Whenever I hear politicians propose to cut the carbon price, I can’t help but think back to my childhood growing up with divorced parents.
On the rare occasions my dad took me for weekends, he would offer me candy and let me stay up late.
“Why can’t you be more like him?” I’d yell after returning home as my mom made me do my homework, eat vegetables and go to bed on time.
So it is with proponents of Axe the Tax. They offer us candy, when the federal government, like my mom, expects us to live responsibly.
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But a politician’s promise that pollution can be free is no more realistic than my childish fantasy that I could live on candy alone.
We are all entangled in an energy system that helps and harms our children. While it enables us to taxi our kids around, and keep them warm, it also poisons the air they breathe, evaporates the water they need to drink and burns the forests in which they play.
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To preserve summers without smoke, winters when our kids can ski, water they can drink and forests and wildlife with which they can live in awe.
That’s why we pay for our pollution.
This dude gets it. We need to do so much more, but walking back the carbon tax is a terrible idea.
Why not tax AC only heat pumps? It would incentivise people to get heat pumps that can heat and cool.
You could, but it wouldn’t help with emissions from literally everything else. A carbon tax is nice in that it gives even coverage.
I have a heat pump…never ONCE used the heat pump on it because I like having heat when it’s really cold.
What happens now…
Your heat pump can still effeciently provide heat during spring and fall when it is cold but not cold enough to ruin the performance of the heat pump.
Not mine, reversing valve seized because I only used gas and I really don’t care to change it. I do agree that AC shouldn’t exist and all machines should be heat pumps but yeh, I have no use for it. Electricity cost here is absurd compared to gas.
Modern heat pumps continue to function down to -20C or below. If it gets colder than that where you live you can supplement with an auxiliary source for cold days.