I did a dumb thing the other day, and wandered into the comment section on an article about Alberta's new TIER carbon levy on large emitters.

One comment stood out (not linking, because I don't want to single out a particular person; I see this kind of talk often), where the pointed out: The estimated cost of gas over the next while is 2$/GJ, according to the futures market, and a price of 50$/tonne works out to 2.80$/GJ, means that the carbon pricing more than doubles the cost of gas. This is pointed out to be particularly unfair because heating is not something people can just "go without", and on a per GJ basis electricity is way more expensive.

I think a lot of people see this stuff and go "Oh my god, they're going to more than double my gas bill!". I just want to walk through our gas bill to show how this isn't the case.

Here's our most recent gas bill, where we were charged for

Charge	Price / GJ	Total
Natural Gas Charges	$0.82	$4.83
Administration Charge		$7.00
Transaction Fee	$1.00	$5.92
Rider		$0.09
Delivery Charges		$32.91
Transmission Service Charge Rider		$5.69
Interim Shortfall Rider (Fixed)		$1.56
Interim Shortfall Rider (Variable/Demand)		$0.28
Weather Adjustment Rider		-$0.48
Property Tax		$1.60
Franchise Fee Edmonton		$13.99
Total		$77.06

So of our $77 gas bill, only $4.83 was actually for you know, gas. The rest was administration, transmission fees and riders, none of which would be pushed up by a hypothetical carbon tax.

Let's add a carbon tax of 50$/tonne. That adds a row that looks like this:

Charge	Price / GJ	Total
Hypothetical Carbon Tax, 50$/tonne	2.81	16.61

Ok, so now I'm paying an extra 17.44$ (after GST). That's nothing to sneeze about for sure! Its' a 23% increase on the my bill, but it's a far cry from a 100% increase to my bill, despite the fact that given the price I pay for gas on that bill, a 50$/tonne carbon tax would be a 415% increase in the price I pay for my gas.

Now. After all that, is Carbon Taxation on consumers a good idea? I'm honestly not sure. It's something I need to dig into more. Another post for another day.