Whenever I hear politicians propose to cut the carbon price, I can’t help but think back to my childhood growing up with divorced parents.
On the rare occasions my dad took me for weekends, he would offer me candy and let me stay up late.
“Why can’t you be more like him?” I’d yell after returning home as my mom made me do my homework, eat vegetables and go to bed on time.
So it is with proponents of Axe the Tax. They offer us candy, when the federal government, like my mom, expects us to live responsibly.
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But a politician’s promise that pollution can be free is no more realistic than my childish fantasy that I could live on candy alone.
We are all entangled in an energy system that helps and harms our children. While it enables us to taxi our kids around, and keep them warm, it also poisons the air they breathe, evaporates the water they need to drink and burns the forests in which they play.
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To preserve summers without smoke, winters when our kids can ski, water they can drink and forests and wildlife with which they can live in awe.
That’s why we pay for our pollution.
This dude gets it. We need to do so much more, but walking back the carbon tax is a terrible idea.
If we end the practice of giving away billions in oil and gas subsidies in exchange for millions in royalties, we would increase our net taxes and fight climate change more than any other decision a Liberal or Conservative government could make. But they won’t ever make it.
There was a CBC article about that a bit ago. Apparently, the three sole sources of subsidies are EDC, the TransMountain and carbon capture projects at this point. TransMountain was very loudly announced and deliberate, and I actually agree with carbon capture subsidies, so that just leaves EDC loans as being possibly sneaky.
Edit: Here.
Yeah, carbon capture subsidies are important yet unsurprisingly the smallest federal expense in oil and gas subsidies.