Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shot back at premiers grandstanding about the carbon tax, challenging them to offer a reasonable alternative to help slow the pace of climate change.
With the carbon tax increasing to $80 per tonne as of April 1 (adding approximately 3.5 cents per litre of gas), politicians whose reelection hinges on constituents opposed to the tax are demanding that Ottawa scrap it.
Of course, if these premiers were really concerned about the finances of Canadians under their watch, they could always reduce their own tax burden on them. But they don’t.
Regardless, the prime minister was spurred by an open letter signed by more than 100 economists defending carbon pricing, noting since it was implemented in 2019, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions have dropped eight per cent.
Trudeau’s right. None of the detractors to carbon pricing have offered an alternative to meet our obligations to the rest of the planet and prevent widespread catastrophe.
Nor will they, for two reasons.
First, if the source of their supporters’ anger is suddenly removed, these politicians will have to find a new crusade to rally their flock around. Republicans in the United States had a border control bill ready to pass earlier this year, but literally pulled the plug on it because their presidential candidate wanted to campaign on border control this fall.
Second, suggesting an alternative risks putting their name behind something Canadians could potentially like even less than carbon pricing, which could put them in the same firing line of the psychological warfare they’ve allowed environmentalists to endure for the last decade. Criticizing other ideas is politically safer than actually presenting your own.
So here’s some alternative policies to carbon pricing:
1) Drop the tax, cut red tape and let our grandchildren deal with the consequences. Whether the Conservatives want to admit it or not, this is the alternative they’re presenting to voters. Effectively halting or even reversing climate mitigation work done in the last decade to accommodate Canada’s oil industry, cutting environmental red tape to let industry pollute freely — doing what Canadians have done for the last century and let the next generation deal with it.
Thanks to this tradition, we’re already dealing with the prospect of wildfire evacuations, catastrophic flooding and widespread drought as an annual occurrence. So the argument could be made, since the cat’s already out of the bag, we should be focusing on enjoying what little civilization we have left and start betting our kids’ tuition savings on whether our descendants will be living in Mad Max, Logan’s Run or Soylent Green. However, economists point out carbon pricing’s effect on inflation is negligible, so chances are doing this won’t reduce the cost of living either since climate change will continue to disrupt supply chains with every new disaster. Since the federal government has acknowledged climate change is a life-threatening problem, walking away from mitigation also opens it up to litigation. It won’t be very hard to convince a judge the feds engaged in wilful negligence if the next government’s election platform is literally about stopping policies shown to be actually reducing emissions.
2) Drop the tax and aggressively overhaul entire economy. Instead of gradually guiding ourselves towards greener practices through behavioural economics, we bite the bullet and force as close to an immediate change as possible through government spending. This means rapidly shifting all transportation to electric vehicles, reworking our food supply chain from the ground up, renovating all buildings to net zero status, requiring all plastic products to be biodegradable, modernizing nearly every machine in every shop, shutting down the oil sands, completely reconstructing our cities and retraining the majority of Canada’s workforce. Naturally, we’re talking about an outrageous amount of money to make this happen — the modern equivalent to the financial costs of fighting the Second World War. This will undoubtedly increase the national debt exponentially, which would likely take the rest of the century or longer to pay down and probably would result in new taxes anyway. But we would at least be leaving our descendants a bill instead of a wasteland.
3) Global government. A huge reason why we’re in this mess is because every government that sits down at a negotiating table is operating with only its own interests in mind. Getting rules on anything international takes years, decades even, whether we’re talking about climate change, human migration, maritime regulations, disease control or combating organized crime. No individual government is capable of solving the problems facing civilization today. Global problems require a global solution, which can only be enforced by a global government with a mandate. The United Nations could be reworked into a global parliament, with each nation electing a representative to vote on global matters. This would require a surrender of sovereignty, particularly by the dominant global powers. Alternatively, as hypothesized in the essay “Climate Leviathan,” a nation or small alliance of nations might simply seize global power as a worsening climate crisis presents the opportunity.
Environmentalists spent the last half century trying to convince the world to do something about climate change because every way out of this crisis is unpleasant and requires major sacrifices. Unfortunately, we all pretended to know better than scientists and now we have a rapidly shrinking number of choices. If we don’t commit to a solution ourselves, one will be picked for us.