Even climate change believers don’t get carbon pricing: survey

Researcher concludes results underline poor messaging by federal government

More than four in 10 Canadians surveyed about climate change last month said there is conclusive evidence climate change is real, it is being caused by people and that they believe addressing the problem should be a top government priority.

However, even among this group — labelled by the Ecofiscal Commission as “climate believers” — only two-thirds see a carbon price as the best way to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and fewer than half express confidence they even know what carbon pricing actually is.

And even in provinces that already have a carbon price, more than half of respondents said they weren’t aware of its existence.

The survey, done for the commission by Abacus Data, suggests to Ecofiscal’s chair Chris Ragan that governments have so far done a poor job communicating carbonprice policies to the public.

Ragan and the commission have written a 36-page explanation of carbon pricing that’s being released today along with the survey, conducted in February with 2,250 respondents from the polling firm’s panel of online participants.

The polling industry’s professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error as they are not random and therefore are not necessarily representative of the whole population.

“There’s a lot of people who just don’t understand how (carbon pricing ) is either supposed to work or how it does work, so that’s why we’re writing this paper,” Ragan said.

Of the respondents, 61 per cent said they believe there is conclusive or strong evidence to support climate change being real, while 27 per cent said there is some evidence but not enough yet to convince them and 11 per cent cited little or no evidence at all.

What is clear, Ragan said, is that those who believe in climate change and lowering emissions consider carbon pricing the best way to do it from an economic point of view.

During a parliamentary committee appearance last month, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna was unable to say by how much emissions could be cut by a carbon price.

That prompted Conservative environment critic Ed Fast to argue the government was imposing carbon pricing without proof it would have the desired impact.

Ragan, who watched some of that exchange, called it another opportunity lost for the government to explain the benefits of carbon pricing. “It was not good messaging,” he said.

Ragan said there is modelling to show emissions are lowered when people or companies are made to pay for what they emit, either through a direct tax on carbon emissions or a cap-and-trade system that limits emissions and makes companies pay to emit more than they allowed.

“The bottom line is that they all put a price on (greenhouse gas) emissions, which creates an incentive to produce fewer of them,” the report says, likening the philosophy to that of using tobacco taxes to curb smoking.

The paper looks at research that studied existing carbon prices in British Columbia, California and parts of Europe and concluded they were generally successful in changing people’s behaviour.