Even if claims are true, B.C. carbon tax is useless
“By comparison, China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, emits 10,552 Mt annually ... That means it takes China 2.5 hours to cancel out all of the B.C. carbon tax’s projected emissions savings in 2020.”
British Columbia’s carbon tax has been described by admirers as among the best in the world for fighting climate change.
Today I’m going to use it, including the most optimistic projections by its supporters, to show you why it is utterly meaningless in the absence of a truly global plan to combat greenhouse gas emissions.
The tax, introduced in 2008 at $10 per tonne of industrial carbon dioxide emissions, now $30, is portrayed by its supporters as helping to transform B.C. into a low-carbon economy that is leading the way in showing other Canadians how it can be done.
Not only did it lower gasoline and fossil fuel use in general, they say, it did so without causing economic pain, since the $1.2 billion it raises annually is returned to the public in lower income and business taxes.
While there are many valid criticisms that can be made about this rosy picture of B.C.’s carbon tax, for our purposes today let’s say everything its supporters say is true.
The tax is still utterly insignificant — a rounding error — when it comes to curbing Canadian and global emissions.
According to the B.C. government’s own figures, it will only reduce provincial emissions by three megatonnes annually by 2020. (A megatonne, or Mt, represents one million tonnes of greenhouse gases.) That would lower Canada’s projected emissions in 2020 from 727 Mt to 724 Mt.
By comparison, China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, pumps out 10,552 Mt annually, according to the World Resources Institute.
That means it takes China 2.5 hours to cancel out all of the B.C. carbon tax’s projected emissions savings in 2020.
But, unlike Canada, China has never had to lower its emissions by a single tonne under any international agreement dating back to the United Nations’ now-expired Kyoto accord. Nor has India, the world’s third-largest emitter, at 2,486 Mt annually, nor any other country in the developing world.
Nor has the U.S., the world’s second-largest emitter, at 6,550 Mt, and the largest in the developed world, since it never signed the Kyoto accord dating back to the ClintonGore administration, while former prime minister Jean Chretien, idiotically, did.
In the so-called historic deal between China and U.S. President Barack Obama announced last year, China simply said it would reduce its emissions post-2030, when they’re going to start falling anyway due to normal technological innovation.
There are no reduction targets nor penalties if China fails to act.
As for Obama promising to reduce U.S. emissions 26 per cent to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2025, there are no penalties if the U.S, fails to meet this aspirational goal announced by a lame-duck president whose last day in office is Jan. 20, 2017, nine years short of the end of 2025.
It’s time we Canadians, whose contribution to global emissions has been dropping steadily from 2.1 per cent in 2005 to 1.6 per cent today, stopped allowing ourselves to be played for patsies by all of the UN’s fellow travellers, who are using global climate policy not to lower emissions or cool the planet, but to redistribute global wealth.
If we don’t, they will rob us blind over and over again, while smearing us internationally, egged on by so-called environmentalists and “green” politicians at home.