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OT - new carbon tax 25-Feb-2011 At 3:51:29 PM billk

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On 25/02/2011 gfdonc wrote:
>Reading Jeff Rubin's book "Why Your World is About to Get Smaller" is a
>bit of an eye-opener.
>
>One of the points he makes is that carbon taxes are misguided. They'll
>make production even more expensive in regulated, low-polluting countries
>such as Australia, the US and Europe, and help to encourage the move of
>even more production to high-polluting countries such as China. Hence
>making the problem worse on a global scale, not better.
>
>The solution is instead to impose an import carbon tariff based
>on the country of origin, rather a local tax, which would have the opposite
>effect. But that would get the whole Free Trade lobby up in arms, wouldn't
>it?
>
>Think local, act global? It's not working on this one.
>

One likely feature of a less energy-intensive future would be to have less stuff shipped all over the world and more manufactured close to where it is consumed. The suggestion of a carbon tariff makes sense from that standpoint.

Declining oil reserves and resulting increasing transport costs will probably push things in that direction independently of carbon taxes or carbon tariffs.