Talk:Environmental pricing reform

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 August 2020 and 13 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ilr11, NeomiSepulveda.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:48, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 1 one external link on Environmental pricing reform. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150510132151/http://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/documents/Discussion_Paper_17_Power_of_Prices_and_Failure_of_Markets.pdf to http://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/documents/Discussion_Paper_17_Power_of_Prices_and_Failure_of_Markets.pdf

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 23:27, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Eco Pricing Reform Definition
The definition of EPR is not simply any price adjustment on things affecting the environment. It must be a governmental fiscal policy such that the price adjustment is external to the regular cost/benefit of consumer/producer buyer/seller. Otherwise if the price adjustment is internal to the exchange between private interests all your doing is either incentivizing the producer while disincentivizing the consumer or reciprocally disincentivizing the producer while incentivizing the consumer. This means that you more or less accomplish nothing with respect to the environment as neither making prices proportional to environmental detriment nor making them proportional to environmental benefit accomplishes uniform benefit, in both systems you are either incentivizing production or incentivizing consumption of environmentally detrimental products. And further producers can also be consumers, in consuming the inputs of their production thus while their detrimental production may be disincentivized, their consumption of inputs for that production is also reciprocally incentivized.

For instance, you decide to have prices reflect environmental benefit, something like gasoline is now practically worthless. A producer of energy efficient electric cars decides that rather than rely on the costly clean energy electric grid to power its factories it will just buy gasoline for pennies and produce its own power with a private generator, it utilizes this cheap detrimental input towards its production of expensive environmentally beneficial products. The end result is a product which is equivalent to a product made with environmentally beneficial inputs, and short of tracking all aspects of all of production and consumption the system would not be able to price them differently as they would simply price them for what they are.

Or reciprocally you decide to have prices reflect environmental detriment, green products are now practically free (worthless). Consumers would love to buy them, but producers have no reason to produce them. In fact you've literally created a price system that only values bad environmental products, thus the now luxury goods like oil are literal liquid gold and the production of environmentally destructive products is the only thing producers are interested in making.

EPR relies on taxes, positive and negative (subsidies) to externally remove and add value to products outside of the private consumer/producer cost/benefit relationship. The taxation of gas to reduce the profit margin of producers and increase the cost to consumers. The subsidization of renewable energy to increase the profit margin of producers and decrease the cost to consumers. Such methods (license tax, consumption tax, production subsidy, etc.) are the only way to decouple the cost relationship of consumer/producer because such change in cost/benefit is not internal to them instead it relies on the external government adding/subtracting cost. Thus the government benefits from oil taxes being high and bares the cost subsidizing green energy products instead of just consumers/producers.

I'd call it Fiscal Reform rather than Pricing Reform, to not confuse it with some administered price system which accomplishes nothing but shifting around incentive between consumers and producers. Darkmagine (talk) 19:53, 24 April 2022 (UTC)