The year 2023 was by far the warmest in human history. Climate extremes now routinely shock in their intensity, with a direct monetary cost that borders on the unfathomable. Over $3 trillion (US) in damages to infrastructure, property, agriculture, and human health have already slammed the world economy this century, owing to extreme weather. That number will likely pale in comparison to what is coming. The World Economic Forum, hardly a hotbed of environmental activists, now reports that global damage from climate change will probably cost some $1.7 trillion to $3.1 trillion (US) per year by 2050, with the lion’s share of the damage borne by the poorest countries in the world.
And yet we fiddle.
In today’s Canada, there is deception, national in scope, coming directly from the right‑wing opposition benches in Ottawa. In 2023, the populist Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre adopted “Axe the tax” as his new mantra and has shaped his federal election campaign around that hackneyed rhyme.
I truly hate what Conservatives have done to politics in this country.
Why is working towards a cleaner and better environment such a controversial issue? They’ve turned the political landscape into an outrage theatre on what pisses people off the most.
Cons prefer theatre over facts.
Cons prefer money over facts.
Conservatives in many countries have realized that since their political program serves the few at the expense of the many, it is inherently revolting to most people, so they can only win support by deceit and distraction.
This is super frustrating to me.
It’s a great solution to a real problem, it works with our market economy, it works for canadians, and now we’re seeing it’s reducing emissions. You can’t leave the free market to manage externalities, if you could they wouldn’t be externalities.
I’m doubly frustrated the NDP are now taking this line and saying it puts the onus on the little guy. We could improve dispersement schedules so the little guy is less impacted, but as the article states, the little guy is coming out a head on the backs of the big polluters.
ETA: I enjoyed this article, it felt like good quality journalism to me. The Walrus doesn’t write the style I prefer to read, but I do appreciate their reporting.
The hypocrisy is what gets me… Yeah, axe the tax… But let the forests keep burning, the rain keep flooding, the heat keep broiling people and droughts starving us…
It’s not rocket surgery… Make the thing that is bad for us more expensive, and use that money to make things that are good for us LESS expensive. I still don’t know why there isn’t a tax on gasoline and diesel and natural gas that doesn’t DIRECTLY fund public transit…
In Vancouver 18.5 cents per litre goes to transit.
I wish that happened in Winnipeg. Problem is our NDP gov’t is currently trying to clean up the deficit hell-hole the Cons left us with.
the environmental effects stop being externalities eventually.
Votes, the average person is an idiot
Wait, when did you guys get a carbon tax? And how?
The first federal carbon tax was enacted in 2018, but a few provinces had started (and sometimes ended) their own versions as early as 2007.
The wikipedia page is pretty thorough. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada
On December 11, 2008, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson said that a carbon tax is preferable to a cap-and-trade program which “inevitably introduces unnecessary cost and complexity”. A carbon tax is “a more direct, more transparent and more effective approach”. Tillerson added that he hoped that the revenues from a carbon tax would be used to lower other taxes so as to be revenue neutral.[13]
Wtf, how is this possible? If your carbon tax doesn’t convince your biggest polluters to divest from fossil fuels, you’re doing it wrong.
The whole point is that it is not revenue neutral
The biggest polluters just pass the cost onto their customers by raising prices.
That’s fine. It encourages everyone to stop carbon
The point of the carbon tax is to stop carbon.
No…it let’s the large companies continue to pollute while passing the penalty off to those who can’t afford to move the needle even slightly. This needed protections against this before the tax was levied but good fuckin luck getting legislation against Canada’s ogliarchs that actually effect their bottom line
But it doesnt work. Grocery stores raise their prices to cover the carbon tax on deliveries, and the consumers pay more. Its not like we can choose to buy only bananas that were delivered by an electric truck.
If it costs you $30 to buy a banana delivered by fossil fuels and $1 to buy a banana that was delivered by sail boat, which would you buy?
I have neither option option. All bananas are delivered to my landlocked town via the same truck.
Bananas are probably a bad example because they are so perishable. They have to be transported in a very controlled environment. Theres no way youre getting bananas from Guatamala to Canada via sailboat and still having them be saleable.
Uhh I dunno if there’s any salvaging that hypothetical, lol… But if bananas start costing $1 each, we’re in trouble.
That’s why you get a big fat rebate in your chequing account every 3 months. It’s meant to offset the rising costs of goods such that end consumers who don’t pollute a ton themselves are in fact not carrying the burden.
Fat? Not enough to offset the increased cost of … everything. As I said, the biggest polluters just increase their prices and the rest of us pay. There’s no incentive for the big dogs to improve, and the rest of us dont have alternatives.
And their customers (e.g. manufacturers, transportation providers) factor in both those price hikes and the carbon taxes that they themselves need to pay, and pass those costs on to their customers, and so forth until finally end consumers are paying for several rounds of carbon tax that’s priced into more expensive goods and services.
In many cases, there’s nowhere for market forces to displace the inefficiency, so things just get more expensive without changing supply chains much.
But think about the new shipping routes available once all the ice melts!
Why Axe It?
Because if people don’t want it, democracy could give us something worse than no carbon tax - politicians that would kill it and increase emissions.
The carbon tax may be “most efficient” from free-market economist point of view but that view itself disregards the political externalities which could upend the whole equation over the long term.
If the carbon tax is felt unfairly by the majority then a different scheme should be implemented that doesn’t feel this way. For example, if most people are getting what they paid in carbon tax and some even more, then instead of insisting on a broad market approach, exclude individuals from the scheme. Tax only firms, perhaps over certain size or over certain emissions. When it comes to individuals, perhaps invest public money in creating cheap alternatives for individuals. Like I don’t know, massively expand public transit. Build high speed rail. We can’t build a single fucking LRT line in Canada’s biggest city for 15 years now and the TTC has been running on a shoestring for at least that long. You’re trying to achieve these things with the carbon tax anyway (shifting behaviour to lower carbon options) but it matters how people feel about the means to the end. If they feel punished and especially if they feel punished with no alternative then they’ll give you Polinever and the whole scheme goes down the trash chute.
Speaking of majorities, given FPTP “a majority” here could be as little as 39% so a plurality is more accurate.
Also I’m not trying to absolve the reformacons from responsibility of their fuckery in all regards discussed in this thread. They’re objecitvely making all of these problems worse.
Because if people don’t want it,
Most people, once the details of how it really works are understood, are not against the carbon pricing system.
Part of the problem is that the public are being lied to by right wing voices, and hold false understandings of what is really happening.
Spoke with 2 co-workers the other day about the Carbon Tax Refund. Both said it was bullshit and neither were receiving anything.
I said bullshit, check your ‘My CRA’ and it’ll be there.
Turns out one guy owes $6K so his carbon tax refund is paying that off and the other’s wife is collecting it as only 1 person per household can receive it.
Both clueless but both were very vocal about something they don’t understand. We’re truly fucked as a species.
And this is why I went down this hypothetical. Perhaps doing transit subsidies and buildouts, heavy EV subsidies would be something most would see and understand. And I’m talking about heavy subsidies, not something I significant that’s not noticeable.
I completely understand, but don’t you see that the lack of self-evidence is an inherent weakness of the scheme which allows the cons to easily weaponize it? Unless we enact some form of censorship on what certain actors can say (factuality, etc), which I’m not opposed to, I don’t see how you fix that. Perhaps the current carbon scheme is not sustainable, even if it works economically. If replacing this policy with something more self-evident is the magic bullet to curb Polinever’s enthusiasm, I’d be 100% for it, because he’ll also get rid of it and do worse in other fronts. “Axe The Tax” is leading by 19% and 27% points at the moment. Clearly this shit resonates. I’d be curious to see what would happen if we took away the axe. Perhaps you believe the knowledge gap can be filled instead. I’m skeptical.
… the lack of self-evidence is an inherent weakness of the scheme which allows the cons to easily weaponize it
That is a weakness in Cons, not the carbon tax. Can you list 5 positive planks in the Con platform that promise universal benefits to all of us?
I can’t. And that’s because they don’t know how to do that, except by removing benefits from the regular folk so the rich can get richer.
That’s who they serve.
That’s hardly a reason to get rid of it or replace it. Clearly people are benefitting from it and it’s evident if you look at your tax return. If anything, the fact that people don’t know about the return is a failure in marketing. So sure, there are maybe some improvements to make.
But really, no matter what carbon scheme you put in place, the cons will find a way to complain about it. That’s not a failure of the carbon tax. That’s just how the conservatives operate.
Oh they’ll complain no doubt but I can much more easily sell to my average intelligent relatives that they’ll be able to get to work without a car or go visit the extended family in Montreal without driving or flying. The cons line will be “too much spending” which only works if there’s nothing to show for it. If most people are getting or expecting to get something (e.g. EVs for drivers, transit for the rest of us) that argument goes limp.
Clearly this shit resonates.
Simplistic slogans do tend to take less effort to understand that more complex and nuanced understanding of big issues.
