Wait so does that mean that the true cost only went up by 18 billion.

In a similar vain, demand based pricing makes no sense in a situation like this, a tax does.

When something becomes scarce, it doesn’t increase its cost of production, it just needs to decrease consumption. They do that via a price increase to dissuade demand but pocket the difference.

What makes far more sense is a tax, similar to the carbon tax, that can go up and down based on limited supply or not. It can still reduce demand but the difference is that the extra money spent gets returned to the people.

I still don’t get why people hated the carbon tax so much.