WILLING TON: Making businesses pay for their cost to the environment would drive up the price of dairy and petrol, industry commentators say.
The Productivity Commission’s Low-emissions economy draft report suggested introducing an emissions price, likely to be in the form of a tax or charge, for households and businesses to pay for each unit of greenhouse gas they produced.
The price should be at least $70 a tonne of gas and up to $200 a tonne in some cases, to motivate people to use less environmentally harmful sources of energy and create a net-zero emission economy, the commission suggested.
Such a tax would hit those industries hardest, but the extra cost would be felt by consumers too.
AA petrol spokesman Mark Stockdale said the impact of such a tax on the economy “could be quite huge”, but the scale of how large that impact could be was unknown.
