Playing the carbon game.
It doesn’t matter how it started the climate around us is changing. I think there is enough science out there to prove that. I’ve been covering the environment beat since the late 1990s and I’m afraid my cynicism has built. Maybe it’s just my age but maybe there’s been too much talk and not enough do, to the point, probably several years ago that whatever mankind was doing, changing it will make little difference. Hell, in some countries, ours included, climate change is likely to bring benefits as well as problems. I think that whatever our planet is doing now, pumping out greenhouse gases, carbon and most notably methane, is going to dwarf our polluting behavior that’s despite recent multiple reports that 2017 was one of the warmest, if not the warmest year on record, which appears to set most of the blame on mankind’s doorstep.
There has long been the debate, even under the previous government, about imposing a sales tax in Alberta. It’s not going to be a vote winner, ever. The trouble is that with oil and gas prices in the doldrums, although there is some recovery, at least until our neighbours crank up the shale output again, that deficits are a fact of life.
Again, with my cynic’s hat on, I regard carbon tax, both provincially and federally, as a cash cow. Taxes are the life blood of governments and here is one, carbon, that people can feel good about saving the planet as their hardearned dollars are whisked away while they pay. A sales tax that it is not, per ce, a sales tax, perfect.
Yes, there are good programs being funded. However, we could have those programs anyway. Getting people who have no choice but to use natural gas and more to pay extra makes no sense to me at all. It would be more logical if people had an opportunity to use an alternative fuel and comments about lifestyle changes that only apply to cities by our premier do not resonate outside of the bubble.
Rebates, I hear the cry. Great, but rebates come later, and people are paying up front, cash on the nail, so to speak. Other nations are looking at carbon tax too and one can’t blame them for getting another income stream with what they perceive as having a good PR rating. The trouble is that the mutterings of the people I see everyday are getting louder. Take care politicos that are pushing carbon tax, you might find that negative feelings run all the way to the ballot box.
And now for methane. A much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon. Are we going to tax that? Put a penalty on anyone keeping livestock, passing gas even? Methane emissions from the Arctic and Amazon forests are only now being considered in models as a part of the planet’s warming cycle. Taxes and clever carbon credit schemes are not going to stop it. Drop the façade that we can individually, or even collectively, do something about it, work smart with renewables, yes, many of them make business sense now.
Finally, I can recall two, clever at the time, taxes that have stoked folks up, window tax, poll tax and I’m afraid that I’m going to add carbon tax to that.