Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said the Carney government is not serious about climate change. May, who supported Carney’s budget in December, has since questioned the prime minister’s word after accusing him of a climate policy flip-flop.
“If we’re serious about emissions reduction, then we have to actually revisit some of the measures that have been eliminated since (Carney) took over,” May told The Canadian Press.
“They’re miles from hitting any of the Paris Agreement targets, and the prime minister did recommit to me on the floor of the House on Nov. 17 that this government is committed to the Paris Agreement and achieving its targets. So the emissions reduction update, the so-called climate competitiveness strategy — there’s lots of highfalutin titles for what boils down to…(no) climate plan.”"
Who could’ve known that abolishing the carbon tax, supporting the auto industry, cancelling the electric vehicle mandate, and subsidizing the oil industry would not lead to success in meeting those targets? It’s not as if we’ve all had thirty years to find out that getting to “net zero” is a difficult challenge that would require actual leadership in the right direction.
The carbon tax was never going to work. Making ordinary Canadians pay a tax to subsidize big oilsands producers was an own-goal of epic proportions by the Trudeau government. It didn’t matter at all that lower income families got a refund of that money later on. It’s a failure to understand basic human psychology: people will always prefer money NOW over a bit more money later, see Hyperbolic discounting.
That a carbon tax would work is pretty clear according to both conventional economics and common sense. It needed to be much higher to be effective enough to clearly demonstrate that. Persuading people to accept that is the kind of “leadership” I had in mind.
The largest Canadian cities use housing instead of raw energy exports, neither are wise. Canada has too much bureaucracy, high taxes, and too large a problem with oligopoly and NIMBY to be competitive with refining raw material.
Seriously. Can we stop fucking subsidizing oil? Solar is cheap now. The free market would handle the transition if we were weren’t giving them tax dollars.
Oil is an export that improves our current account balance and gives our dollar value, we only import solar for consumption, and we use the dollar value we get from our oil exports to do so. Oil is one of the most productive sectors of Canada with the highest productive hours per worker.
Free market? Sounds like communism to me.
Not only is solar dirt cheap and getting better (thanks China!) but battery technology is improving so drastically that any surplus energy we have can be easily stored for those (sometimes literal) rainy days. Wasn’t there a town in China that produced such a glut of electricity that they were exporting it to neighboring communities for free?
The problem is the massive opposition to all this by oil and automakers, and as time passed the Libertarians and worldwide conservatives all joined forced against the ‘bleeding heart liberal/Politically Correct/Woke’ forces to basically make it a point of their identity that they are as opposed to the environment and anything to help humanity. It is how we get people like RFK Jr. who makes a point of patronizing a burger joint that fries their stuff in beef tallow and uses disposable plastic straws (those straws have their uses for some people, but most people don’t really need them. I almost never use straws myself).