Re: Ed Fast’s May 10th letter “Liberals and the carbon tax.”
I hope Ed Fast is not denying climate change or our responsibility to address it. He is right to ask about the costs and the benefits. However, it is hard to answer these questions. His logic appears to be; therefore, we should do nothing.
The statement that by doing something it will cost a lot, misses the fact that by doing nothing it also costs a lot. We could equally ask; how much has not acting on climate change cost Canadian taxpayers? How much has it cost the residents of Cache Creek who have faced a flood, a forest fire and another flood, each once in 100-year events, in the past two years? How much has it cost the B.C. economy to have the worst forest fire season in its history last summer? According to the Jason Thistlewaite’s policy brief (No 57, March 2015) from the non-partisan Centre for International Governance Innovation, climate change will make insurance impossible to buy for many Canadians and expensive for all Canadians. How much will inaction cost Canadians in insurance?
Answering these, or Mr. Fast’s questions would at best be educated estimates with wide error bars for uncertainty. The only certainty is that, unless we address climate change, it will cost much more later.
Three years ago, I attended a conference where George Schultz was the keynote speaker. George Shultz served three different U.S. Republican presidents. As secretary of state for Ronald Reagan he signed the Helsinki Protocol in 1985 to curb sulphur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. He said climate change today is like sulphur emissions in 1980, “we think it could be bad, perhaps really bad, but we don’t know how bad. It is prudent to act, because if we don’t act and it turns out really bad, then we’re screwed.”
The problem is the imbalance of being wrong. If climate change is a hoax and we act, then we will all breathe better air and live cleaner lives; not a bad downside. If climate change is real and we don’t act, the cost to human life could be catastrophic, and the cost to the economy will be many times the claims Mr. Fast makes.
We should have a cost on carbon, which increases, starting low and doubling every few years until our emissions reduce to pre-industrial levels. The money raised should be used to provide incentives to reduce emissions: i.e., use a stick to create a carrot. The carrot should start high and decline over time. Those who act benefit twice: they get the carrot and avoid the stick; while laggards don’t get the carrot, and get hit by the stick.
The problem is bigger than Canada, but by acting, we join enlightened European countries showing leadership. The climate is not political. Like Mr. Fast, I’m all for low taxes. We should aim for “AND” not “OR”: sound economic policies AND sound environmental policies. Like French President Emanuel Macron addressing the US Congress we should show leadership, “there is no Planet B.”
Richard MacKellar
Squamish
