Carbon tax won’t solve climate woes

Carbon taxes are seen as the cure for global warming. They are, in fact, bureaucracy and pseudo economics replacing science.

Premier Kathleen Wynne’s five-cent-a-squirt carbon tax, conveniently delayed to mitigate the backlash, is bureaucratic jiggery pokery that will do nothing to combat emissions. But it will dampen car sales, discourage tourism and send already soaring food prices even higher.

It’s also a cynical exploitation of the fact that current oil prices are artificially low. We inevitably will return to dollar-plus gasoline in a year or two but with this extra nickel tagged on as well.

In small towns like Bracebridge, Ont., there is no alternative to driving. We do not have a subway, LRTs or even a workable bus system. Wynne’s cash grab supposedly will fund charging stations for the electric cars that nobody is buying. This will end as disastrously as did their ill-planned support for wind power.

There are few electric cars on the road and they are almost universally second vehicles. If they ever become common, they will require vast amounts of new power. Their lithium batteries pose environmental problems both in their manufacture and their disposal. Hydrogen, burned directly or in fuel cells, is a far friendlier source of power but we must find new ways of generating it.

Ms. Wynne cites the “successful” B.C. carbon tax. The truth is that the B.C. tax exempts several dirty industries and carbon emissions in B.C. have increased 4.6 per cent since 2010.

Ms. Wynne and the premiers will not fix global warming. That’s not their mandate. It requires a commitment from world leaders to set a firm goal that in 10 years we will totally eliminate the use of fossil fuels. That’s the way the Americans got to the moon. And in doing so, they created jobs, stimulated science and research, developed new consumer products and spawned new industries and technologies.

That’s what should have come out of the recent Paris love-in, which produced hot air rather than controlled it.

As with her ruinous electricity policy, Wynne’s increase in home heating fuel targets seniors unfairly. Retirees (and the unemployed) are at home during the day when rates are highest.

The Queen’s Park brain trust never thought of that when they introduced smart meters. They’ve repeated their blunder with the fuel hike. Dick Smyth, Bracebridge, Ont.