute to how much wealth those deposits have generated. Without them, it would be like Greece with glaciers. It doesn’t mean that the heavy taxes are good policy, just that there is enough wealth coming from evil fossil fuels to support it. For now.
With all due respect, Jan Kjetil Andersen, you haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.
BC is about the size of Finland, Norway, and Sweden combined. Other than the multi-million population urban blight called Vancouver on the coast, the entire rest of the Province is huge, separated by vast distances, and it’s all mountainous. Fuel for transportation is NOT OPTIONAL anywhere except in one densely populated urban center. And even though the coast itself is a great climate with minimal heating requirements, the rest of the Province is inland. It’s COLD. Heating is not an option in the Okanagan Valley, for example.
The carbon tax may not be such a big sacrifice for Vancouverites, they’re already living in squalor for twice the price of anywhere else in the country (don’t tell them, they don’t realize that 800 square foot houses with no yard to speak of for over $800,000 is a complete rip off).
However, outside of that one urban area, the rest of the place is suffering, a lot.
It is mind boggling that you “think it’s odd to make a point of BC’s population size”. Why would anyone think that’s odd?
A tax is a cost. Usually, those costs have some sort of value… paying for police, fire departments, schools, etc. A carbon tax just takes your money with NO RETURN, except possibly unicorns and rainbows, which seem to be in abundance in BC.
Frankly, your opinion on what’s going in in a place you’ve never been to is ridiculous and ill informed.
Firstly I think that a long term effect of carbon tax may impact the emissions more than estimated here. I’m taking an example from Norway again just to give you a clue; the annual fuel consumption diesel plus gasoline in Norway is approximately 1000/ liters per capita. The annual fuel consumption in the US is approximately 2400 liters per capita. An average US citizen therefore use more than double of what an average Norwegian citizen use. This is so in spite of the fact that Norway is more sparsely populated than the US so we need to drive longer distances, and that the per capita income is on average higher than in the US. The main factor that accomplishes the huge difference in fuel consumption is that we have a very high tax on automobile fuel.
Then to the odd part I’m talking about. Since we are only 5 million people our contribution to the global emissions are of course small. If we removed all fuel taxes we would perhaps sooner or later have come up on the US level or more and more than doubled the carbon emissions from the cars. It would not matter much since we are only 5 million, would it?
Using that logic all small nations in the world should not care about emissions since their share are so small on a global scale. That is the odd logic I’m talking about.
Sorry, I should have said in a statewide perspective a tax is not a cost; it is only a way to transfer money to the government. I did that previously, but forgot it in the summary.
After all, what we are discussing is whether a carbon tax in BC will be a sacrifice for the citizens in BC. I don’t think so as long as we do not raise the total tax level. That means that a carbon tax should be compensated by reliefs in other taxes.
The discussion of the total tax level is an entirely different topic.
All taxes are of course a burden for those who pay them and in your personal budget you can correctly regard them as costs. But we need some taxes to transfer money to the government, so why not put a tax on bad stuff like carbon emission instead of taxing good stuff like creating jobs? For most people that will not matter much, but it may encourage people to cut emissions a bit, and perhaps do more of the stuff which has got the tax relief.
Willis objects to this and argues, if I understand him correctly, that it is bad for the economy to tax energy because it is such a fundamentally important factor to make the economy grow.
I think he may have a point there, but I do not think it is very important in a highly advanced economy such as the Canadian. I think cheap energy is more important in the less developed countries in the world.
Norway has never been especially poor compared to the rest of the world; we had the level of an average western European country, which is high compared to most other countries in the world.
Jan;
Norway is more sparsely populated than the US so we need to drive longer distances,? Puhleeze. What % of the population is huddled in that teeny blob in the south? The US is habitable from corner to corner, excepting a few deserts and mountain ranges bigger than Norway.
It is 55% the size of Texas. Trivial travel totals .
Jan Kjetil Andersen says:
July 14, 2013 at 12:38 am
Willis Eschenbach says:
My apologies if I’ve misunderstood, thanks for clarifications.
As I said, any country with a North Sea full of oil to nurse on can tax it all it wants. Well, not all it wants, but heavily.
The problem is that organizations like the World Bank and environmental NGSs think that one size fits all.
Yes, you are arguing strongly in favor of shafting the poor. Let me state it again.
Cheap energy is the friend and savior of the farmer, the housewife, and the poor. Therefore, anyone arguing for increasing energy prices is harming those people.
You misunderstand my argument. The people of BC, to achieve the 0.003°C cooling, would have to freeze their emissions at the 2008 level for fifty years. That is a huge sacrifice. For me, that sacrifice is far too great for that kind of return.
It’s not the small size of the group that matters. It is that every group, including the poor, would have to make a similar size of sacrifice. I’m not willing to ask the world to do that for the next fifty years, when I know for a fact that energy is development, and thus freezing energy use means freezing development.
Any tax is a cost. It takes money out of my pockets. The question is whether the cost is worth the benefit. I’m not an “anti-tax” person, I don’t think that “tax is theft” or any of that nonsense.
But it is absolutely a cost, as an accountant I can assure you of that.
Oh, my goodness, that’s rich. Businesses are fleeing California, in part because of the high cost of energy. And manufacturing tends to cluster around the cheap power plants, do you think that’s coincidence? Claiming that energy costs are not a factor when deciding where to locate a business just reveals what I said a while ago, that you have little experience in the rough-and-tumble world of running a business.
Look, I’m not dissing you, Jan. It’s just that truly, you don’t seem to understand business and finance. Taxes are not a cost? Don’t say that to an accountant …
w.
johanna says:
July 14, 2013 at 1:35 am
Thanks, Johanna. You’re right, here’s how Norway got fat … and I do love “Greece with glaciers”.
Figure C1. Per Capita Energy use versus per capita GDP.
The size of the bubbles shows the per capita oil production for that year. So yes, given their huge oil production, Jan’s right that Norway can tax it all it wants … doesn’t make it intelligent policy, though.
Note also how the availability of energy has fueled manufacturing in Norway (color of the bubbles)
w.
I recognized that we have a huge advantage there when I first mentioned Norway. But why I did mention Norway was to reply to your claim that:
” what we haven’t had is a strong economy built on expensive energy”
And even if I cannot say that Norway’s economy is built on expensive energy in general, a huge part of it is; namely the diesel and gasoline for road transport.
This came out wrong as I have explained in answer to Joanna above. I just missed a small explanation. From the start of the discussion you use the words “cost” and “sacrifice” for the citizens of BC. But for the state as whole taxes are just as much revenues as expenses. And a shift from one tax to another is no sacrifice in total.
Well I just show to what Forbes magazine have evaluated. Do you mean that they don’t have a clue or what?
No I don’t think this is dissing, you just use a missing sentence for all it is worth, I think that must be in lack of substantial arguments.
Jan says: “No I don’t think this is dissing, you just use a missing sentence for all it is worth, I think that must be in lack of substantial arguments.”
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you have not given anything but oddball references and still you refuse to provide anything that shows Willis missed something. Opinions are different than facts.
Norway is also habitable from corner to corner.
The area of Norway is 323 802 square km. Spitsbergen is then not counted. The population in Oslo with surrounding areas in a circle with a total area of 21 400 km is 1.8 million, i.e. 36 % of the population on the most densely populated 7% of the area. This means that we are not i especially crowded in a small spot.
You may have a point that the US is even more spread, I don’t know. But that cannot explain that the fuel consumption an average is so much as more than double per citizen compared to what we have.
Can you please be more specific Mario. Which of my objections do you think lack backing and which references do you characterize as oddball?
Jan Kjetil Andersen says:
July 14, 2013 at 1:12 pm
Jan, you live in the country that is the third largest oil exporter on the planet. Your country reaps huge stacks of dollars from that … and you want to lecture the poor on how to price their precious drops of oil?
Oh, please, your explanation just makes it worse. You say that for the state “taxes are just as much revenues as expenses”. Again you’re just revealing your ignorance. For the state taxes are never a cost (expense), they are a revenue stream. For individuals, taxes are never a revenue stream, they are a cost.
Sheesh …
And again your ignorance of the real world is showing. A shift from one tax to another can involve huge sacrifice for one group and a trivial gain for another. It’s like taking a hundred pound pack from a grown man and putting it on a kid. Yes, the same weight is being borne, but that doesn’t matter in terms of sacrifice. As a result, neither individually nor in total is there “no sacrifice”
In addition, economies don’t “sacrifice”, they just produce more or less as the case may be. Individuals, on the other hand, sacrifice. And yes, when there are millions of people driving to the US to fill up their gas tanks, that is a sacrifice … just not as large a sacrifice as buying fuel in Canada.
No, I just think they’re looking at a different set of business-related variables that don’t happen to include energy …
I have given you substantial arguments. I’ve given you references to further studies. I’ve given you citations to my own discussions about the specifics of the issues.
You, on the other hand, keep showing up with nothing in your hand but your johnson. As I remarked earlier:
So yes, Jan, I’ve given you a host of very specific examples and very substantial arguments.
In return, you’ve claimed that taxes are not a cost … and when I comment on that you accuse me of lacking substantial arguments?
Truly, you need to get out more, Jan. You’re making a spectacle of yourself, and not doing the reputation of Norway any good either. I would strongly recommend that before you say one more word about economics and costs and prices, that you start and run a business for a few years … I say that because its clear that reading about businesses has taught you next to nothing.
w.
Jan Kjetil Andersen says:
July 14, 2013 at 2:00 pm
Mario Lento says:
July 14, 2013 at 1:21 pm
you have not given anything but oddball references and still you refuse to provide anything that shows Willis missed something. Opinions are different than facts.
Can you please be more specific Mario. Which of my objections do you think lack backing and which references do you characterize as oddball?
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Jan: I think you realize that you are intellectually dishonest. I give you credit for not being dumb. But I stand by my statements. Let me give you a single example and expand on it. You do not consider tax a cost. That’s absurd.
You wrote “A tax is not a cost; it is only a way to transfer money to the government.”
The explanation you provide after the comma “…it’s the only way…” is 100% obfuscation. It does not in any way show that a tax is not a cost. Instead of proving it’s not a cost, you instead justify why you think taxes are good. You change the argument to avoid the issue. You leave the issue hanging and move on to other opinions of yours. This makes you unreasonable to argue with. It’s like dealing with someone who’s hysterical -or unable to discuss a topic cogently.
I submit that taxes are one of the costs of doing business. You probably agree, but we cannot tell that by the way you go on an on with obfuscation.
What’s worse is that you don’t understand that taxing changes behavior in a macro sense. Willis explained this to you in his words. You don’t understand or admit that taxing energy has trickle up effects. It makes everything that uses energy more expensive and hurts everything that is essential to life of poor people. The wealthy have excess money, but the poor must essentially deal with having less of what is necessary to live on.
You see yourself as being caring of the poor I’m sure. But it is your policy and obfuscation of the truth that hurts them the most. That you don’t admit this is another objection I have.
Come clean and admit Willis took you to school and you will be a better person because of it.
JKA said:
Norway has never been especially poor compared to the rest of the world; we had the level of an average western European country, which is high compared to most other countries in the world.
What is your source for that statement?
I invite you to look at the graph on page 4 here:
http://m.norges-bank.no/pages/85389/nhh_foredrag_til%20olsen_english_110405.pdf
The paper is by the boss of the Norges Bank – hardly a critic. The graph is titled “From Rags to Riches” and demonstrates that, adjusted for purchasing power parity, Norwegian GDP per capita was pretty much static – and 20% less than that of Sweden – from 1900 to … well, well … around 1970 when the oil money began to flow. Since then, it has doubled.
I don’t know what you mean by “an average European country” – would that be Portugal or Germany you are talking about?
Without the oil you would be closer in living standard to Portugal than to Germany.
I have to admit, this is one of the most astounding opinions on taxes that I’ve ever encountered.
Each tax has a purpose (or is supposed to).
With my property taxes I pay for police and fire, garbage collection, local road maintenance, sanding and plowing in winter, and (Calgarians will get this:) artsy bridges from Italy.
With my federal income taxes I pay for a military presence, airline safety and security, federal road construction and maintenance, and fireworks displays in Ottawa every Canada Day.
With my business taxes I pay for people to handle business affairs, file paperwork, handle patents and copyrights, and other tangibles.
Each tax that I am subject to is supposed to have a purpose. YES it happens that often my money is misused, but at least there is SOME reason for it to be there.
A Carbon tax, however, is PUNITIVE. It’s goal is to PUNISH me for living in the first world. It is intended to CHANGE MY BEHAVIOR and make me drive less, or heat my home less. The result of a carbon tax is that everything else I do in my entire life costs more, thus my money is worth less. It now costs to get food delivered to my house. Things in retail stores cost more because shipping is more costly. Businesses that depend on power find it difficult to make a profit, or in some cases even break even, which means they have to lay off workers.
There as ABSOLUTELY NO ADVANTAGE to a carbon tax. NONE. A carbon tax is a parasitic tax that lowers everyone’s standard of living with ABSOLUTELY NO BENEFIT. Except to the few that are lined up to milk that “free” money. And that’s not me, or anyone I know, or am likely to ever know.
If you think that it’s good to “give” more money to government, then I suggest you find a communist country and let THEM run your life. At the moment there are still a few, I understand North Korea is still welcoming immigrants (that have money).
CodeTech, you raise a great point here. Tesla made a profit of about $11.2 Million, because they received $68 Million in Carbon Credits paid for by other companies. This is according to their own letter to shareholders. The Carbon credit has a purpose… it is to garner political clout from greenies to keep afloat companies that sell products that would otherwise cost more to make than people are willing to pay.
When people say Tesla is a success story, remind them of this. Just think of all the costs we need to bare to support receivers of Carbon Credits.
See the dialogue above again. I have explained why I bring in the example of Norway, it is to contradict your statement. I cannot see that this “you want to lecture…” statement of yours is bringing in anything of substance. You just attack me for being who I am.
When I say “the state as a whole” I mean both the government and the individuals who are living there. I thought that much was obvious. Your responses start to get less and less to the case and more to personal attacks on me. You say “Again you’re just revealing your ignorance”, Why not just stick to discuss the case?
Again you start by attacking me, not the case.
When shifting from one tax to another then obviously some people will pay more and other less than before. In some cases it can be the way you describes as a huge sacrifice for one group and a trivial gain for another, but the opposite may also be the result; a trivial sacrifice for one group and a huge gain for another. After all we are not talking of increasing the total tax level here.
With a carbon tax most people will have a choice of how much they shall pay. Buy a huge gas –guzzling car and pay more, or buy a small and pay less. With most other taxes you do not have that choice.
But why do you think they don’t include energy? If energy was so crucial to a modern economy they should have it on the chart, don’t you think?
When you say that “ Businesses are fleeing California, in part because of the high cost of energy. And manufacturing tends to cluster around the cheap power plants”, it has to be quantified by numbers. How much does this affect the total GDP and employment? There are of course some heavy industries like metal smelting and the like which are depending on huge energy use which benefit a lot of cheap energy, but they counts less in a modern economy than they used to.
Software industry, as one example, is not so dependent on cheap energy.
We had a discussion on the Solomon Island and I made it clear that I do not think that a carbon tax is a good idea in the least developed countries in the world. We are talking about BC which is a rich part of the world.
I have in a similar way answered to the case on the different topics we have bought up, but your counterarguments seems to dry up. Then you change to personal attacks on me, like for instance screaming accusation like “again your ignorance of the real world is showing” instead of sticking to the case.
You disappoints me here Willis. I have read a couple of your articles and I think that in general they are well written and have a good point. Here you as usual go high out and claim that the carbon tax in BC is a huge sacrifice for the citizen of BC for virtually no gain at all.
I counter this by suggesting that this may be not so bad idea after all. I am not claiming that this is our savior; let’s have more of it all over the world, and I am not claiming that I have all the answers to this. I just had some objections to your claims that I would like a discussion on.
I put out the question for debate in my initial comment: “After all we need some taxes to bring money to the government, so why not put a tax on the bad stuff we want to reduce rather than tax good stuff like creating jobs?”
And we had a good debate for some time. I recognize your argument that cheap energy is an important factor in an economy. But I do not think it is that important and in a modern high tech economy. It was very important in the old days yes, but less now since we have many more profitable high tech industries with low energy usage. I have given arguments for that and showed to the Forbes list. But now you attack me again and just say that “You’re making a spectacle of yourself”. I do not regard that as a very good argument.
So this is really a disappointing end.
Thank you for the link Joanna. In short is says that Norway’s per capita GDP was 80% of Sweden’s before the oil. All is relative, but I do not think that 80% of a well-developed country like Sweden in the 1970-ties can be termed as a “poor country”. India and Egypt is poor, Norway was not close to that.
Sorry, Jan, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but “spectacle” does describe it quite well.
If your mode of thinking is common in Norway, I can only say I’m glad I don’t live there.
Very few people in BC have “gas guzzlers”, and those who do don’t worry about trifles like fuel costs. The vast majority, just as in every other part of the world, drive vehicles that are practical for them and their purposes. I bought a car in August 2009 that used to cost about $30 to fill, now it’s closer to $60. My income hasn’t doubled.
No Mario, I have the disadvantage to debate in a, for me, foreign language, but I am trying my best to be clear and not intellectually dishonest.
I have commented on that in answer to Joanna and Willis above. I missed one sentence to explain what I meant. Tax is of course a cost for doing business, but when if you just replace one tax with another the cost will be zero.
Yes, I understand and admit that taxing changes behavior in a macro sense. It is the purpose of the carbon tax to change the behavior away from carbon intensive behavior and towards less carbon intensive behavior.
I just wanted to put Willis claim that a carbon tax in BC is such a big sacrifice to the citizens to debate
I have given a few arguments in favor of carbon tax, and I have got some insightful replies that I have enjoyed and learnt from, like the first replies from Willis and the link from Joanna. I have answered to those trying to be clear, honest and polite.
“Thank you for the link Joanna. In short is says that Norway’s per capita GDP was 80% of Sweden’s before the oil. All is relative, but I do not think that 80% of a well-developed country like Sweden in the 1970-ties can be termed as a “poor country”. India and Egypt is poor, Norway was not close to that.”
No, it says that Norway’s GDP per capita was static from 1900 till the oil arrived in around 1970. Given the economic history of Europe since 1900, that is hardly a stellar performance. And, if comparing it to India or Egypt is the best that you can do, well …
My best friend for the last 40 years is Norwegian by birth (we live in Australia). Her family, who were actually quite well off, left in the 1950s because the place was an economic backwater – and as quasi-aristocrats who owned a lot of land, they were well attuned to how the wind was blowing in those days. If it hadn’t been for the oil, and given the taxation and expectation levels of the locals, it would indeed be Greece without the glaciers.
No, Joanna you misunderstand the graph. It says: GDP per capita, Norway – adjusted by purchasing power parity. Index, Sweden = 100. 1900-2010
The keyword is “Sweden=100”. That means that Norway’s per capita GDP is compared with Sweden for all the years. Sweden and Norway had more or less the same good development in the period 1900 to 1975, and then Norway leaped away because of the oil income.
I have not found any English statistic for the actual per capita GDP development from 1900 to 1970, but it was approximately 500% in fixed prices. It is shown in figure two in this Norwegian article:
http://www.ssb.no/a/filearchive/norsk-okonomi_og_olje_gjennom_100_aar.pdf
We would have been really bad off if it had been a steady state from 1900 to 1970, don’t you think?
Gee – comparing yourself to Sweden. That’s not a bad thing. Except in the mid 70s, Sweden had ABBA. I once read that for a while, ABBA was the biggest industry in Sweden, surpassing the auto industry, the mining industry, etc. And in spite of this, Norway still found oil on the back 40 and leapt ahead.
Does your mother know that you’re out?