Taxing Facts

Sometimes I think of myself as too conservative to be a socialist, or too left-wing to be liberal. Think of that what you will. My politics don't follow party lines, so I'm just being me.

I was thinking about taxes. I don't care how much I get taxed, because I see that as a part of society that I contribute to. I don't like the tax dollars being wasted, but can't see how it is. In fact, I suspect that the professionals in the public service do as good a job as they can.
Make of that what you will.

The fixed price for carbon, which became known as the Carbon Tax in Australia, was considered at first a step in the right direction for bringing down the production of carbon emissions by increasing the cost of producing said emissions.
In theory, this is a direct effect.
The reality is that the increased cost of producing the service that produced the emissions was passed directly on to the consumer, & the consumer was then compensated for the increase by the government that collected the revenue ... but there was no correlation between between the rise in one & the offset of the other.

Fundamentally, although the idea of taxing the polluters is a good one, it doesn't encourage anyone to do anything about it, but shifts the money around. I believe that there was an effect on carbon emissions, but this could be more about people looking for cheaper alternatives & lowering demand, rather than any polluter changing their ways.

To ensure that things really change, you need to encourage investment in, & therefore availability of, alternatives. You can also discourage investment in pollution.
The easiest way to do this is to change the way that people are taxed on the profits in carbon-emission-oriented industries.
That's radical. It's also time-consuming, because it requires an assessment at the polluters end to determine how profitable the carbon-emitting aspect of the business is, & therefore what tax should be applicable to the profit of the company.

This sounds too hard, but the theory goes that people (investors) will move away from those companies who aren't investing their energy into lower-emission alternatives.
Tax concessions in green energy (for example) companies' profits would redistribute that investment appropriately.

Rather than applying a tax to the primary producer, hitting the secondary investor would have less of an impact on the end user, & would seem to be less of an administrative nightmare because there are fewer people involved in the process overall.

The end user would simply see less availability of high-emission products, or else cheaper low-emission products. Do they need to care more than that?

Now you see my political dilemma - I'm fundamentally all for climate change awareness & taxation, but don't believe it's been done right so far.