Does Australia have the highest carbon tax compared to other countries? > Check the facts
Who: “The rest of the world [is] not going anywhere near carbon taxes or emission trading schemes.” Tony Abbott.
Mr. Abbott has also claimed that Australia has “the world’s biggest carbon tax”.
The Claim: That no other country has a scheme to place a price on carbon and Australia has the world’s biggest tax.
The Facts: Australia is not the only country to put a price on carbon. Many other countries in the world have done the same and all OECD countries have some type of carbon pricing mechanism. Australia’s tax rate is also relatively small compared to the OECD average.
Discussion of evidence: The OECD has recently released a report comparing the carbon tax rates of OECD countries. All OECD countries have some type of mechanism.
The report states that “Australia and the Americas have the lowest effective tax rates [on CO2]”. Australia’s carbon tax rate is the 5th lowest out of the 34 OECD countries and is well below average. The graph below illustrates this:
Who knows how you would get it to work or the political implications but given our level of imports shouldn’t we be taxing imports relative to their countries carbon polution? While the 1st world is starting to see some movement towards planning for the future (carbon taxing and reduction of carbon pollution) for many developing countries cash in the short term is more important than the future environment and often they are the larger polluters. The only way you will effectively motivate them is through financial incentives/penalties and if they won’t implement a carbon tax themselves, we do believe in carbon taxing ourselves, then surely we should likewise tax their imports. I think it’s this imbalance, where essentially we disadvantage ourselves against higher polluters which angers some parts of the community against a carbon tax. Not withstanding the larger problem that so much of the population still doesn’t believe in global warming and we need to do a better job educating them of the facts.
The issue here I think is that poorer countries will become even poorer. Many of these rely on exports for income, have no social welfare and therefore subsequently become worse off. Its a Catch 22.
We may see industries moving to these poorer countries not only for the cheaper labor but overall reduced operation costs due to carbon tax.
That nation would therefore be better off instating a tax themselves so they see some of that income before the profits and taken back to the US or Australia or wherever.
Current financial climate its hard to ask anyone to spend a cent on something they aren’t forced to do.
I would interested to see the axis labels for that graph – I presume they are for other OECD countries? IIRC, Europe’s scheme used to be the most costly, but I think now they’ve moved to an ETS and their carbon price has dropped significantly.