You and I can live the greenest of
lives possible, but even our best efforts won't reduce Canada's total
carbon footprint by much. Alberta's proposed carbon tax may help us
change our behaviours as consumers, but unless the province's big
emitters — the producers of bitumen from the oilsands — can
significantly change their processes, our efforts will basically be
for naught.
Oilsands bitumen production accounts
for more than a third of all of Canada's greenhouse gas production.
We might all volunteer to freeze in the dark, but unless that
technical problem gets solved, our new carbon tax will be little more
than an expensive PR campaign to gain social licence for more
pipelines to carry more bitumen, from yet higher volumes of oilsands
production.
How expensive a program? Alberta's
opposition Wildrose Party says the average family of four will pay
$1000 a year more, in higher prices for auto fuel, heating fuel and
electricity, plus the indirect costs of carbon taxes woven into
everything we buy.
People who have examined the Wildrose
estimates say their calculations, based on a 2014 study, don't take
into account rebates power producers will get under the plan, plus
other cost reductions.
If you like, make it closer to $105 a
year, which is the government estimate, provided your income is close
to or below the provincial median. Or you might even make money on
the rebates, if you are low income, don't drive and live in a very
small apartment that doesn't cost much to heat.
Or not. These things are speculative;
we really won't know the numbers until 2018, when we file our 2017
tax returns.
But we do know that prices on many
things will rise. That's the point of consumption taxes. Increased
costs make people consume less.
And we also know Alberta's total
greenhouse emissions will still rise, although the plan is for
emissions growth to slow, plateau and then begin to fall by 2030.
That's the magic year which is the deadline to meet emissions cuts we
promised as Canada's part of global efforts to curtail runaway
climate change.
But for most of us, it will be about
the money. In sum, money will be collected; about $6 billion over
five years. That money will not be used to reduce our income taxes,
as occurred in B.C.
Instead, it will be used to fund yet
another government agency, called Energy Efficiency Alberta. That
agency will supposedly invest in projects that reduce greenhouse
emissions.
Were this about the environment and not
about PR for pipelines, that ends up basically as a research subsidy
for oilsands producers to reduce their emssions.
That's not exactly a bad thing. We must acknowledge that a significant breakthrough in the oilsands-to-bitumen
process translates into a significant step toward Canada achieving
its promised emissions cuts.
But we know where the research and development money would be
coming from under that scenario, and who would benefit most. I'd just
rather the oilsands producers paid for that research themselves.
They will pay some. The government
plans to set a baseline rate for big emitters, above which polluters
will pay ($20 a tonne in 2017, just like for all the rest of us).
Producers who achieve emissions below the baseline will get a rebate,
thus lowering their costs and making their products more profitable.
Call me jaded, but I can't see even an
NDP government in Alberta setting a baseline that puts too serious a
crimp in bitumen producers' bottom lines.
Therefor, since no amount of
complaining is going to stop this plan, I aim to make the best of it.
Riding my bike will get even more
profitable than it is now. Excessive work will only result in higher
incomes and lower rebates, so that's out, too.
What I really want for my carbon taxes
is a nice, fat incentive to install those solar panels I've been
reading about. And please, premier Santa, there's an electric car I'd
like to charge up with my own solar power.
This can't all just be about money for
research into oilsands efficiencies and social licence for pipelines.
There needs to be social acceptance of the reasons for and the
processes of a carbon tax, too.
