Carbon is the most useful substance on earth and there is already a price on every product containing carbon – coal and oil, bread and butter, beef and bacon, oil and ethanol, beer and whiskey, coffee and tea, cotton and wool, diesel and fire wood, methane and carbon dioxide, petrol and rubber - all are carbon products with an established market price.
Those who chatter about “a price on carbon” are hiding their real aim which is to reduce human activity by taxing the release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
If this tax attempted to cover all releases of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it would indeed be “A Monster New Tax”.
Every man and beast, every car and train, every ship and plane, every cement plant and blast furnace, every power station using coal, oil or gas, every wood stove and gas barbeque, every swamp and termite nest – all emit carbon dioxide and thus recycle carbon. Carbon feeds, powers and clothes our world. Any attempt to stop that is suicidal.
Every producer of carbon products is already taxed – income tax and payroll tax, royalties and resource rent tax, excise and levies, permits and quotas.
Another carbon tax would just add to the costs of everything, increase poverty, bloat the bureaucracy and send more jobs to China.
We didn’t want the deceitfully labeled Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and we don’t want a new tax labeled “A Price on Carbon”.
Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, has spent his life working in exploration, mining, farming, infrastructure, financial analysis and political commentary. He has worked for government departments, private companies and now works as a private contractor and farmer.
Viv has also been a guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects.
