Tyler Hamilton

The International Energy Agency warned last week that 50 per cent of global electricity supply will need to come from renewable energy sources by 2050 if we hope to “minimize significant and irreversible climate change impacts.”

“Governments need to take urgent action,” said Nobuo Tanak, executive director of the agency. “Governments need to do more. Setting a carbon price is not enough.”

Standing on the GO train platform at Exhibition Place yesterday, the Liberal leader was engulfed in a sea of party heavyweights as he pledged a Grit government would spend $70 billion over 10 years on public transit, high-speed rail, waste-water treatment and recreation facilities.

The proposal, he told a band of cheering supporters and candidates, would strengthen the economy and provide “good jobs, green jobs, high-paying jobs, new jobs.”

The government (through an “arm’s-length group” of the party-in-power’s cronies) takes risks with private investors’ money, but guarantees them a miserly rate of return no matter how badly they screw up, so it’s supposed to be OK. The whole point would be to support ventures that traditional sources of capital are unwilling to touch, keep in mind.

In any event, high energy prices and concern about future supply are already driving investment in renewable energy to a sufficient degree.

Clearly, this can only be a small part of an overall solution. That being said, it could do some good, and it is the kind of initiative that appeals to the ideologies of some groups presently in charge of major countries.

It would do the same thing as Canada Saving Bonds and encourage people save their money.

Canada Saving Bonds are a pretty terrible way to save your money. They are rigid in terms of when you can cash them and pay very low interest. You can do better with no risk of capital loss using GICs. In the long run, you would probably do dramatically better investing in low-fee index tracking funds.

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That being said, I don’t have a problem with such a program - it’s harmless. It would do the same thing as Canada Saving Bonds and encourage people save their money. It would also allow the government to borrow some money to subsidize emerging green technologies. But really, this isn’t exactly a very novel idea to solve climate change, other than having a cooler name.

Getting the government to support the concept of green subsidies is the hard part. What to call it, and who the government ends up borrowing the money from… that’s the easy part.