Learning about cap-and-trade carbon pricing is not as easy as you might think. If you ever get serious about our world condition, you need to look into schemes such as those proposed by our politicians. Babel-on-the-Bay went on the quest recently when California Governor Jerry Brown, Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne got together to fight climate change. You have to wonder what those three are trying to pull off.
While Google can be helpful in your quest for knowledge as long as you remember that environmentalists will call it a carbon tax but politicians consider ‘tax’ a dirty word. That is why you will never hear ‘carbon tax’ from politicians. Politicians also like to set targets—and the further in the future the better. That was why everyone was laughing at the last G-7 meeting when Stephen Harper seriously said that they should set a target for the year 2100. They only wished they could!
Talking to environmentalists about this also reveals some pipe dreams. The main problem is in determining which industries have to have limits set on their carbon (or other greenhouse gas) emissions. It seems the politicians will decide. Mind you the only experts on these emissions work for the industries and they advise the politicians.
Next you have to set prices of how much per metric tonne industries need to pay to the government if they do not meet the target (usually about 10 per cent less than last year) that the politicians have set. You can have a series of auctions to set a price as they are doing in California or you can let the politicians decide. Industries who are not meeting their targets are also free to buy allowances from companies that are exceeding their emissions targets.
And nobody seems to know if shutting down the plant for six or seven weeks and laying off employees for the period can also be counted in the reduction of emissions.
There is some rotten timing here as U.S. Steel has already bought and shut down Hamilton’s major steel works. And is Inco’s big stack in Coppercliffe (Sudbury) still pumping out tonnes of pollution? Mind you Ontario has already shut down our coal-burning electric generating plants.
California only has 600 facilities emitting more than 25,000 metric tonnes of carbon per year each. Between Ontario and Quebec in that category we are likely to be talking a few oil refineries, cement plants and large factories but if it is more than 50 between the two provinces, the Harper Conservatives have not done the damage to our industry that we suspect.
Since the provinces and the state are the ones benefitting from all this money being paid for missing emissions targets, we can understand why they are so interested. The California government expects revenue of about a billion (US) dollars from this ‘environmental’ program. Ontario and Quebec will have to settle for much less.
But we should bear in mind that Ontario and Quebec citizens are a much greater source of carbon emissions than our industries. It will only be when we start to measure our own carbon footprint and do something about it that we can start to really do something about global warming.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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