Clarke Ries: Which Canadians should bear the carbon-tax burden?
Justin Trudeau’s continent-spanning Tofino visits are an easy target here, but this criticism applies to Canada's entire managerial class.
By: Clarke Ries
I’ve already explained to the nation why the carbon tax is a disaster, and I was sure that article would settle the whole debate. Unfortunately, I’ve recently become aware that a few holdouts stubbornly refuse to see the light, so here I am again to entertain and illuminate. Fiat lux, baby.
I began my last article with a brief explanation of why the world needs to emit less carbon (to buy our species time to invent the Series 3000 Atmospheric Decarbonator). I’d like to focus this time on the related subject of why Canadians need to emit less carbon.
“To save ourselves from global warming” is the usual answer, but that’s not quite right.
Between 2018 and 2022, annual worldwide CO2 production by our particular brand of ape (including other greenhouse gases expressed in their CO2 equivalents) rose by 1,030 megatons. In 2022 Canada produced 782 megatons of CO2 — zeroing out Canada doesn’t even bring the world back to being carbon neutral. We could sink into the sea tomorrow and the world would keep right on heating up. No amount of moralizing or panicking is going to give us any greater control over global warming or the consequences it inflicts on Canada.
Canadians must therefore start by acknowledging that our heartfelt anxiety about the future does not make us the main character in this story. If this was a grade-school nativity production, we don’t even rate one of the wise men. On a good day we’re playing the front half of the donkey two stalls down from the business end of Joseph’s divine cuckolding.
We are not, however, off the hook. We are a cold, rich, petroleum-exporting country with a substantial manufacturing base, so despite only amounting to 0.5 per cent of the global population, we produce about 1.5 per cent of global emissions. Nor are emissions the only measure of moral obligation: if we use the money we earn moving data around a spreadsheet to buy a laptop manufactured in China, emissions from the factory that produced the laptop somewhat unfairly go on China’s side of the ledger.
We therefore have more than just 0.5 per cent of the responsibility for this planetary goat rope. We must not just do our part: we must display leadership in order to convince poorer countries to also make sacrifices.
What does leadership look like? It means we tighten our belt and trust the world to follow our example, instead of waiting for someone else to go first. It means we forgo luxuries that we can afford but that are conspicuously contrary to mission.
Why? Because insisting that an upwardly mobile Cambodian peasant forgo air conditioning is more persuasive when it’s not argued from slightly behind a V8 engine with the fuel economy of an Abrams tank.
We are being asked to make a largely symbolic sacrifice on behalf of mankind. It’s noble, but we should be deadly honest that it’s symbolic and that it’s in the name of climate leadership, because it affects the answer to the following question profoundly:
Who within our country is responsible for showing leadership on this issue?
I ask because that very same logic I just meticulously laid out seems to stop applying when it comes to the question of which Canadian citizens are being called upon to sacrifice for the greater good.
The carbon tax is an elegant, small-c conservative solution that functions by causing enough discomfort to promote substantial change in Canadian lifestyles. Put another way, the carbon tax functions by inflicting life-altering pain.
That pain is not evenly distributed. The carbon tax most harshly punishes high-carbon, low-market-value lifestyles. In economics textbooks this is referred to as incentivizing efficient allocation of limited resources. In reality it’s referred to as no longer being able to afford the gas to get to your low-wage job.
The carbon tax isn’t designed to stop investment bankers from flying to work by private helicopter, it’s designed to stop grocery store clerks from driving to work in battered old hatchbacks.
And this is economically rational! There are lots of grocery clerks but only a tiny handful of fabulously wealthy investment bankers. Canada lowers its emissions more effectively by herding our grocery store clerks onto city transit than by policing rooftop landing pads in financial districts.
But boy, when you’re shivering at a bus stop for the sake of the planet and you hear the thump-thump-thump of your social betters overhead commuting to their morning espresso, you could be forgiven some disgruntlement.
That disgruntlement is usually anticipated, which is why emergency rationing of a limited resource doesn’t typically exempt the most profligate consumers of that resource, regardless of their willingness to pay for an exemption.
If, hypothetically, a municipal water pipe in one of Canada’s major cities disintegrated, we wouldn’t put a tax on every litre of water and force some families to stop showering while those with sufficient simoleons maintained a verdant lawn. We would tell everyone, rich and poor alike, to knock it off with the most wasteful forms of water usage.
Every carbon tax advocate who considers it perfectly obvious that Canada, as a small but rich country, needs to symbolically sacrifice its most wasteful carbon habits seems some combination of baffled, dismissive and irritated at the suggestion that within Canada, maybe we needed to start by banning the private jets, not raising the price of heating oil.
Justin Trudeau’s continent-spanning Tofino visits are an easy target here, and he is indeed the man who has most visibly bungled the greatest individual leadership responsibility on this file, but it would miss the point to focus obsessively on Trudeau. This criticism applies to Canada’s entire managerial class.
This is about the progressive politicians, but it’s also about the professionals, academics, journalists, and administrators who are, like it or not, Canada’s unofficial collective leadership.
These are the people who tend to care the most about things like Canada’s standing on the world stage, and who come up with ideas like the carbon tax, and who are now venting their spleen as slavering political velociraptors bring down the carbon tax, and who I don’t think have ever seriously considered whether their European vacations are electorally compatible with imposing life-altering pain on other, poorer Canadians.
Maybe they should start.
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This is a great article but IMHO is mistaken on two fronts:
1. the CT is getting punitive enough now that it's impossible for the "grocery clerks" to afford it - grocery clerks being grocery clerks AND other groups like farmers, etc
2. the world doesn't give a shit about Canada or its carbon tax, other than to take competitive advantage of it.
This anti-human ethos of "let's sacrifice the people who are alive today to save hypothetical future humans" needs to die once and for all. Energy IS progress, innovation and in even simpler terms, a guarantor of our survival.
Any policy that aims at reducing energy consumption (aside from technological progress) is essentially telling people who are alive today that they can go rot in hell, as "the planet burns" as one of our finest politicians put it this summer.
And then we ask ourselves why our GDP per capita is so appalling, especially compared to our southern neighbour.
The planet isn't burning and all evidence points to the fact that a warmer climate isn't necessarily as bad as it's made out to be (increased CO2 means a 20% greener planet, more food produced, its deleterious effects are real, but mostly localized, not to mention that humans die more from cold exposure than heat).
Yes, we can improve on a whole lot of fronts, but we are better solving tangible problems (poverty, hunger, etc.) than something as intangible as a supposedly warming climate. Poor people don't care about the environment, so eradicating poverty is one of the quickest way to greening our energy mix globally.