A carbon tax is the only logical solution

Re The right-wing roots of carbon pricing, Cohn, Oct. 27 Martin Regg Cohn is exactly right when he notes that the Liberal “carbon tax” vilified by Andrew Scheer and Doug Ford is actually — and ironically — a policy long championed by rightwing, free-market political economists.

The hidden costs of carbon have existed for more than a century (in climate change and health effects), but those costs can only be controlled by forcing them to be visible in market prices. That is what carbon pricing does.

Raising the price of carbon-intense products inevitably lowers the demand for them and spurs innovation of new, cleaner products. Justin Trudeau is heeding two Nobel-Prizewinning giants of right-wing political economy, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

Arch-capitalist Hayek wrote in 1944 that when environmental harms are not recognized by the market, then government regulation is needed. And arch-conservative Friedman said repeatedly (including in a 1979 interview, viewable on YouTube) that the way to deal with pollutants is for government “to impose a tax” on them. Thomas Mulligan, Grimsby The Conservatives accuse the government of imposing a “job-killing carbon tax” on Canadians. But the plan to price carbon emitted by industry and give virtually all the money collected back to individual Canadians doesn’t look like any tax I’ve ever paid.

In fact, most of us will come out ahead. And if it kills jobs, why does B.C., the province which has priced carbon the longest, have Canada’s lowest unemployment rate?

Whatever you call carbon pricing, it means no longer treating the sky as a free garbage dump and leaving a rapidly rising bill for our children to pay.

The evidence is all around us that climate change is a global emergency. Canada, with a per capita carbon footprint four times the world average, can no longer avoid facing the existential crisis of our times. Norm Beach, Toronto