Juno News - December 16, 2020


The carbon tax is worse than you think

Mentioned
Candace Malcolm
Will our ＂feminist＂ government do anything about PornHub？ Jason Kenney on lockdowns, freedom, and western alienation

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

223.68

Word count

1,058

Sentence count

—


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I explain why the new federal carbon tax is actually worse than you think, and why you should be worried about it. I discuss why the carbon tax isn't as bad as you think and why it's actually much worse than people think.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 so today I'm going to tell you why the new federal carbon tax is actually worse than you think and
00:00:09.840 it's not because the price is going to be exorbitant and going to hit you in the pocketbook it's
00:00:14.640 because it's basically a syntax that leaves you no alternatives now a syntax is a tax that we put
00:00:21.120 on things that are sinful or harmful to society these are traditionally things like gambling or
00:00:25.800 alcohol drugs tobacco might be pornography sugar lately things like driving your car into the city
00:00:32.680 during rush hour put a fee or a levy on you because we simply don't want you to do these things even if
00:00:37.320 we don't want to make them illegal per se now what is the problem with these syntaxes what is the big
00:00:42.220 problem with a tax that is trying to affect your behavior well the problem with those in general
00:00:47.940 is that they're very difficult to predict because people often get a different level of benefit from
00:00:53.760 the thing that we're talking about right if we're talking about a sugar tax it's very difficult to
00:00:58.160 predict how people are going to behave because if you're used to buying a can of pop can of soda for
00:01:02.540 about a buck well at what point are you not going to buy that thing is it have to be a dollar five
00:01:07.200 dollar ten dollar twenty five dollar fifty two dollars you know at what point does the tax have
00:01:12.500 to be so that you're not going to engage in the behavior that the government doesn't want you to
00:01:16.980 behave in and this is ignoring the fact that we may not even agree that the government should be even
00:01:21.600 enforcing such a thing and you know what are your rights about that but again that's a whole entirely
00:01:26.260 different issue but the question here is really the potential alternatives now the tax is going to
00:01:33.160 go up from about thirty dollars to one hundred and seventy dollars per ton and even though most people have
00:01:37.660 no idea what a ton of carbon is or greenhouse gas emissions what you know what does that actually do
00:01:41.920 how do i produce that you know what what does the average canadian produce but the problem is that
00:01:46.820 it's going to go up slowly to a hundred and seventy dollars and even though 2030 is a long time away
00:01:52.120 and there might be very different world that we're going to live in in 10 years the problem is that
00:01:56.660 in two years the effect is going to be about 12 cents per liter on gasoline now the government's stated
00:02:03.060 goal again is to change your behavior and get you away from carbon emissions so they probably would like you
00:02:07.400 to drive an electric car but what if you have no alternative what if you cannot afford to buy an electric car right
00:02:14.280 maybe you don't have the money to switch cars maybe you're driving an old beater because that's what
00:02:17.640 you can afford you're simply beginning to pay 12 cents more and you have no alternative to move away
00:02:23.780 from a gasoline powered car what if you drive a lot and an electric car simply does not work for you
00:02:29.900 because of the amount of driving that you're going to have to do maybe you're you know a taxi cab driver
00:02:34.020 or a limousine driver or some sort of delivery driver the car is going to be running the entire day you
00:02:38.700 cannot drive an electric car because there's simply going to be no time to charge it in between your driving
00:02:43.400 maybe you have a very large family and they don't really make electric cars that are you know
00:02:48.560 affordable for a large family that seats seven or eight people so the fact that the government is
00:02:54.780 framing this as a syntax is actually problematic because ultimately yes they're trying to get you
00:03:00.340 to change your behavior but they're not really leaving you with any alternatives it's not like
00:03:04.600 a tax on soda where you could theoretically just drink something else you know you don't have to drink
00:03:08.680 soda even though again you know maybe it's your right to be able to drink soda that could be argued
00:03:12.600 it's not like a tax on driving into the city where they want to take you to you know they want to make
00:03:18.380 you use public transportation so you can not take your car and again even that it might not work because
00:03:23.520 it might not work for your family but it's a syntax on something that you may have no control over
00:03:28.820 and you may have no alternative and that's why it's actually worse than people think because it's not
00:03:33.800 just a penalty for people who want to pollute like the government says that you know they say that
00:03:38.960 we're going to increase the price and make it more difficult for people to pollute but that might not
00:03:42.860 be the scenario you might have absolutely no choice but to pollute but to you know create carbon
00:03:48.860 emissions which isn't it you know an entirely different issue as well because pollution and
00:03:54.180 carbon emissions may or may not be the same thing so this is why the carbon tax is actually worse than
00:03:59.200 you think and it's not just because it's going to be a very high fee it's worse than you think
00:04:02.980 because it it's going to leave a lot of people with potentially no alternative to change their
00:04:08.780 behavior no way around creating those carbon emissions at the very least in the short term
00:04:14.440 now my good friend candace malcolm has a great series called green hypocrisy and i would definitely
00:04:19.740 recommend that you subscribe to our true north channel and hit that notification bell so you can
00:04:23.440 be notified when the latest episodes come out it's a great series and it will talk about these type of
00:04:28.040 things but i really just wanted to talk about the alternatives that it's going to leave you or not leave you
00:04:32.600 with because that is a serious problem and that's the problem of any syntax or tax that's aimed at
00:04:37.540 changing your behavior so for true north i am sam ashkenazi thank you so so much for watching
00:04:42.520 have yourselves a great day