With the upcoming People’s Climate March and the U.N. climate summit in New York City, more attention has been focused on the carbon tax in recent weeks. While the carbon tax addresses the most pressing environmental issue, climate change, there are many others including pollution of all sorts and land degradation. A number of instances of these stem directly from various extractive industries; think mountain top coal mining, drilling and transport of crude and refined oil products, hydraulic fracture mining of natural gas, mercury in gold mining and mining and refining other industrial minerals/metals. Some of these effects could be mitigated by switching to renewable energy and recycling. But current cost structure favors virgin extracted raw materials over renewable energy and recycled material. This is why expanding the carbon tax into an extracted materials tax would be a positive move. Considering that extractive industries consume immense amounts of energy, this would increase the cost of virgin materials and provide incentive for entrepreneurs to develop more efficient recycling capacity… renewable energy and material stream; reduction in landfill use; less extractive industry pollution… many positive outcomes for one tax.
You might enjoy Henry George's _Progress and Poverty_, which came to similar conclusions. His 1890s followers were called the 'Single-Tax Movement', due to advocating only one tax, on 'Land' (= natural resources).
ReplyDelete