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Comment by sunkenvicar | Hacker News Reader

Tesla and Volkswagen are already selling government subsidized electric cars and installing government subsidized chargers. Now they get the chargers for free. No one voted for this enormous wealth transfer from poor to rich. Nor a car ban in under 20 years.

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A carbon tax and rebate along with a similar carbon tariff on imports is by far the best way to combat climate change. Efficiently price the externalities caused by emitting CO2 and let the market fix the problem itself. The rebate ensures that the carbon tax is not regressive.

But to work properly, the carbon tax needs to be above CAD100 per ton, almost doubling the price of gas.

But that's unpalatable to most, so instead they have to resort to far inferior measures like electric car subsidies.

No one voted for climate change either, yet here we are. Sometimes you just have to deal with reality.

I disagree. Scientists have been sounding the alarm over climate change and man's impact on it with pollution and emissions for over 3 decades at this point.

One could argue generations of the electorate have voted for it by de-prioritizing, or completely ignoring, the issue and candidates who stood for it.

> Now they get the chargers for free.

The car industry gets fuel stations and roads for free as well.

Charger costs will reduce. Battery based chargers will be a game changer for infrastructure cost:

https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/13/volkswagen-battery-based...

They can be installed anywhere with no need for big transformers or high power cabling. And they offer some charging capability during power outages.

Gas stations are built without our tax dollars.

Imagine a future where we wait for our government-mandated chargers to charge. Hopefully there’s an app for that.

If costs keep dropping, EVs will become a no-brainer for most. Scrap the government incentives and we will achieve the inevitable.

> Gas stations are built without our tax dollars

Are they? They need fuel to sell. Where does that come from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/15/climate-change...

> Imagine a future where we wait for our government-mandated chargers to charge

This is infrastructure building. Canada's got the right idea here. Build roads, build chargers. Makes sense.

You're comparing charging stations to gas. A more logical comparison would be electricity in charging stations vs gas in gas stations.

It's all part of the same system. What use is a gas station without gasoline?

Do you want $3.3 billion going to fuel subsidies or do you want $8 million going to EV chargers. If you're interested in a smaller government spend, you want to pick the EV chargers.

That’s what I though too. 8 million is peanuts for Canadian government. Even for the provincial one. I think it’s more a PR move.

"Scrap the government incentives and we will achieve the inevitable."

Government incentives helped overcome the industry chicken-egg problem. Purchase subsidies are effectively R&D dollars towards what is inevitably the future of cars.

Amen

This isn't a big enough issue to topple this monitory but hopefully soon they get out of power. Very poor fiscal management. Budgets apparently don't balance themselves

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