The future is, however, looking brighter as the proper debate gets underway, and the real thinkers come into the forum with real solutions. The only caution…how much damage can the fading stars, the Howards the Turnbulls the Albaneses do promoting their ill though out cling-to-the-past solutions as they are nudged of the stage.

Some things to look forward to:

Assuming that the information is correct the Tesla style car: http://www.teslamotors.com/display_data/21stCentElectricCar.pdf

Solar airconditioning: http://www.broad.com/english/products/pro_bj.asp
and their Australian agent:
http://www.arbs.com.au/visitor/exhibitor.aspx?m=view&CompanyId=226

Notwithstanding alchohol and tobacco excise and gambling taxes, with resource taxing predominantly, that wouldn’t be true. It would be quite simple to tax mining and quarrying to any degree necessary, down to fractions of a cent per kilogram. However resources would have to include a tax on land use to some extent(essentially rates replacement), with an important proviso. Whilst you would tax concrete, bitumen and glass covered land at a much higher rate than say cropping or grazing land use, you would want to exempt totally, natural land would you not? After all that was the main objection to Henry George’s ideal tax. You need to exempt natural land to make sure there is no incentive whatsoever to get an economic return from it. That rule would need to be fundamental and sacrosanct.

Now if there were a powerful inbuilt incentive to create more such natural environment, a la John Walmsleys Earth Sanctuaries Ltd, then that would be heading further in the right direction compared to the present marketplace, would you all agree? There is such a way, with one more plank in our ideal constitutional marketplace. Can you see it? I’ll give you a clue. Brian’s not entirely comfortable with ditching income tax totally. What would the left want to trade that off? Are you all completely comfortable with the envisaged equity of carbon/resource taxing here, or is there still some unfinished business with equity concerns, in such a greener but decreasing materialist world? I am of course assuming here, that substantially decreased fossil fuel use in particular, will see real incomes/consumption lowered generally.

Instead of building freeways they whacked on a congestion tax on motor vehicles and put all of the proceeds into public transport.

This has a the approach, as observa has observed, of being flexible as we go.

I’m cautious about getting rid of income tax for another reason. The object of the exercise is to get rid of undesirable CO2 emitting activities, so if you are successful down the track there would be nothing left to tax. That wouldn’t do, would it?

Now to get really serious with such taxing you would want to drop income tax completely(and indeed others like payroll, stamp duty GST and the like). After all when you think about early feudal times, income and consumption were almost synonymous. eg how many sheep, cows, bushells of wheat produced and what proportion of that was due to his lordship. That is a far cry from the 10000 pages of income tax act nowadays to try and pin down the income earning entity and exactly what that income is. Much too hard, compared to resource taxing. So, if the left are prepared to give up income taxing to enable serious resource and cabon taxation, what will they want in return?(especially considering we all need to take a cut in material well being presumably to save our planet)Or are you all entirely satisfied that resource and carbon taxing would do the trick, equity wise? After all there’d be a fair bit of equity in the carbon tax component surely?