I think that if you want to project how carbon pricing and associates of carbon pricing.... We can talk about the price of the emissions allowances on the carbon market or the backup carbon price. There are also the clean fuel regulations that have been introduced, which you could say are a carbon price, although it's a differently structured instrument.
We are going to see rising costs. The carbon tax is supposed to rise to $170. That would add about 32¢ to a litre of gasoline, given its current carbon content. I think clean fuel regulations would add 17¢ by 2030.
Yes, it's going to be politically sensitive. There's a lot of public opinion research out there that suggests carbon pricing increases.... If you transform that into a sort of number that people can understand like the price of gas, people are not so excited about it.
One thing I can mention here, and I reference it a bit more in detail in my submitted comments, is that we did a public opinion survey last year in Quebec. We asked people about different carbon pricing scenarios, higher and increasing, and one thing that came out in the results was very interesting. We also asked if they had an electric vehicle. When people own electric vehicles, that trend of declining support for increasing carbon pricing falls off. People are ready to support a higher carbon price because they have an electric vehicle. The downside is that only 8% of our respondents of our sample had electric vehicles, so it was sort of a very minor effect. The implication is that, if more people have access to these clean technologies, they're going to support more ambitious climate policy in Quebec or in Canada.
The final note I would say is that the carbon price in Quebec is linked with California. It's much lower, $47 versus $65. I know these numbers are a little wonky, but it's quite effective in the sense that a lot of emission reductions are being achieved in California. I know there's a critique that it's an outflow of capital from Quebec to California, but this is the situation with a lot of our economy. We buy things from the U.S. and other countries because it's cheaper for some reason. There's a logic behind that.
California is a bit of an outlier in the United States. Washington has come online. Nova Scotia is part of this Western Climate Initiative. It's generally cheaper, from my read of the literature, to reduce emissions in the United States relative to Canada. There's going to be a bit of that price advantage if we do emissions trading systems linked with the United States. It may be something to explore because it does allow costs to be brought down. There are concerns whether we are going to be able to hit that $170 target for the federal carbon tax. I know that for some of the Conservatives in the room, it's a very salient political issue right now.
There are some structures. I will just say that recently, in the past few years, emissions trading systems have been emerging in many other countries. China has one. There may be concerns there. India and Brazil are also establishing ones. There are some carbon climate finance mechanisms that are being developed under the UN under the Paris Agreement and the Glasgow Climate Pact that will also have some opportunities for reducing emissions in co-operation with other developing economies where costs of reducing emissions are lower.
It's something that Canada might want to revisit and consider.