Clarke Ries: The pain is the point

What an effective — successful! — carbon tax unavoidably does is throw the government into a cage match with Canada’s working class.

By: Clarke Ries

We all know how climate change works by now, right? We light the hyper-compressed remains of prehistoric creatures on fire, which causes their little carcasses to explode, and with that energy operate useful things like leaf blowers, ice-cream machines, and the incubators in neonatal units.

The byproducts of this chemical reaction are noise on Saturday mornings, expanding waistlines, toddlers, and carbon dioxide emissions that trap heat in the atmosphere. Solutions must be found. Many turn out to be universal — like passive-aggressive neighbouring, walking to the store instead of driving, and long time-outs.

The writing has been on the wall for a few years now about one attempted solution to climate change: nobody is willing to solve it via personal austerity. Our mass unwillingness to return to a carbon-free state of nature is such an inexorable reality that it’s not even worth getting upset about. The sum total of our performative gestures aren’t moving the bottom line on keeping our planet pleasantly suited for human life, and never will.

Instead, we’ve all started quietly banking on more pragmatic fixes, like solar and nuclear power, emission-efficient equipment, carbon storage technology, and probably weather engineering. In the meantime, there’s a reasonable case to be made that a little belt-tightening will buy us time to actually implement (and in some cases invent) all of that.

I’m agnostic about whether the pain is worth it. If it is, the most ruthlessly efficient way to distribute collective pain is indeed a carbon tax (I almost wrote “fair”, but let’s be real, no emissions policy that doesn’t start with banning private jets can be called “fair” with a straight face).

Consumption taxes are a straightforwardly-effective policy tool. You simply increase the price of the resource you want to see used less and let people adapt to the simulated scarcity via ingenuity, frugality, lifestyle change, repricing their goods and services, etc. The government doesn’t dictate solutions, it lets people find their own. In the process, the consumption tax dispassionately reveals who’s making the most valuable use of that resource.

When the state of New York recently declared Manhattan a “congestion pricing zone” that would impose a $15 toll, some of the haters claimed they were objecting on behalf of salt-of-the-earth trucking companies delivering goods below 60^th Street. It didn’t work. Truckers appear ecstatic, if this comment on the New York City subreddit is to be believed:

“As someone who routinely drives box trucks into the congestion zone, let me just say that this makes zero difference for my customers, the impact on my bottom line is next to nothing, and I don't care if every dollar collected goes to build a solid gold statue of [the governor of New York], as long as there are a few less of you deranged, mouth breathing, soft handed idiots on the road. Take the fucking bus, take the fucking train.”

In short, if you make plenty of profit on each unit of a thing you consume — miles of Manhattan roadway driven, tons of carbon emitted — you’re not going to care about a consumption tax. It won’t be your problem. Canada’s most productive mines and farms and manufacturing concerns will be just fine.

So far so good, but then whose problem is the carbon tax going to be? It has to inflict unendurable misery on somebody if it’s going to actually work. I think progressives assumed that somebody would be perfectly hateable, like maybe a swaggering Alberta suburbanite who drives a jacked-up F-350 to the liquor store and then rolls coal past a playground on the way home.

And yes, it turns out that dude isn’t happy. But if he makes enough money to buy a truck that retails fully-loaded for $127,000 (not counting the aftermarket suspension job), he can afford pricier gas.

So the question remains, who uses a lot of carbon but doesn’t make a lot of money doing it? Who lives in drafty old single-family houses? Who uses archaic methods of keeping those houses warm, like furnaces that run on heating oil? Who has to drive halfway around the world to reach the nearest grocery store and halfway to the moon for the nearest medical clinic? Who’s making that drive in a battered old ride with terrible fuel economy?

The rural poor.

Not the farmers or the ranchers, who mostly make plenty of dough and often know their way around America’s higher-end resort towns, but the rural poor. The kind of people you disproportionately find in Newfoundland outports, eking out a tenuous living as they wait for the cod to return. You know, reliable Liberal voters.

Put another way, a neutrally-applied carbon tax goes after Maritimers first and hardest — forcing them to close shop on their romantic traditional lifestyle and move into apartment blocks in the nearest city, where they’ll earn more for their labour and emit less carbon doing it.

You can reasonably disagree about whether the character in The Grand Seduction who gives up on her picturesque fishing village for a job sorting garbage at a St. John’s recycling plant is encountering a harsh necessity or an intolerable outrage. In either case, it’s a feature of putting a tax on each ton of carbon, not a bug. The rain will fall on the just and unjust alike.

But that’s the problem right there, isn’t it? Nobody is actually enthused when the rain falls on the just, or favourably disposed toward the politician operating the rain machine.

This of course cast the Liberals onto the horns of a dilemma, one of which was labelled “lose the next election,” and they reacted accordingly: doubling the supplementary carbon tax payout to rural voters and suspending the carbon tax altogether on heating oil.

Fury over the government hand-selecting the carbon tax’s winners and losers was predictable, as was the Conservatives overstating their case when the Liberals rolled back their policy, and as were the economists howling with outrage at Conservative exaggerations.

But the heating oil scandal and its aftershocks are just the first round of what promises to be a lengthy political pounding for the Liberals and for any successor government that attempts to champion a carbon tax.

Remember: for the carbon tax to do what it says on the tin, somebody has to lose. For the carbon tax to be anything other than a purposeless pain in the ass, somebody — a lot of somebodies, frankly, if the Liberals are serious about cutting carbon emissions to 40 per cent under 2005 levels — must be forced to make significant and unpleasant lifestyle changes.

So let’s assume the Parliamentary Budget Office is right, and that Atlantic Canadians are now, after a second round of special supplements and exemptions, definitely net beneficiaries of the carbon tax. All it’s bought the Liberals is a reprise of the same question: who’s for dinner?

Who’s going to trade in their beater for bus tickets? Who’s going to raise their kids in a condo tower instead of a single-family home? Who’s going to start taking their midwinter vacation in the province next door instead of Palm Springs or Costa Rica? Who’s going to shiver on a cold night instead of raising the thermostat?

Only the most diehard of optimists could believe that the roster of ritual sacrifices will substantially consist of financially-comfortable Canadians. The people who can afford to make investments that reduce their carbon emissions without materially sacrificing their lifestyles will do so. A handful will start biking to work during the summer. Others will install solar panels on top of their detached houses — which are mostly located in neighbourhoods where you’re not even allowed to build a condo tower — and that’s going to be that.

Beneath all the aspirational language, what an effective carbon tax actually does is throw the government into a cage match with Canada’s working class. The truth behind the Liberals’ woes on this file is that as long as they’re committed to the carbon tax as a tool for fighting climate change, their only real choice is which part of the working class they land on when they come off the top rope.

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