My Point of View Part 2: Carbon reductions and the age of austerity

You won’t hear me say this very often even though I’m as humble as all get-out:

“I’m wrong.”

In the previous post I said because many Canadians have a fairly thick cushion against the hard times that are a-comin’ it’s likely a carbon tax won’t hit them too hard.

As proof I gave, in my opinion, brilliant examples.

And then I thought, many young people are up to their shiny little ears in debt because of a big car in the driveway and a steep 40-year mortgage on a larger-than-life home that’s 6 miles away from the closest grocery store.

So a hefty and sudden carbon tax could get a lot of ordinary Canadians to do more than THINK about reducing their footprint, walking to work, eating bologna sandwiches on cheap white bread or living with their parents in a 3,600 sq. ft. condo in the ‘burbs.

And, in my opinion, a carbon tax would have to be hefty if that’s how Canadians choose to make a dent in excessive carbon emissions.

No level of improvement will be easy.

For example, in a recent opinion piece (Carbon zombies attack economy, June 12, Sun Media) Lorrie Goldstein wrote:

“Claims (from our federal political parties) of “revenue neutrality” for a carbon tax, or that cap-and-trade or tougher regulations are painless or even effective solutions to carbon emissions are nonsense.

“We don’t have a technology capable of dramatically lowering carbon emissions when burning fossils fuels.

“The only alternative is to burn less of them. The only way to do that is to make them so expensive, people have no choice but to use less.”

Though there may be other alternatives i.e. rationing programs, restricting development of oil reserves, leaving oil in the ground where it seems right at home and does less harm than in air, water and on land surfaces, I think they all lead to the same thing, referred to by Mr. Goldstein when he later writes:

“(Making them expensive, using less) risks driving developed countries into recession (or deeper recessions than they already face) as consumers buy less, because the skyrocketing price of fossil fuels will hike the price of almost everything.

“As George Monbiot writes in Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, the campaign to fight global warming is a campaign for austerity.”

I think Monbiot, who wrote an intriguing article about the benefits of a recession, took the right tone when he stated near the end of the aforementioned book:

"The campaign against climate change is an odd one. Unlike almost all the public protests which have preceded it, it is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less.

“Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves." 

Believing his words makes it easier to say I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.

[See ‘Recommended Reading’ in right hand margin for a helpful link to HEAT.]

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