The National Post – Canada’s right-leaning daily newspaper – has publicly stated that it believes climate change is real, and also that the current government has the right approach to dealing with it. In particular, it praises Environment Minister Jim Prentice for avoiding the “creation of state-managed “green economies” — socialism with a Gaian face.”
Whether such a creation is possible (and whether it would be desirable or not) are questions that can be set aside for a moment. The irony that seems to be paramount when it comes to the relationship between conservatives and climate change is how they stress a desire to interfere in markets and individual choices as little as possible, while rejecting the mechanism that would do that best: a carbon tax. A carbon tax doesn’t force anyone to drive a small car or, terrifying thought, forgo automobiles all together. It doesn’t force people to choose small pets, give up flying, or make other specific sacrifices. It also doesn’t rely upon the government deciding which energy technologies should succeed, whether that means renewables, nuclear, carbon capture and storage, or something else. It encourages low-carbon technological development in the most hands-off and market-friendly way possible.
All a carbon tax does is take the price imposed on strangers by greenhouse gas emissions and makes it ‘internal’ to the decision-making of individuals and other economic actors throughout society. It comes the closest to retaining the libertarian ideal in a world where interconnectedness forces us to take into consideration the consequences our actions will have on others. I have talked before about the irony of how laissez faire climate policies will inevitably fail and force governments to take employ more coercive measures. That outcome can only be avoided by sending a clear price signal on greenhouse gas emissions, and doing so early and at a meaningful level. Indeed, a carbon tax can be said to be a way of protecting property rights, given that it reduces the degree to which emitters will harm the property and prosperity of other people around the world.
It should be noted that the important policy change here is to put a price on carbon emissions, to represent the harm they cause to other people. The establishment of such a price is more important than the precise mechanism through which it is done, whether that is a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system in which 100% of the permits are sold at auction. The choice of instrument is less important than moving quickly to put a price on carbon in one way or another.
It is an open question whether conservatives will realize the extent to which they are undermining their own aims and ideals through opposition to carbon pricing. Part of that is the paleoconservative stance that climate change isn’t happening, that it is benign, that it is inevitable, etc. Among conservatives with enough basic awareness about the world to know that those arguments have been discredited, we should hope that support begins to grow for the idea of dealing with the climate problem in the way that involves the least expansion of the state and the least infringement on liberty: a carbon tax.
While there may well be cause for accompanying such a tax with other regulations – such as a ban on coal power – at least gaining conservative support for some kind of carbon action would change the tone of the debate. We would finally stop pretending that we can ignore climate change indefinitely while the economy keeps ticking on just fine, and begin to appreciate and implement the steps required to build a low-carbon future.
Good article, I look forward to reading your next one.
I agree with you completely, one problem is that the left-liberal groups have a monopoly on environmental concern. As the UK Conservatives have shown, it’s perfectly possible for a centre-right party to be taken seriously on the environment.
It’s a bit mistaken to use the notion of “conservatism” to tell conservatives what to do – since there have been no “real” conservatives in about 75 years.
Pointing out why something is compatible with a person’s pre-existing values is a pretty ancient method of persuasion.
Once the conservative mainstream finally accepts that something must be done about climate change, it would be good if they were open to policies with a good shot at being effective, carbon taxes foremost among them.
[I]t’s perfectly possible for a centre-right party to be taken seriously on the environment
Probably, but they need to satisfy at least two criteria: have awareness and recognition about the serious environmental problems we face and be willing to enact policies to deal with them. Supporting a wooly notion of conservation and planting a few trees are not an adequate response.
I like the photo and your entry is interesting. This week I learned a lot about environmental policy in China thanks to your links.
I think you’re making the mistake of assuming that people’s beliefs are logically consistent, whereas in fact people tend to proclaim a set of principles and then favour policies which clearly contradict those principles (e.g. neoliberals arguing for a small state and cost effectiveness, and then massively expanding incarceration at huge cost & virtually no benefit). My guess would be that the Globe is trying to maintain a credible rightish leaning stance and since being a climate change denier is increasingly not credible, and moreover because denial would lose them market share amongst a lot of educated people, they’ve conceded that climate change is real but don’t want to alienate the business and oil lobby by suggesting that anything should be done. Their position makes sense in terms of the incentives & pressures to which they are responding.
Since when are conservatives libertarians? Conservatives support protectionism and welfare for corporations. The libertarian wing of the Republican party has been pushed off to the Ron-Paul right, and in Canada I’m not sure if there ever were any libertarians.
Conservatives are all for externalizing costs when it helps “economic development”.
“(e.g. neoliberals arguing for a small state and cost effectiveness, and then massively expanding incarceration at huge cost & virtually no benefit).”
There is a principle, it’s just not the one explicitly endorsed. The principle is act in the interest of business and the elite, whether or not that happens to be in the general interest of the population as a whole. That’s the point of the bailout. That’s the point of twenty years of delay on climate action. There’s no “master plan”, there is just power perpetuating itself.
The existing political system will work to solve climate change exactly when the powers it serves decide it is in their collective interest. Incidentally, just like how in the U.S. health care reform became politically possible (though there has been overwhelming public support since the 80s) only after major business interests demanded it (i.e. downfall of American auto industry).
Thank you for the article, interesting.
There does appear to be a consensus that placing a price on carbon is the most effective means of reducing GHG emissions (with a carbon tax probably being the most effective mechanism).
That being said, I think the article minimize the difficulties associated with implementing a carbon tax and has a “just do it” tone. While it may be extreme to say that a carbon tax would literally take away all of a person’s liberties, you cannot minimize the impact that this government action would have on Canadians’ lives.
Proposing that a carbon tax is a hands-off approach that doesn’t ‘force’ people to change their behaviour is inaccurate. A carbon tax would directly impact people’s lives by making certain day-to-day activities more expensive. For 99% of Canadians, price is a major (if not the primary) determinant for decisions.
Thus, if due to government intervention, it becomes more expensive for a person to drive to buy groceries, or to fly overseas to visit a relative, and that person has to forego the activity due to cost, then the government is in fact taking away some of that person’s liberties.
This is actually the desired outcome of a carbon tax though. Its goal is to directly influence people’s decisions and essentially force them to lead a low-carbon lifestyle. Just because this outcome (a low carbon society) is a desirable one, it does not mean it doesn’t infringe on people’s liberties.
In other words, just because this particular government intervention would help save the planet, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take away the liberties of those who contribute to destroying it.
The point is, it takes away only liberties directly related to the environmental harm being caused, and it lets people choose how they cut down their emissions.
There is no completely painless mechanism by which human greenhouse gas emissions can be cut to nothing, but letting people choose which luxuries they forego seems preferable than having the government restrict options by decree. At least, that’s a position I think libertarians would agree with.
Carbon pricing would also drive investment decisions and technological development, eventually making it possible to do some things that are carbon-intensive today in a less carbon intensive way. Over time, that would partially restore the ability of people in general to do what they like, while not causing significant harm to others.
The way I see it though is that a carbon tax doesn’t let people decide how to cut their emissions. The government defines a specific set of activities / puchases that would be subject to the tax, and people would be forced to comply. In many instances, there are no other viable options, and therefore there is no decision to make (i.e., someone who cannot afford to drive to work anymore due to the tax, yet there are no viable low-carbon alternatives). In many cases, the government is in fact restricting options by decree.
The only way people would be able to decide on their own how to cut their emissions would be to allocate a certain amount of carbon each indvidual is allowed to emit. Each person could choose how they will remain under that level, and pay taxes for anything over. Each person would be responsible for reporting their emissions to government, which would be kept in a database…………. This is obviously not feasible.
Further, re: “a carbon tax would ‘only’ take away those ‘liberties ‘ directly associated with the environmental harm being caused”: Sorry to be blunt, but I just don’t think this statement is in touch with reality. Almost everything people do every day causes some sort of environmental harm. And many of these activities are hardly ‘luxuries’.
Look, am not arguing against a carbon tax. I just don’t think we can minimize the profound profound impact it would have on many Canadians’ lives. While a carbon tax would be an excellent way to reduce GHG emissions, we need to be up front and honest with people re: the sacrifices that will need to be made.
The way I see it though is that a carbon tax doesn’t let people decide how to cut their emissions. The government defines a specific set of activities / puchases that would be subject to the tax, and people would be forced to comply.
Ideally, you would impose the carbon tax as high up as possible: at the point where fossil fuels are produced or imported, and where other greenhouse gasses are generated. The price signal would then filter through the economy.
Emissions intensive things would get more expensive – that’s the whole point – but people would be able to respond to price signals in the same way as with any other change in input prices (such as an increase in hydrocarbon prices).
In addition, you could use most of the revenues to make periodic grants to taxpayers. People who emitted the average amount could more or less break even. Those who emit less than average could actually get more in credits than they pay in taxes. Naturally, those who emit a lot would end up paying more than they received.
Over time, the impact would be profound in the sense of changing the energy basis of society. That said, given changes in investment and technology, there might not be that much change in what people actually do. Cars will go from running on petroleum to running on renewable forms of energy; forests products will be produced sustainably; there will be less and more efficient air travel; etc.
The alternative – allowing climate change to proceed unmitigated – is far less desirable.
Here is some more on carbon pricing.
In particular, you may want to have a look at the cap and dividend idea.
“The way I see it though is that a carbon tax doesn’t let people decide how to cut their emissions. The government defines a specific set of activities / puchases that would be subject to the tax, and people would be forced to comply.”
This just doesn’t make any sense to me. No one should get to decide whether or not to include the negative costs to others in their decisions – carbon tax is just an attempt to internalize these costs so you don’t have a choice about whether your decisions are based these costs or not. Having carbon costs included in your choices means you are left free to choose whichever carbon reductions you choose. For example, if you really value incandescent light, but are willing to give up driving, you can simply choose to pay more for light and less for fuel by consuming more or less of different modes of energy.
What it would mean to take away choices would be to, instead of imposing carbon taxes, simply ban certain activities. For example, banning fast cars, banning traditional lightbulbs, etc… This would be a real restriction of choice – and since even energy efficient technologies can be used inefficiently, probably a bad one (although it is certainly the road we’ve been traveling down).
It’s interesting how stupid the population is assumed to be in these out-right bans. We have free education up to grade 12, and a huge proportion of people going to post secondary, and yet policy makes absurd assumptions like “the car gets such and such a fuel economy”, when anyone who thinks knows that a car’s economy has as much to do with driving style than with anything else. Also, we ban incandescent light bulbs, but not electric baseboard heaters – when anyone who has taken a high school science class should be able to see they amount to the same thing.
“Almost everything people do every day causes some sort of environmental harm. And many of these activities are hardly ‘luxuries’”
The term luxury is difficult. In a sense “luxury” is an entirely subjective term – what is a luxury for me may be a need for you depending on how we’ve been socialized. There is another sense of “luxury”, however, which includes things that are luxuries “objectively”, but do not appear as luxuries “to you”. For instance, a computer, to me, appears to be a need – I could not function in the way I consider normal without one. But, if my having a computer was putting undue strain on others, it would be hard for me to justify that damage because this “need” has been only recently constructed, and I could certainly learn to function in a different way.
Similarly, driving is for many a “need” because of the way their built environments are constructed. For instance, when I’m in Surrey, B.C. I need a car – without a car life there is awful. But, that built environment is contingent, is itself a luxury! Low density housing turns luxuries into needs, and so my choice to live in low density housing relies on my being able to treat luxuries as if they were normal everyday things. Do I have a right to live in low density housing if it is putting an undue strain on others? Certainly not – since I could live in another kind of community.
“The only way people would be able to decide on their own how to cut their emissions would be to allocate a certain amount of carbon each indvidual is allowed to emit.”
I think this plan would produce even more inequality than a carbon tax system, since a lot of the working poor rely on auto transportation since they’ve been priced out of dense areas and taught that they should have many children. I don’t think we should pick any global warming solution that criminalizes the life of those who live by need, whereas those who live by luxury can simply buy their way out of emitting carbon.
This is a very interesting article and subsequent discussion. I agree with the article and the introduction of a carbon tax.
Also, I do not think that a carbon tax will either not cause hardship or be inequitable.
I do not think that proponents of a carbon tax are saying that it will not effect people’s decisions and people’s lives. It will. The purpose of it is to effect people’s decision making by including the environmental costs in the cost of the products they consume.
Also it will not be equitable as rich people will simply be prepared prepared to pay for the included carbon tax than poor people. We already have the situation that rich people can afford more than poor people.
A key to introducing the carbon tax is for people to realize that it is for the greater good and in the end the cost of not changing to prevent climate change will outweigh the costs of introducing a carbon tax to counteract it. The key would be for the introduction of such thinking worldwide.
Thank you for providing me with an argument (s) to put forward in discussions with conservatives.
“Also it will not be equitable as rich people will simply be prepared prepared to pay for the included carbon tax than poor people. We already have the situation that rich people can afford more than poor people.”
This is an interesting point. It seems to me there is a straightforward way to fix it – make it a progressive tax. It cannot be immediately progressive because that would require the rate of tax to be charged to be dependent on your income at the time of purchase – impossible. However, it would be possible to make the rate high, then issue monthly refund checks based on income.
Previously:
“Actual carbon pricing schemes (whether tax based or cap-and-trade based) also need to choose between an approach based purely on internalizing the cost of carbon and one that also seeks to advance other goals. One motivation for the second option is political; it can be used to defuse opposition to carbon pricing within groups that are politically influential. Another motivation is the ethical notion that different people should pay more or less the same amount to combat climate change. Another motivation is the pure redistributive preference that exists within some political views and ideologies.
In the end, I don’t think any of these arguments is terribly strong. It makes sense to charge more to those who pollute more. Not only is that a matter of fairness, it is a matter of prudence. Knowing that the group is going to split the bill in a way that renders shares more even, a selfish diner will consume an above-average amount, counting on those who consume a lesser quantity to subsidize him. A revenue neutral carbon tax achieves the opposite: with heavy polluters paying dividends to those who are more restrained. Granting special treatment to politically influential groups also risks reducing the effectiveness of the carbon pricing scheme, partly because it becomes more worthwhile to try to game the political system, rather than cut emissions.”
You are employing a false notion of neutrality to distinguish between the two sorts of schemes. In reality, just about every tax is either regressive or progressive since the value of money decreases as you have more of it-just like any other commodity.
Still, I think there is a very strong case to make the sole objective of a carbon tax encouraging emissions reductions.
Leave progressivity (whatever level you want to have) to the income tax system.
The Canadian National Post – believe that “climate change” is real, without asking whether the term makes sense, as a look at the UNFCCC shows
Article 1 of the FCCC providing definitions offers none on the term “climate”, and if it had been based on the common explanation on “average weather”, the word “weather” would have required a definition as well. That the drafters failed to do so is a clear indication that they either lacked the scientific competence to do so, or they knew it would make no sense, because ‘average weather’ is statistics, and remain statistics regardless of any name given to the set of statistics. Instead the FCCC defines in
· Para. 2. “Climate change” means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.
Para. 3. “Climate system” means the totality of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere and their interactions.
Further details at: http://www.whatisclimate.com/ )
Allow me to refer you to my climate primer and previous arguments with so-called climate ‘skeptics.’
If you really want to argue that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – which differs from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – doesn’t understand what ‘climate’ means, let me know. In reality, the IPCC reports consider the natural functioning of the climate system in great deal, as well as identifying and attributing the warming trend induced by human greenhouse gas emissions.
#Milan
If someone wants to say that weather and climate is different, after having stated that: „
Climate is generally defined as average weather, and as such, climate change and weather are intertwined.”, seems to have problems. A highlight is such an explanation:
As an analogy, while it is impossible to predict the age at which any particular man will die, we can say with high confidence that the average age of death for men in industrialised countries is about 75.
To find at FAQ, 1.2 , IPCC 2007 : What is the Relationship between Climate Changeand Weather?
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_FAQs.pdf, which starts as follows:
Climate is generally defined as average weather, and as such, climate change and weather are intertwined. Observations can show that there have been changes in weather, and it is the statistics of changes in weather over time that identify climate change. While weather and climate are closely related, there are important differences. A common confusion between weather and climate arises when scientists are asked how they can predict climate 50 years from now when they cannot predict the weather a few weeks from now. The chaotic nature of weather makes it unpredictable beyond a few days. Projecting changes in climate (i.e., long-term average weather) due to changes in atmospheric composition or other factors is a very different and much more manageable issue. As an analogy, while it is impossible to predict the age at which any particular man will die, we can say with high confidence that the average age of death for men in industrialised countries is about 75. Another common confusion of these issues is thinking that a cold winter or a cooling spot on the globe is evidence against global warming. There are always extremes of hot and cold, although their frequency and intensity change as climate changes. But when weather is averaged over space and time, the fact that the globe is warming emerges clearly from the data.
Have a look at this text: What is Weather? http://www.whatisclimate.com/c305-what-is-weather.html
This is just confused.
For any unit of time, you can measure a statistic like mean global temperature. Obviously, this varies due to factors like season.
That being said, if mean global temperatures are rising year-on-year, it is perfectly correct to say that the climate is changing. Beyond thermometers, this manifests itself in things like glaciers melting, species migrating north and uphill, flowers blooming earlier in spring, etc.
We have good temperature records going back for decades, and can collect data going further back using techniques like tree ring and ice core analysis. Climate scientists certainly understand the difference between climate and weather, and none of what you say undermines the argument that the climate is changing, greenhouse gasses are the major cause, and that further change will likely be dangerous.
This chart from the IPCC shows three things:
In blue are what climate models project would happen in the absence of rising greenhouse gas concentrations. In pink are what the models project based on the emissions humanity has been producing. The black line shows measured mean temperatures.
The observations detect that climate is changing, while the modelling makes a compelling case that anthropogenic GHGs are the cause.
My comment is about terminology and in this respect WMO, IPCC and others are not up to resonable scientific standards, see FN 1, at http://www.whatisclimate.com/:
The WMO site has a theme-section, which include the two terms in question. Concerning weather the section “Weather” offers no explanation but has the opening sentence: “Everyone is interested in the weather”, while subsection: What is Climate begins with the sentence: “At the simplest level the weather is what is happening to the atmosphere at any given time.” In the same section the Organization offers for climate three options namely:
· in a narrow sense Climate is usually defined as the “average weather,”
· in a more rigorously way, Climate is the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time, and
· in a broader sense, Climate is the status of the climate system which comprises the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the surface lithosphere and the biosphere.
“In the 160 years since explorer John Franklin perished in the Canadian Arctic, the enterprise of science has succeeded in overturning the old, yet persistent, Greek idea of climate as a stable property of the natural world. ‘Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get’ is no longer an adequate aphorism because we have come to believe that climate, just like weather, is constantly changing. Our expectations of climate have changed. This is the insight that Louis Agassiz applied over the very longest of time-scales. This to is the more recent insight offered us by Tyndall, Callendar, Broecker and colleagues.
Thje view, dominant over the first half of the twentieth century, which led Hubert Lamb to remark, in 1959, ‘not so very long ago.. climate was widely considered as something static, except on geological time-scale[s], and authoritative works on the climates of various regions were written without allusion to the possibility of change’, is as anachronistic to us today as the notion of a flat Earth. Physical climates change, they change on all time-scales, and we humans have become an active agent of change.”
Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction, and Opportunity. (p.61, trade paperback)
# Just some news; 16Nov, 01:23
HH Lamb was presumably one of the best in the field few decades ago, saying also this :
· __Definitions of climate and climatology have varied. That (still widely) definition of climate as “average weather” must surely be regarded as quite inadequate. Climate comprises the totality of weather experienced at a given place. As long ago as 1845, Alexander von Humboldt defined climatology as a division of meteorology taken in its broadest meaning as the physics of the atmosphere and the causes and relationships of atmospheric phenomena.
· __Only thirty years ago climatology was generally regarded as the mere dry-as-dust bookkeeping end of meteorology.
(H.H. Lamb, Meteorological Office Bracknell, Berkshire (UK), “The New Look of Climatology”, NATURE, Vol. 223, September 20, 1969, pp.1209ff)
However the scientific terminology is the same as 100 years ago, which means the same as the ordinary people use it since ancient Greek’s time.
So what exactly are you arguing? That climate change is happening, but that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change doesn’t define terms in the way you like?
Nobody else seems to think this is a problem. Climate change is happening because of human emissions, and we need to stop. That is basically the situation.
The UNFCCC text defines terms in the very first article:
An alternative way to approach the issue would be to define climate change to include “natural climate variability” and specificy anthropogenic climate change as the sort induced by human activity. That being said, it is perfectly rational to call natural variability just that, and use the term ‘climate change’ to refer to anthropogenic climate change.
Define first CLIMATE in a scientifically reasonable manner, and then go for CLIMATE CHANGE. If that is impossible, and you wish to use the word climate, then give it with regard to studying atmospheric behaviour a reasonable meaning, for example what is the most relevant aspect of atmospheric dynamics, respectively the driving source.
___One source is certainly the sun. BUT the sun does not makes the weather on this planet (see the moon, which is in relation to the sun in the same situation).
___Consult Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) who has said: “Water is the driver of nature”.
___Chose the prime driver on earth, and say: “Climate is the continuation of the oceans by other means”; as expressed in a Letter to the Editor, NATURE ,1992, Climate Change, Vol. 360, p. 292; http://www.whatisclimate.com/1992-nature.html
Conclusion: With the oceans in focus the climate change debate would presumably be going very differently.
I am totally confused by you.
It doesn’t seem like you are denying that anthopogenic GHG emissions are causing the climate to warm. I can’t really understand what you are so up in arms about. The UNFCCC seems to define its terms in a reasonable way, and I find the premise of your website perplexing as a result.
Aber’s argument seems to be: if we assume that climate is a result of some internal change in the ocean, then we can conclude that climate change is caused by something internal to the ocean. That’s begging the question.
Resolution: This house believes “Begging the question” is reasonable grounds for censorship.
I find it remarkable that Aber has set up an entire website, but cannot express his key point in a form I find comprehensible enough to respond to.
The timecube-style formatting should be setting off alarm bells.
# Milan November 17, 2009 at 10:52 am “I am totally confused by you”
“Until one has experienced the sea around one,
One has no idea of world and its relation to the world.”
(Johann – Wolfgang v. Goethe , 1749-1832, “Italian Voyage”, 1787)
Hence here is oceanology in 30 seconds:
___the oceans hold 1000 times more water than the atmosphere,
___the average temperatures of the oceans is below 4°C,
___only a very thin ocean surface layer and at lower latitude regions have more than 10°C,
___The atmospheric vapor is completely exchanged every two weeks.
___ The upper 3m of the ocean surface layer has the same heat capacity as the whole of the atmosphere. Hence the heat required to raise the temperature of the atmosphere (10’000m) by 1ºC can be obtained from cooling the upper 3m of water by the same amount. As weather takes primarily place in up to 1000 m, the mentioned heat supply into this sector could be easily 10 and more degrees.
“Everything comes from water!
Everything is maintained through water!
Ocean, give us your eternal power!”
(From the drama Faust II, Thales, by Johann-Wolfgang v. Goethe, (1749-1832)
Are you saying that we shouldn’t worry about climate change because the oceans will absorb any additional heat in the planet system?
It would be helpful if you would be less poetic, and more willing to express yourself in clear statements.
In any event, it is clear that the extra heat being trapped isn’t all going into the oceans. Just look at observed changes in temperature on land – not to mention melting glaciers, earlier flowering dates for plants, migration of species, etc.
If you want to learn more about the importance of the ocean within the climate system, I recommend that you read Richard Alley’s The Two Mile Time Machine.
P.S. I would be rather surprised if there is only 1,000 times more water in the oceans than in the atmosphere. At sea level, air has a density of around 0.0013 grams per cubic centimetre, compared with 1.0 for water. Air also gets less dense as you go up in altitude. The percentage of the atmosphere consisting of water vapour is also only around 1%.
While the troposphere may be between 17km (at the equator) and 7km (at the poles), the average depth of the ocean is 3,790m.
To summarize, there is more volume of atmosphere than of ocean, but the ocean is nearly 100% water and is 100 times denser than air at sea level. I would guess that this means the ratio of water content in the oceans to the atmosphere is greater than 1000:1.
This page includes the following statistics:
Volume of Earth’s Oceans: 1.310302 to 1.5 billion km^3
Volume of water in the atmosphere: 12,900 km^3
That suggests there is about 100,000 times more water in the oceans than in the atmosphere.
It is also worth noting that without the natural greenhouse effect, the whole planet would be around -20 °C and the seas on the Earth would be frozen solid. Obviously, the composition of the atmosphere has the capability to affect the oceans.
Not that any of this has much to do with carbon taxes…
17 November 09
Bankrupt National Post Eats Crow on Climate Change
According to the Post:
“The Earth is warming, and human activity is likely to blame. Climates are changing across the world, including in Canada’s far north. In other parts of the world, some crops will fail, some species will be pressed to extinction and some low-lying territories will be flooded.”
Imagine that. Only about two decades after the scientific community came to exactly the same conclusion, Canada’s most business-friendly newspaper has belatedly acknowledged that several of its most prominent and vociferous critics of climate science don’t apparently have a clue what they are talking about.
# Milan November 18, 2009 at 8:52 am
My point is:
Understand the oceans better and take more care of the seas, and if interested read here: http://www.seaclimate.com/,
or this
Letter to the Editor,
NATURE 1992, “Climate Change”, Vol. 360, p. 292;
“SIR – The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the earlier struggle for a Convention on Climate Change may serve as a reminder that the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea has its tenth anniversary on 10 December. It is not only one of the most comprehensive and strongest international treaties ever negotiated but the best possible legal means to protect the global climate. But sadly, there has been little interest in using it for this purpose. For too long, climate has been defined as the average weather and Rio was not able to define it at all. Instead, the Climate Change Convention uses the term ‘climate sys- tem’, defining it as “the totality of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere and their interactions”. All that this boils down to is ‘the interactions of the natural system’. What is the point of a legal term if it explains nothing? For decades, the real question has been who is responsible for the climate. Climate should have been defined as ‘the continuation of the oceans by other means’. Thus, the 1982 Convention could long since have been used to protect the climate. After all, it is the most powerful tool with which to force politicians and the community of states into actions. ”
http://www.whatisclimate.com/1992-nature.html
I certainly don’t disagree with the notion that we should try to understand the oceans better, and that we should take better care of them. Look at my posts on fisheries or ocean acidification, for instance. That said, your position on climate change remains unclear.
As for that letter to Nature, did they really print it in 2002, or did you just post it on their website in 2009?
In any event, I would prefer if people could stick to the topics of carbon taxes and conservatism, in the discussion of this post.
For some reason, the above exchange with ‘aber’ is being reproduced on this site: Open Letter On Climate Legislation.
This makes it seem more likely that aber is in fact a climate change denier, albeit one who expresses himself very poorly.
Oh, and one page linked above seems to provide conclusive evidence that ‘Dr. Arnd Bernaerts’ is a crackpot: Climatic changes due to naval warfare.
“Large-scale anthropogenic weather modification and climatic changes resulted from two destructive sea wars. This became particularly obvious when an arctic winter befell Northern Europe only four months after World War II had started. To establish a definite connection between war at sea and climatic change, climatic data for first few months of WWII are analyzed in fourteen theme papers. Thereon further climatic data is analyzed in respect of subsequent two war winters of 1940-41 and 1941-42, in six supplementary papers. It can be seen that record cold winters occurred in Europe only.”
Once again, I am astonished by what ludicruous things are believed and argued outside the reasonable scope of debate on climate change.
“95% water vapour” Global warming debunked by New Zealand Meteorologist
http://www.hawaiifreepress.com/main/ArticlesMain/tabid/56/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/849/quot95-water-vapourquot-Global-warming-debunked-by-New-Zealand-Meteorologist.aspx
Water vapour was responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, an effect which was vital to keep the world warm, he explained.
“If we didn’t have the greenhouse effect the planet would be at minus 18 deg C but because we do have the greenhouse effect it is plus 15 deg C, all the time.”
The other greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and various others including CFCs, contributed only five per cent of the effect, carbon dioxide being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6 per cent.
However, carbon dioxide as a result of man’s activities was only 3.2 per cent of that, hence only 0.12 per cent of the greenhouse gases in total. Human-related methane, nitrogen dioxide and CFCs etc made similarly minuscule contributions to the effect: 0.066, 0.047, and 0.046 per cent respectively.
“That ought to be the end of the argument, there and then,” he said.
“We couldn’t do it (change the climate) even if we wanted to because water vapour dominates.”
This analysis is incorrect. See: Calculating the greenhouse effect
Yes, water vapour is a greenhouse gas. That said, the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere depends on the temperature of the air. As such, adding other greenhouse gasses (like CO2) to the atmosphere warms the air, allowing it to hold more water, which then causes further warming.
See also: Earth’s Annual Global Mean Energy Budget (PDF)
Also, it’s weird to call yourself ‘AlGore’ when you are so thoroughly lacking in knowledge about climate science.
Jack Carradice was also confused about water vapour.
‘Climate scientists dodge the subject of water vapor’—No, they really don’t
Not a single climate model or climate textbook fails to discuss the role water vapor plays in the greenhouse effect. It is the strongest greenhouse gas, contributing 36% to 66% to the overall effect for vapor alone, 66% to 85% when you include clouds. It is however, not considered a climate “forcing,” because the amount of H2O in the air basically varies as a function of temperature.
If you artificially increase the level of H2O in the air, it rains out immediately (in terms of climate response times). Similarly, due to the abundance of ocean on the earth’s surface, if you somehow removed all the water from the air, it would quickly be replaced through evaporation.
This has the interesting consequence that if you could somehow instantly remove all CO2 from the atmosphere, the temperature would begin to drop, causing precipitation to remove H2O from the air, causing even further drops, in a feedback effect that would not end until no liquid water was left, only ice sheets and frozen oceans.
CO2 put into the air by burning fossil fuels, on the other hand, stays in the atmosphere for centuries before natural sinks finish absorbing the excess. This is plenty of time to have substantial and long-lasting effects on the climate system. As the climate warms in response to CO2, humidity rises and increased H2O concentration acts as a significant amplifier of CO2-driven warming, basically doubling or tripling its effect.
I think now the Hadley CRU is exposed, we have more chance of a PH based economy than a CO2 one. Well written article.
On the CRU emails
It is also worth nothing that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre are not the same institution.
The first is a university body, the second is a government body.
You know, the original post is actually correct. Conservatives should love carbon taxes. Better – conservatives do love carbon taxes. Therefore, there aren’t any conservatives. This seems the most likely conclusion.
Better – conservatives do love carbon taxes.
What is your reasoning here?
“A good policy framework would include some regulation in areas where the market doesn’t work well, such as the energy-efficiency of buildings and appliances. It would include a modicum of subsidy, on research into technologies that are still a long way from being marketable, such as carbon capture and storage. But it would rely largely on by far the most efficient tool in the policymaker’s kit—a carbon price.
A carbon price sends business a price signal to invest in clean stuff not dirty stuff. It doesn’t involve micromanaging business, which regulations do. It doesn’t impose a burden on taxpayers, or require governments to pick winners, which subsidies do. It is, according to an American study, twice as efficient as any other policy.
Economists prefer carbon prices, especially those set by taxes rather than cap-and-trade systems, which are more vulnerable to capture by the polluters they are supposed to penalise. Sadly, though, the views of economists carry little weight. Governments and businesses both tend to like subsidies.”
I would also be curious to see why the lack of support for carbon taxes proves that there are no conservatives.
As the NDP has shown, there are plenty of reasons why it can make political sense to oppose them.
I think the NDP has better demonstrated why it can make political non-sense to oppose them.
However, conservatives need to love carbon taxes because their notions of individual freedom and autonomy, and the perfection of the free market, require the inclusion of externalities to fulfill their own ideal. The idea that taxation is theft because I do not enter into it as a contract extends to every negative externality being theft because you are effectively taking from people you do not have contracts with, who are not engaging in acts of consensual economic interchange.
If you believe in individual freedom and autonomy, but don’t believe that the state should restrict the autonomy of the ruling class when its free actions effectively steal from others and from future generations, you are not a conservative but a fascist. Fascists do not believe in the rule of law, or in equal application of principles to different classes of society. Conservatives do – it is part of their ideal of freedom and individual rights.
Ergo, there are no conservatives. Instead, we have weak, proto-fascists who don’t know what they are because they’ve been watching too much TV.
You can also be ‘conservative’ in the sense that you believe existing institutions have value that is demonstrated by their survival through time. You can be skeptical of reform and change, because you think it is likely to produce disruption and strife rather than improvements in outcomes.
The trouble with this sort of conventional Burkean conservatism is that it cannot respond to genuinely new circumstances. While there aren’t many conventional conservatives who haven’t – for example – incorporated nuclear weapons into their world view, there are plenty that have not yet accepted the fact that humans could render the planet very hostile or uninhabitable by wrecking the climate.
Incidentally, that sort of Burkean conservatism has a lot in common with parts of the modern environmental movement: organic unity, agrarianism, high culture, localism, etc.
Prince Charles’ environmentalism also seems similar.
Well, I don’t think we have any strong strains of that kind of conservatism either. The senate and “big government” are institutions which would have this value by virtue of their survival through time. And yet, the main strands of “conservatism” in the US and Canada respectively expend much wind desecrating them.
“You can be skeptical of reform and change, because you think it is likely to produce disruption and strife rather than improvements in outcomes.”
This isn’t a serious moral position. Slavery resulted in improved conditions for slaves between 1750 and 1850 – is this an argument for slavery? Of course not.
A conservatism based on principles (i.e. freedom and autonomy) at least fulfills the basic requirements of a moral position. This Burkean position appears the worst kind of utilitarian anti-ethics.
There are practical principles behind the Burkean view: particularly regarding human fallibility. The fact that we cannot easily rebuild societies to our liking should be all the more obvious, post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan.
“The fact that we cannot easily rebuild societies to our liking should be all the more obvious, post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan.”
This isn’t a good argument. In Iraq, the US have continually blocked the progress of democracy because a democratic Iraq would likely ally with Iran. In Afghanistan, the idea that an invasion of guns and tanks (rather than an invasion of roads and hospitals) would produce a democratic or equitable outcome is not serious. All we do is support some warlords against other warlords.
Every political gain is the result of demanding an ideal be realized in concrete. Many occur when said ideals are already in circulation, but hypocritically so, i.e. abolitionism in American appealed to principles in the Constitution which could not be harmonized with slavery.
“The fact that we cannot easily rebuild societies to our liking should be all the more obvious, post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan.”
More generally, isn’t every political improvement in history an example of us “rebuilding society to our liking”?
Maybe you are making an equivocation between “improving and reforming institutions” and “violent revolution”. Sure, violent revolution rarely, if ever, accomplishes the desired aim – but certainly such an equivocation is fallacious.
I was talking about radical change of the ‘simply expropriate the assets of the 25 Canadian companies which produce 80% of the C02 and shut them down‘ variety.
Such approaches are:
(a) fairly unlikely to succeed
(b) likely to use up a lot of political capital to attempt
(c) not certain to reduce GHG emissions, even if they succeed.
At least to begin with, the stealth approach looks more promising.
Canada has run large national crown corperations before. Quebec nationalized its hydro power under Levesque. BC Hydro is still a crown corporation. The federal government bought Great Northern when it went under and that became Canadian National, a crown corporation until the late 80s.
We have a strong history in this country of national industry. It’s not a “grand political experiment” to propose nationalization of the energy sector as the best and fastest way to deal with climate change!
The same objections raised here apply.
“[Promiment Republican Mike Huckabee] thinks the climate summit in Copenhagen is a waste of time. He favours a voluntary cap-and-trade system for curbing carbon emissions, which is like arguing for a voluntary income tax. As it happens, he favours a voluntary income tax, too. Or rather, despite the rapid deterioration of the government’s finances, he would abolish income tax and ramp up consumption taxes instead.”
Clean energy conservatives can embrace
By James Murdoch
Friday, December 4, 2009
Conservatives champion the essential characteristics of America: liberty, enterprise and ingenuity. As world leaders consider how to transform the way we make and use energy in the face of a changing climate, it’s time for an energy policy true to that spirit — and it shouldn’t be anathema to the American right.
Conservatives have a robust tradition of principled concern for the environment. It was, after all, Teddy Roosevelt who created five national parks and signed the Antiquities Act. It was Richard Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency, and George H.W. Bush who ushered in one of the greatest environmental success stories, the 1990 cap-and-trade plan to take on acid rain.
Today, Americans of all political persuasions want to see their country on a path toward an economy powered by energy that is clean, safe, secure and stable. With climate legislation pending and a binding global treaty being negotiated, conservative leadership is critical because the only way to get the job done is with broad bipartisan agreement.
“What you hear from conservative opponents of a climate-change policy, however, is that any attempt to limit emissions would be economically devastating. The Heritage Foundation, for one, responded to Budget Office estimates on Waxman-Markey with a broadside titled, “C.B.O. Grossly Underestimates Costs of Cap and Trade.” The real effects, the foundation said, would be ruinous for families and job creation.
This reaction — this extreme pessimism about the economy’s ability to live with cap and trade — is very much at odds with typical conservative rhetoric. After all, modern conservatives express a deep, almost mystical confidence in the effectiveness of market incentives — Ronald Reagan liked to talk about the “magic of the marketplace.” They believe that the capitalist system can deal with all kinds of limitations, that technology, say, can easily overcome any constraints on growth posed by limited reserves of oil or other natural resources. And yet now they submit that this same private sector is utterly incapable of coping with a limit on overall emissions, even though such a cap would, from the private sector’s point of view, operate very much like a limited supply of a resource, like land. Why don’t they believe that the dynamism of capitalism will spur it to find ways to make do in a world of reduced carbon emissions? Why do they think the marketplace loses its magic as soon as market incentives are invoked in favor of conservation?
Clearly, conservatives abandon all faith in the ability of markets to cope with climate-change policy because they don’t want government intervention. Their stated pessimism about the cost of climate policy is essentially a political ploy rather than a reasoned economic judgment. The giveaway is the strong tendency of conservative opponents of cap and trade to argue in bad faith.”
Some more thoughts on a carbon tax
Jun 18th 2010, 5:57 by T.C. | LONDON
THIS week, in advance of its “emergency budget” on June 22nd, we wrote about how Britain might close its deficit, which currently stands at 11.1% of GDP. One idea we advocated was a carbon tax. We commissioned some modeling on the subject from Cambridge Econometrics (who have a model specifically designed for this sort of thing). I wrote up the headline results in a small piece to accompany the main article, but space constraints prevented me going into too much detail. Happily, space constraints don’t apply on the web.
The Economist has long advocated a carbon tax as the best way to deal with climate change. Carbon taxes are a subspecies of Pigovian tax; taxes that are designed primarily to change behaviour rather than to raise revenue. The idea is to try to manipulate the price of a good or a service in order to capture all the negative externalities it imposes. Pollution is the standard example: neither the owner of a factory nor the buyer of its goods, for example, care very much that the local river is being filled with nasty chemicals as a byproduct of the factory’s work. Those who live by the river do care, but, not being party to the transaction, there isn’t much they can do about it. The uncompensated costs imposed on locals by the factory-owner’s activities represent a market failure. In theory the government would step in and impose a tax on the factory owner designed to compensate the locals for the damage caused by his actions (in the jargon, the government would make sure the private cost of producing the goods was equal to the social cost).
It’s the sort of dry, neat idea that appeals to professional economists, but there are reasons for advocating carbon taxes in the real world, too. Having one, unchanging price for carbon offers certainty to businesses and the public (unlike cap-and-trade schemes such as the EUETS, which has seen big price fluctuations), an important benefit to industries like power generation, which produces a lot of greenhouse gases and which must be confident that an expensive new power station will stay profitable for several years. And yes, before you rush to the comment button, there are important downsides, too. I’ll explore some of those below.
With all that in mind, we investigated two different basic scenarios. One applied an economy-wide carbon tax that aimed to raise 1% of GDP in revenue by 2020; the other applied a tax set at a level designed to ensure that Britain meets its commitment to cut emissions by 34%, relative to their 1990 levels, by 2020. In both cases, to keep things simple, we scrapped all the other policies that aim at the same outcome, such as Britain’s membership of Europe’s emissions-trading scheme, subsidies for renewable energy and so on. The results of the first scenario are set out in the print piece, but briefly, electricity prices fall as expensive subsidies for renewable energy are replaced by the carbon tax. That provides an economic boost, the government gets an extra revenue stream, and output is 2.5% higher come 2020 than in the baseline scenario. Somewhat embarassingly, emissions of carbon are slightly higher than in the baseline scenario. But we chose 1% of GDP as our target figure for convenience more than anything else. There’s no reason the tax couldn’t be tweaked a little to reduce emissions, although a high enough tax would presumably start to drag GDP back down again. At any rate, the modeling strongly suggests that a tax would be much more efficient than the present arrangements.
Speaking of populism:
Ontario shelves eco fees after fierce backlash
Karen Howlett
Toronto — From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Jul. 19, 2010 8:54PM EDT Last updated on Tuesday, Jul. 20, 2010 3:22AM EDT
The Ontario government is pulling the plug on its controversial program that slaps eco fees on thousands of household products, after a growing backlash from retailers and consumer groups.
Environment Minister John Gerretsen will announce on Tuesday that the government plans to eliminate the new fees charged on aerosols, cleaning products and thousands of other potentially toxic items, according to government sources.
The cancellation comes less than three weeks after the fees were introduced, marking another hasty policy retreat for the McGuinty government. Premier Dalton McGuinty shelved a new sex-education curriculum last April amid complaints from parents and religious groups
“It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s growth rate.”
It is encouraging that the Council of Chief Executives is reiterating its support for putting a price on carbon at the national level (National Energy Strategy Gains Clout – Report on Business, July 11). A particularly simple and transparent way to do this is a carbon fee and dividend: Charge a fee on fossil fuels at their source of production that reflects their carbon content, then distribute the revenue raised directly back to Canadians, e.g. as dividend cheques. People get both more money in their pockets and an incentive to spend it on less-carbon-intensive products and services as the cost of carbon propagates in an efficient manner throughout the economy. Only when fossil fuels’ real cost to our planet is reflected in what we pay will we be able to move toward the low-carbon future necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.
James Booth, Toronto
When it comes to emissions, we have bureaucracy run wild
Since their first day in office, the Harper Conservatives have been both big spenders and users of the tax system to achieve social (and political) objectives. What they haven’t done is deploy regulations to achieve their objectives.
Instead, they’ve railed against excessive regulations. They even established a Red Tape Commission to reduce regulations that got in the way of doing business.
They’ve been quite clear: Spend and tax to achieve objectives, but don’t regulate. Except, it seems, in one huge area – greenhouse-gas emissions. In this case, the Harper Conservatives have jettisoned their usual approaches and opted for the least economically efficient methods imaginable: regulations and subsidies. Predictably, the government is failing to meet its own targets.
It has recently been announcing regulations for new coal- and natural gas-fired plants. Later regulations will arrive for existing coal-fired plants. Still later, perhaps at the end of 2012, will come regulations for oil operations. These will be so detailed as to be specific to each plant across the country, a task of mind-boggling complexity designed by civil servants.
Oil sands, green groups unlikely allies in push for carbon tax
Ottawa is facing growing calls for a carbon tax from some surprising quarters as it pursues plans to regulate industrial sources of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Oil sands producers and some environmental groups that agree on little else have opposed the Conservative government’s regulatory approach and endorsed the idea of carbon pricing. Now, that idea is being pushed in a new paper to be released Thursday by the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.
Republicans Tired Of Climate Change Deniers Launch Initiative For Global Warming Action, Carbon Price
Former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis is “urging conservatives to stop denying that humans are contributing to global warming.”
Inglis, a South Carolina Republican beaten by the Tea Party in 2010, is launching the “Energy and Enterprise Initiative” at George Mason University to push “conservative solutions to America’s energy and climate challenges.”
Federal approach to environment undermining energy industry, say experts
Former Syncrude CEO Eric Newell calls for national carbon pricing strategy.
By CHRIS PLECASH |
Published: Monday, 09/03/2012 12:00 am EDT
Last Updated: Monday, 09/03/2012 2:00 pm EDT
Remember the federal election of 2008, when the Conservatives championed a carbon tax? They promised a tax on everything that would kill jobs. And they won, beating Stéphane Dion’s Liberals.
This might seem like revisionist history, but it’s perfectly consistent with the “facts” you can find on the Conservative website these days.
The website quotes NDP MP Nathan Cullen as saying he prefers a cap-and-trade system to a carbon tax, but that what matters is putting a price on carbon — which either system would achieve. The Conservative “fact check” concludes: “A ‘price on carbon’ is a tax on carbon. That makes it a carbon tax.”
If so, the Conservative platform of 2008 clearly called for a carbon tax when it promised the Conservatives would work to develop “a North-America-wide cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases and air pollution, with implementation to occur between 2012 and 2015.”
Here we are in 2012 and the Conservatives’ promised cap-and-trade system is nowhere to be seen. But political parties not keeping their election promises is nothing new. What is new is demonizing Idea X by saying Idea Y is better, then a few years later, when a different party is in Opposition, claiming Idea Y is identical to Idea X.
Dragged toward a third-best emissions solution
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/dragged-toward-a-third-best-emissions-solution/article13151259/
Jeffrey Simpson
The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jul. 12 2013, 12:00 AM EDT
Last updated Friday, Jul. 12 2013, 12:00 AM EDT
“The oil and gas industry over many years has brilliantly delayed any implementation of federal regulations in one of the most concerted and successful lobbying efforts in modern Canadian history.
…
The best policy for reducing carbon emissions – a policy called for by various oil company executives – would be a price on carbon, or a tax, with the revenues recycled in the form of lower personal and corporate taxes. Another possibility would be a cap-and-trade market system. Either method would use free-market principles that the federal Conservatives and their erstwhile cousins in the Alberta Progressive Conservative government are supposed to favour, but do not for oil and gas.”
In the past year, a movement of conservatives outside of Congress has pushed a market-based solution to climate change. This conservative alternative envisions a phase-out of subsidies for all sources of energy coupled with a revenue-neutral carbon tax swap. This is exactly the kind of proposal that gives Republicans the chance to win both in a messaging battle and on policy merits.
Energy subsidies come in many forms and most serve as a proxy for a price on carbon. Conservatives want to get rid of subsidies because they’re wasteful and inefficient and allow government to pick winners and losers in the market. Government subsidies also result in market uncertainty, rent-seeking problems, and inefficient allocation of capital. Importantly, getting rid of these wasteful expenditures can help reduce our deficit.
As the subsidies are being phased out, a revenue-neutral carbon tax swap should be phased in. A proposal like this wouldn’t force individuals to choose one energy source over another. It would simply “internalize the externalities” associated with the burning of fossil fuels and the emission of greenhouse gases, and the market would sort the rest out.
There is a crucial piece of the carbon tax swap puzzle that will separate many liberals from conservatives. The left will attempt to use the carbon tax as a cash cow for the federal government, using the revenues to pay for legislators’ pet projects or to keep subsidies flowing to the preferred energy source du jour.
http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2013/07/10/a_sensible_gop_solution_to_climate_change_106589.html
Australian carbon tax to be repealed by incoming conservative government
Rod McGuirk
The Associated Press
Australia’s new government prepared to take control of the nation Sunday, with Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott vowing to immediately scrap a hated tax on carbon polluters and implement a controversial plan to stop asylum seekers from reaching the nation’s shores.
Abbott met with bureaucrats to go over his border security plans and said his first priority would be to repeal the deeply unpopular carbon tax on Australia’s biggest industrial polluters.
Australia became the first country in the world to repeal a measure to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions when the Senate voted to overturn the carbon tax, which Tony Abbott, the prime minister, promised to ditch when his party won an election last year. In a bad week for Australia’s image, it was also heavily criticised by the UN and Amnesty for returning a boat filled with Tamil asylum-seekers to Sri Lanka. See article
More than conviction, it was populism that drove Mr Abbott’s campaign to abolish the tax. As voters’ support for action on climate change wavered, he branded the tax a “wrecking ball across the economy”, raising the cost of business and destroying jobs. He forecast that industrial cities such as Whyalla in South Australia would be “wiped off the map”. These predictions have not come to pass. Indeed, there were signs that the tax was starting to work, by encouraging Australians to switch to cleaner forms of energy. The Climate Institute, a research outfit committed to green policies, says the proportion of Australia’s electricity sourced from brown and black coal has fallen by a tenth in the two years since the tax started, while that from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, has risen by more than a third—though from a very low base.
The carbon tax brought the federal government revenue of more than A$7 billion ($6.5 billion) last fiscal year. In its place, Mr Abbott proposes a “direct action” plan. Details are sketchy, but its main feature is a public fund worth about A$2.5 billion over four years to pay big polluters to cut emissions. The plan is a nod to greens, and suits business by shifting the cost to taxpayers. But it sits oddly with the Liberal Party’s free-market instincts, and there are doubts about whether it will achieve Australia’s (bipartisan) commitment to cut carbon emissions by 5% from 2000 levels by 2020. Mr Abbott, meanwhile, is resisting a bid by Barack Obama to include climate change on the agenda of the G20 leaders’ summit in Brisbane in November.
Preston Manning argues Conservatives should support carbon pricing
Back in 1997, Reform Party leader Preston Manning and Liberal Finance Minister Paul Martin faced off over the Kyoto Protocol in the House of Commons. Seventeen years later, carbon emissions are even more pressing of n issue…. for the environment and the economy.
But Preston Manning, now an elder statesman of the Canadian conservative movement, seems be sounding a different tune on carbon… and courting controversy with some fellow conservatives in the process.
Today, Preston Manning leads his own foundation and conservative think tank in Calgary — the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. Its annual networking conference is a must-attend event for many of this country’s opinion makers and decision makers.
He’s also a member of the new Canadian Ecofiscal Commission, a privately-funded group of economists and former politicians whose agenda includes putting a price on pollution.
Twenty years after Kyoto, Preston Manning has become Canadian conservatives’ most prominent green advocate
Manning’s basic argument is the negative aspects of any economic activity should be rolled into the cost of the development
“Federal Conservative leadership candidate Michael Chong was in the rhetorical hot seat Sunday, defending his proposal for a carbon tax from skeptical rivals vying to take the party into the 2019 election.
The opposing viewpoints prompted pointed jabs during the second of two debates held in the Lower Mainland over the weekend – a gathering of about 300 people in a downtown theatre organized by the Vancouver Centre electoral district association.
…
But Mr. Chong insisted the cheapest way to reduce emissions is a revenue-neutral carbon tax, and noted it would consist of a tax cut. Mr. Chong has proposed a levy that would reach $130 a tonne by 2030 and help finance an $18-billion tax cut.
https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/conservative-leadership-candidates-reject-michael-chongs-carbon-tax-proposal/article34088253/
The generation gap is apparent on such issues as climate change. Conservatives from western, energy-producing provinces, like Mr Scheer and Mr Harper, tend to oppose serious action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Mr Scheer promised in his victory speech to repeal the “job-killing carbon tax” that the Liberal government plans to impose on provinces that do not put a price on carbon by next year. Michael Chong, the one candidate for the leadership to support a carbon tax, was booed for his stance during a pre-election debate. Alex Kwong, a young Conservative delegate from Toronto, lamented that in rejecting such measures the party was distancing itself from millennial voters. Progressive Conservatives, one of the tendencies Mr Harper brought into his big-tent party, had made the environment “our issue”, he said. The Liberals “took it away from us”.
Wall’s staunch opposition to a national carbon tax drew him endless praise from conservatives across the country, but it is hardly the type of forward-thinking and innovative approach that will help propel the federal Conservatives back into power. The fact that MP Michael Chong – who offered a market-friendly, revenue-neutral approach to carbon taxation during his failed run for CPC leader – was often heckled during his leadership campaign by his fellow conservatives speaks a great deal to the uncreative and stubborn adherence to conservative orthodoxy that has come to define the intellectual framework of Canadian centre-right politics.
Conservatives rally around carbon tax opposition
After several years of standing down on the issue of the carbon tax, conservative parties and politicians are no longer willing to sit idly by and allow the Liberals to steer the agenda, writes Jaime Watt.
…
While some Conservatives briefly toyed with Michael Chong’s plan for a revenue neutral carbon tax, Andrew Scheer won the leadership race by promising to scrap carbon pricing. He rejects the premise that taxes can fight climate change and has ardently emphasized their impact on affordability. The recent political climate has only contributed to his resolve.
He has allies. With Trump’s election, the Liberal’s newly created Canadian Energy Regulator and the harsh impact of the oilsands downturn on our national productivity, carbon pricing is beginning to feel like too much too soon for many Canadians. And in an era where political conversations are increasingly framed around affordability, the added burden of taxes has become problematic.
This explains the recent shift in Ontario politics. Former Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario leader Patrick Brown shocked pundits and delegates alike when he announced his support for a revenue neutral carbon tax in March 2016. Many pundits saw this as a critical point in national discussions around carbon pricing.
But his swift removal as leader has provided a window for anti-carbon pricing advocates to rebound in Ontario. While there may have been no appetite for such a position in 2016, leadership candidates are now willing to fight against carbon taxation in spades.
CARLOS CURBELO, a Republican congressman from southern Florida, represents a district vulnerable to both climate change and a Democratic swing in the mid-term elections this November. Perhaps that is why, on July 23rd, he offered a bill that would tax carbon pollution. The measure is symbolic and doomed to fail. Just a few days earlier, Mr Curbelo’s fellow Republicans voted overwhelmingly for a resolution calling a carbon tax “detrimental to American families and businesses”. Just six Republicans voted against the proposal. But even that represents progress. When an identical measure was offered in 2016, not one was brave enough to do so.
“That huge partisan gap has grown since the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore turned green and made it a Democratic cause. “There’s a huge identity-based effect based on the cues Republicans have received from Fox News, conservative media and elected officials telling them that the science is uncertain,” says Matthew Nisbet, who studies political communication at Northeastern University.
…
Conservatives have long had difficulty talking about climate change because the debate is often framed in the “language of repentance, guilt and doing with less, which doesn’t work well in the conservative community”, Mr Inglis says. Carbon taxes are less preachy, especially if they are balanced by tax cuts.”
Certainly there are abundant grounds to doubt the political wisdom of the Liberal plan. A tax, or anything that resembles it, would be a hard enough sell on its own. But a tax in aid of a vast international plan to save the earth from a scourge that remains imperceptible to most voters, to which Canada has contributed little and against which Canada can have little impact, while countries whose actions would be decisive remain inert? Good luck
https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-dont-bet-on-carbon-tax-deciding-the-next-election/wcm/d5b77fcc-a43d-46ee-87b1-338e08284115
Are Conservatives jumping on an anti-Carbon Tax bandwagon for the wrong reasons?
Colin Chisholm (colin.chisholm@hantsjournal.ca)
…
But really, a carbon tax is the most conservative way to tackle climate change.
A carbon tax targets the big polluters, giving them incentives to find new ways to reduce their emissions in order to avoid a big bill. This leads to changes in attitude as well as finding new, innovative ways to reduce pollution.
And where that money goes is really up to the provinces. For example, in British Columbia under Christy Clarke’s government, which had a carbon tax well before the federal plan, those funds raised via the carbon tax led to tax decreases in other areas.
So, a government could establish a carbon tax, which, yes, would probably increase the price at the pumps a bit and increase costs for some other items, but they could then, using those new revenues, reduce taxes elsewhere, such as income, making the plan essentially revenue neutral.
Chris Selley: Preston Manning has answer to carbon problem, but clout with conservatives seems in decline | National Post
Why conservatives secretly love the carbon tax
…
The further irony is that the carbon tax started life as a conservative idea – developed by economists, designed to leverage the free market and leave decisions in the hands of individuals rather than central-planning bureaucrats. It first came to Canada a decade ago, under the right-leaning Liberal government of British Columbia. It was all kind of boring.
…
Which is why, for conservative governments and parties, making the carbon tax their No. 1 issue is their No. 1 misdirection strategy. It’s supercharged, high-octane political fuel.
Costs of Ontario climate plan would be double Liberal carbon tax, raise household costs: report
A growing pile of research argues economy-wide carbon taxes are cheaper to administer than regulations targeting specific sources of emissions
“Instead of talking about facts or science, however, Hayhoe says those conversations have to address shared values. And perhaps the most commonly shared value in Alberta is scorn for taxes of any kind. “We like to think of Alberta as this conservative place,” says Brown. “But Albertans aren’t so much conservative as they are tax averse. Beyond the fact that we don’t like paying taxes, we’re not fiscally conservative in any other way. We love our social programs, and we love when government spends money—we just don’t like paying the money.”
The NDP’s inability to design a communications strategy that took Alberta’s hatred for taxes into account revealed that the party didn’t entirely understand the narratives shaping the province’s mindset. Another narrative Notley’s climate plan underestimated, for example, was that much of the population still actively questions the science behind climate change and the role of human activity in it. According to a 2018 survey conducted for Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission, 46 percent of Albertans attribute climate change to “natural patterns in the Earth’s environment,” while 16 percent deny that the earth is even warming at all.
To recap: no one in Notley’s party seemed to appreciate the political perils of introducing a tax in Alberta that was justified on the basis of its ability to fight a problem many residents didn’t think existed. If you want your climate plan to have a fighting chance at success, in other words, you might want to consider who you’re trying to persuade”
https://thewalrus.ca/the-political-downside-of-saving-the-planet/
McKenna announces carbon tax on Alberta a week after province kills former tax
In 2020, a family of four in Alberta can claim $888 in carbon tax rebate on income taxes
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John Ivison: Report showing how high carbon tax must go to meet Paris targets gives Tories major ammo
Calculating anything so far into the future is a bit of a mug’s game, but for Andrew Scheer this is too good an opportunity to let slip
“A price on carbon pollution leaves the door wide open for the most innovative companies and the most creative ideas, and leaves freedom for consumers to make the choice that works best for them.”
Breaking it down: how carbon pricing addresses climate change
‘Unprincipled intrusion’: Alberta files legal arguments against federal carbon tax – National Post
By scrapping the carbon tax brought in by his predecessor, Mr Kenney has made it harder to claim that Albertans are environmental boy scouts. He has hitched Alberta to a national campaign against Mr Trudeau’s climate policy, waged in the name of “affordability”. Ontario’s government has told petrol stations to put stickers on their pumps reading, “The federal carbon tax will cost you.”
The government’s scheme was designed to resist such attacks. Provinces with their own carbon-pricing schemes can keep them. British Columbia, which began taxing emissions in 2008, and Quebec, which has a cap-and-trade system, have done so. The national scheme is only imposed on provinces that reject carbon pricing or whose schemes fall short of federal standards. It sets a price floor of C$20 a tonne this year, rising to C$50 by 2022. All the money goes back to the province where it is raised; 90% of that goes to taxpayers. In Ontario, a family of four will get back C$307 this year. “It’s a small-c conservative approach,” says Catherine McKenna, the environment minister.
The carbon-pricing scheme plus other measures, such as “the toughest methane regulations for oil and gas in the world”, will ensure that Canada meets its emission-reduction targets, Ms McKenna insists. Others say that will require more action. To achieve the target mainly through the carbon tax, the price would need to be C$125-175 by 2030, believes Chris Ragan of the Ecofiscal Commission, a think-tank. “When people say, ‘We can’t have a carbon price that high,’ I say, ‘Why can’t we have income taxes that low?’ ”
Canada Election: Scheer vows “carbon tax” will be “history” by January if Tories get majority
Scheer vows to never support carbon tax, blames Trudeau for national unity ‘crisis’
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Responding to the Liberal throne speech that opened the new session of Parliament on Thursday, the Conservative leader proposed an amendment that would, among other things, commit the government to scrapping the carbon tax and stopping what Scheer called “the attack on the western Canadian economy.”
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In a later speech deconstructing Scheer’s remarks point by point, Trudeau noted that the Conservative leader bemoaned the impact of the carbon tax on families without mentioning that they will receive compensation from the federal government that, on average, will actually put more money in their pockets.
“If one wanted to truly bring down the temperature and the anxiety in the West, pointing out that fact might actually help,” Trudeau said.
Important work cited here. The govt’s own study on CTax impact is available at https://open.alberta.ca/publications/9781460146224 It’s a well done report, though largely ignored by government. Results are politically inconvenient: CTax has negligible effect on economy while lowering GHG emissions. #ableg
https://twitter.com/trevortombe/status/1206585856057729024
“But, in fact, it is the Left that has been advancing the market-based approach—carbon pricing—while the Right insists on the most costly and intrusive command-and-control policies. To be sure, the Left usually proposes both, aiming to layer carbon pricing on top of existing subsidies and regulations. All the more reason for conservatives to make their own distinct case for carbon pricing as a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, current policies, and as a means to cut other taxes rather than finance more subsidies.
Carbon pricing is the biggest win for markets in decades. Conservatives should have taken the idea and run with it. They had the opportunity not merely to show that they care about the environment, but also to make space for market approaches more generally. If you like what the market can do for your air or water, conservatives might have said to the public, can we interest you in what it can do for your schools or health care?”
The Political Price of Climate Inaction
I THINK THAT THE CONSERVATIVES WERE SMART, THEY WOULD PROPOSE A CARBON TAX, AND I’M NOT SURE THAT’S THE SOLUTION, BUT I THINK THAT’S THE ANTE TO GET INTO THE GAME. IF YOU TOLD ME YOU’RE GOING TO TAKE AWAY THE HARMONIZED SALES TAX AND INSTEAD TAX ME BASED ON THE CARBON THAT I CONSUME, THAT WOULD PROVIDE AN INCENTIVE TO MY BEHAVIOUR TO LOOK FOR A LOW CARBON ALTERNATIVE, WITHOUT COSTING ME MORE MONEY.
It’s Time to Abandon Carbon Pricing
BY
JESSICA F. GREEN
Carbon pricing programs like cap and trade carry enormous political costs and few environmental benefits. We should abandon them — and instead pursue transformative climate policies that deliver immediate material gains to workers.
“Is carbon pricing a good idea? In theory, yes. We really should make bad things more expensive. Has it worked? Depends on the yardstick. In environmental terms, carbon pricing has produced marginal climate benefits in the form of gradual emissions reductions.
But politically, it’s done more harm than good. Carbon pricing has contributed to the extreme polarization of the climate issue. It’s stoked class divisions, reinforcing the myth that climate policy necessarily penalizes the poor and working class, and sparking revolts like the Yellow Vests in France. That myth, in turn, has slowed progress on decarbonization — all while convincing politicians and the public that we’re making real headway on climate change. (We’re not.)”
The winning Republican climate answer is the third option: carbon pricing. Just as a market-based solution is the Republican policy of choice on most issues, so should it be on climate change. A well-designed carbon fee checks every box of conservative policy orthodoxy. Not surprisingly, this is the favored option of corporate America and economists — including all former Republican chairs of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.
On Thursday, the two of us released a report titled “The Pricing Advantage” that outlines the top 12 reasons carbon pricing outperforms regulations and subsidies on all counts and should become the cornerstone of U.S. climate policy. Chief among these are that carbon pricing offers the most cost-effective and fiscally conservative solution and would unlock all facets of clean-energy innovation.
The Pricing Advantage: The 12 Reasons a National Carbon Fee is the Most Cost-Effective, Environmentally-Ambitious & Politically-Viable Climate Solution
JANUARY 2020
FME’s key proposal for addressing climate change was the creation of tradable emissions permits, a model that had been successfully deployed in the case of sulfur dioxide emissions. According to this view, a market in permits would supply incentives to find the most cost-effective path toward reducing emissions, as long as there were appropriate limits on the volume of permits.
Most environmental activists greeted the idea of “rights to pollute” with suspicion: they argued for more direct controls, as part of a broader shift away from mass consumerism. But many were won over by the prospect of forming an effective coalition to press for decarbonization. By the time of the Kyoto conference in 1997, support for carbon prices as the most cost-effective long-term solution, to be implemented through internationally tradable permits, had become the dominant view. Twenty years later, this vision is finally being realized in the European Union, where high permit prices are driving coal-fired power out of existence.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/libertarianism-climate-change-environment-private-property
Both parties used to love the carbon tax. So why are they giving up on it? – Grist
https://grist.org/politics/who-killed-the-carbon-tax-republicans-or-democrats/
The Supreme Court gives Conservatives a chance to move past the carbon tax | CBC News
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carbon-tax-pricing-climate-supreme-court-otoole-kenney-1.5964328
‘This absolutely is not a carbon tax,’ Conservative MP says of party’s new price on carbon
Conservative MP Tim Uppal says his party’s proposed carbon pricing scheme is not, in fact, a carbon tax.
Conservative Party Leader Erin O’Toole unveiled his party’s climate plan on Thursday, and it included a proposed price on carbon for consumers — something the Conservatives had vehemently opposed before now.
Unlike the Liberal carbon tax with rebates, the Conservative plan would charge a levy on fuel and use the money to fund “low-carbon savings accounts” that Canadians can use for environmentally friendly purchases.
Uppal told As It Happens host Carol Off last month that a carbon tax is “not the solution” for climate change.
Conservatives announce plan to replace Liberal carbon tax with a lower levy of their own
Proposal would see levy from fuel purchases go into personal savings accounts
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Under O’Toole’s plan — which CBC News obtained a copy of Wednesday — Canadians would pay a carbon levy, initially amounting to $20 per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions, every time they buy hydrocarbon-based fuels, such as gasoline.
But instead of channeling that money into direct rebates to Canadian households, as is the case currently, the Conservatives would divert it to “personal low carbon savings accounts.”
Consumers could then draw on those accounts for “things that help them live a greener life,” the document says. “That could mean buying a transit pass or a bicycle, or saving up and putting the money towards a new efficient furnace, energy efficient windows or even an electric vehicle.”
But just as the major parties in the U.K. were converging on climate policy, Canada’s parties were polarizing. When Stephen Harper’s Conservative government chose to loudly attack the Liberal Party’s call for a carbon tax in 2008, it created a schism that has defined the climate debate in Canada for most of the past 13 years.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/climate-change-u-k-emissions-canada-1.6009671
But the Conservative Party’s 2021 platform still marked the first time the party delivered a credible plan to achieve any of Canada’s international targets. It was also the first time in a decade that the Conservative Party acknowledged that putting a price on carbon is smart policy.
“We recognize that the most efficient way to reduce our emissions is to use pricing mechanisms,” the Conservative platform stated.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/erin-otoole-climate-change-2021-election-1.6192648
Conservatives can’t kick their addiction to opposing carbon taxes | Canada’s National Observer: News & Analysis
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/10/14/opinion/conservatives-cant-kick-their-addiction-opposing-carbon-taxes
Is there a conservative case against the carbon tax? Not really
https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/opinion-is-there-a-conservative-case-against-the-carbon-tax-not-really
Conservatives launch radio ad campaign, taking on Trudeau over carbon tax
https://globalnews.ca/news/9462526/conservatives-launch-radio-ad-campaign-carbon-tax/
Catherine McKenna: Carbon pricing is a conservative policy that works
https://www.cheknews.ca/catherine-mckenna-carbon-pricing-is-a-conservative-policy-that-works-1177240/