Flying the friendly (but taxed) skies

In Canada, it’s common wisdom that declaring support for an environmental tax can be political suicide. Stephane Dion’s support of a carbon tax certainly didn’t help him hold onto the leadership of the federal Liberal Party, and BC’s carbon tax originally raised the expected howls of opposition (and its recent increase in tandem with the provincial HST could raise them again). But in a country with one of the highest per capita greenhouse gas emission rates in the world, it seems likely that Canadians will eventually see something along the lines of a price on carbon. Across the Atlantic, it’s already becoming a reality.

Germany, along with other struggling European economies, recently passed a slate of austerity measures to bring deficits down. In this case, it included an eco-tax on air travel designed to bring up to a billion Euros in revenue.

Following on the heels of the UK’s own air travel duties, instituted in 2007, the German tax is stirring controversy as opponents accuse the government of using environmental concerns as an excuse to draw more tax revenue. As the Tree Hugger article linked above notes, other European countries including the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain have already dropped taxes on air travel in response to this kind of opposition, which is hardly surprising — with the world still concerned about recession, environmental concerns are usually trumped. A Canwest poll in March, for example, found that 36 per cent of Canadians listed the economy as their primary concern, versus 17 per cent for the environment.

Money talks, which is why Alberta requires companies who exceed their carbon intensity targets to pay $15 per tonne of CO2 emissions into the Climate Change and Emissions Management Fund, which recently paid out a total of $28.1 million to 30 Alberta companies. We all incur an environmental cost with emissions, and if Germany is any indication, we might also eventually incur a financial one to boot.

Via Tree Hugger