this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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I would love to be more environmentally friendly but unfortunately the financial cost of entry is too high. The answer isn't to keep making gas more unaffordable, it's already way more expensive to drive an ICE car than an EV. The issue is the people the carbon tax hurts the most are precisely the same people who can't afford to buy something electric. There have got to be other ways to incentivize the switch for people who can afford it (and therefore don't really notice a few extra bucks to fill up) while not overly punishing those who can't. Maybe we should be putting a tax on new ICE vehicles proportional to their pollution, and put that towards a means tested/non-luxury ev subsidy so that they become viable to those who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford a new car.
The carbon tax is currently 14.31cents per litre, that's about 10%. It's an incentive. To fully wipe out that cost, you don't need to buy an EV, you could drive 10% less, or buy an ICE vehicle that is 10% more efficient (or some combination). That's very easy to do in a country where most of us drive large vehicles, and make too many un-combined trips. Drop one trip in 10, or combine it with one of the other 9 and you get to spend your rebate money on beer instead of gasoline.
Subsidies and special taxes are super in-efficient. Besides requiring a whole slew of bureaucracy to administer it, it never applies to everything fairly. That tax you suggest on new ICE vehicles doesn't dissuade anyone from parking their jacked up f150 one day a week, and it doesn't reward the person who buys a used car for their commute instead of a used SUV. All those little decisions get incentivized, and they allow people to make their own decisions about how to pollute less, instead of doing the 1 thing some government has decided to be the official, subsidized solution.