Alberta's carbon tax is just an expensive PR campaign, if the big emitters don't clean up their act

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.