Surely there’s something we can do to help our planet survive. You can’t expect it to if we Canadians ship tons of live lobster from the east coast in one shipment to satisfy China and the Chinese. We’re wiping our oceans’ bounty.
Or scraping the bottom with special nets catching whatever comes in its path. It’s illegal, and by some counts fishing that’s not reported brings in between 10 and 25 million tons of fish yearly. Oops.
I wanted to write about carbon taxes to reduce what they call greenhouse emissions (GHGs) which cause global warming. From all accounts, that’s the best way to handle it. At least for a start. Let’s give it a chance to prove itself.
I found a good explanation of carbon taxing recently in the Globe & Mail by veteran columnist David Olive. He tells us how Canada is a pioneer in carbon taxing dating back (2006 & 2007) to Alberta and British Columbia respectively, who launched North America’s first carbon taxing systems.
Everything since then hit the fan beginning with five provinces who won’t go along with it.
David Olive summed it up by reviewing the facts. I’ll paraphrase what he had to say:
- The carbon tax will rise each year until 2022, and so will the federal rebate. - The bureaucratic costs of carbon pricing are so low as to be negligible. - The cost to Canada of global warming effects…has been estimated at 21 billion to 43 billion a year by mid-century. - Canada’s conservatives are offering no real alternatives. - The B.C. model is a free-market approach… leaving it up to the individual the decision how to reduce the carbon footprint. - Worldwide, 74 countries, states, provinces and cities have implemented or are scheduled for implementation of the carbon pricing systems.
I’ve touched what Olive tells us, but it gives us food for thought.
Author’s comment: Last week I wrote about Olga and Charles putting some $2,500 into a condo yet to be built. They paid this to the builder over two years. It turns out my figures were askew. Somewhere around $175,000 which was returned to them when the construction was called off. They received no interest on it by the contractor.