Trant said...fatwa said...
I'd support this tax if the proceeds actually went to developing cleaner power. Otherwise what's the point?
If a power company sees greater profit potential in using cleaner power sources (because they won't be subject to tax), then they're more likely to use them.
e.g. If I run 'Trantpower' and it costs me $10 to generate 1MW using coal, but $9 to generate 1MW using solar, then I'm going to see greater profit potential using solar and will spend less on new coal power stations and more on new solar farms.*
Without a carbon tax, it's still cheaper to generate power using coal and therefore my incentive is to use coal and invest in coal power.
The tax is 'supposed' to make clean energy more attractive to industry. (or clean production methods etc.)
* figures pulled out of my a$se ;)
Trant, what you have failed to pull out of your butt is an alternative method of producing power at anywhere near the cost it can be pulled out of a coal fired power station. Unfortunately it is about half the cost of the next cleanest alternative which is a gas powered power station. And these still produce bags of "dangerous carbon polution" by-products.
Next off would be wind power but then that is about 3 or 4 times the production cost and only works for about 30% of the time and we don't know what times that will be because we don't know when the wind will blow.
And then we have solar power which is at a similar cost to wind power but it suffers from the same defect in that it only works for less than 25% of the time, and we don't know exactly when that will be except that we do know it only works in the daytime, but we don't know what days.
And finally we have a whole range of pie in the sky alternatives like wave power, hot rocks, tidal power etc etc, non of which have anything like a large scale power production facility anywhere in the world, and in all probability never will because all the small scale demonstration plants show serious deficiencies in their economic viability when transferred to a larger scale.
I haven't mentioned nuclear power because it's seriously on the nose at the moment.
The fact is, if there was a viable alternative to coal fired power stations then the world would have jumped onto it years ago.
Bringing in a $23 a ton tax on carbon will nowhere near be enough to force power production in any other direction than it is presently going and the level of taxation required to force the issue would totally scuttle the whole economy long before change was achieved.
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