“Our House is on Fire,” and Carbon Taxes Are Not Enough to Save Us
In 2008, British Columbia implemented North America's first broad-based carbon tax. Between 2007 and 2016, provincial real GDP grew by 19%, while net emissions were reduced by 3.7%. Although GDP growth over nine years is impressive, the meagre 3.7% reduction in emissions over such an extensive period is, to say the least, dismal. Add another year, the results look even worse: in 2007, BC emitted 64.76 tons of Greenhouse Gas emissions; in 2017, 64.46 tons - a mere .30 ton drop in emissions or 0.46%, less than one-half a percent, over ten years. And these recent figures do not take into account all the carbon emitting forest fires in BC over these years - a situation, one could easily surmise, that would add significantly to the total amount of emissions recorded over this ten year period.
Nonetheless BC’s initiative continues to be frequently looked to as a model strategy for carbon emissions reduction. But, in our current context of a climate emergency, it is not really, I would argue, an effective enough method for reducing emissions as aggressively as we must in order to have a truly habitable world. It is instead a good example of market based economics that has been successfully sold politically, especially by neoliberal economists, and that is why it continues to be pushed in at least 50 jurisdictions around the globe as a relatively comfortable method for dealing with emissions by those in particular who have a stake in the business-as-usual game that serves their economic interests.
It is this sort of strategy, that is, putting a price on carbon, that our current federal government has adopted as its main strategy in its Greenhouse Gas Pollution Act of 2018 and, with variations, some of the major federal parties advocate - specifically a fee-rebate structure - but it, like the BC initiative, is also woefully ineffective. We don’t have a recent report, but as of 2017 emissions in Canada (716 million tons of carbon dioxide) have been reduced by a mere 2% since 2005 levels, we are 79 mega-tonnes short of the Paris Agreement targets, and emissions in 2018 have risen 7% since 1997, the year we signed the Kyoto Agreement. It’s doubtful they dropped significantly in 2019.
The fee/tax is supposed to provide an incentive to change one’s carbon behaviour. What works against such an incentive, however, is a politically motivated tax credit payable to just about everyone to use as they wish - except the big industrial polluters who have a different market based scheme based on industry sector thresholds that is also inadequate. Such compensation, in effect, undermines any real incentive to change one’s carbon behaviour. Unless one is a committed environmentalist, why should one change one's carbon behaviour when there’s little or no pain? And in what way are such fees an incentive, say, to drive less when one has no other choice but to do so, as many do, for example, in rural Canada, where there is no public transportation to speak of, or to opt for a green vehicle or home energy source when one cannot afford the capital outlay even with government subsidies, now only available from the federal government in Ontario? Not to mention that, despite the tax credit, any fee or tax on fossil fuels disproportionately wounds those with lower incomes who cannot afford to absorb increases even with a dividend.
Even if the fee were higher, as some have suggested it should be for the process to work effectively, is anyone who isn't in the 10% going to stop driving a fossil fuel car? Is any medium size business suddenly going to switch its energy sources and green its infrastructure without significant subsidization? We're all deeply locked into fossil fuel capital investments and inscribed in the global infrastructure of fossil fuels - our houses, our cars, our businesses - and because we've naturalized that situation so deeply, we won't abandon them completely until we absolutely have to do so in order to survive.
That day may be coming: a report synthesizing all the recent research by the Science Advisory Group of the UN Climate Action Summit to coincide with the UN Summit on climate change reveals that 2014-2019 is on track to be the hottest six year period on record and that emissions reductions should really be three times what the Paris Accord recommends. Issued just two days later, the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report co-written by 100 scientists synthesizing 700 recent scientific studies indicating that conditions are even worse than they anticipated in their 2018 report underscores once again the monumental crisis we're facing without aggressive action.
Yet carbon tax strategies remain attractive to governments and political parties, and it would seem many climate conscious environmental organizations also think they are a good strategy. Why? Because they are more politically palatable and would seem to balance some effort against climate change with a business-as-usual economy. But it is, alas, no longer business-as-usual: there are no jobs on an uninhabitable planet.
There is of course considerable resistance, propagandistic and otherwise, from the vested interests of fossil fuel production corporations, their financial backers, and their friends in media and government to any efforts to wean us off fossil fuels and to shift us exclusively towards sustainable green energy sources. Ask yourself who benefits from political inertia? Who benefits from climate inaction? We have a considerable number of those especially in the Western world who indulge in classic whataboutism too: what about China? What about the recalcitrance of Brazil, Turkey, and Russia? What about all the developing countries still burning coal?
And there is also what has now become a desperate resistance from climate change deniers who, when they behave with a degree of civility on social media and elsewhere, masquerade as philosophical skeptics with a veneer of reason and dance around the massive amount of globally coordinated scientific evidence on the existential reality of global warming and climate change. (Check out the hashtag #climatebrawl.) Their goal is essentially to keep the issue in doubt and a contested state. Recent cooperative research from the University of Montreal and the University of California at Santa Barbara, however, reveals that the majority of people in every single federal riding in Canada with the exception of three accept the fact of climate change and suggest that some sort of action should be taken. Indeed, with the exception of the three all say their province has experienced climate change.
No wonder they say that. The planet’s average surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth highest since 1880, when record keeping began. Nine of the ten warmest years in recorded history have occurred since 2005 - soon to be ten of the eleven warmest. This past June, the month ER visits in Ontario uncharacteristically but perhaps not coincidentally spiked, was the hottest June ever recorded, while July was the hottest month in human history, the four-hundred and fifteenth straight month of temperatures higher than the twentieth-century average. We also learned recently that September 2019 was the hottest September in recorded history. But, worse news of all, we have increased C02 emissions globally by 20% since 2015, in mere 3 and 3/4 years. 20%!!
The simple fact is that Canada is the ninth biggest emitter in the world, that Canada has the highest per capita carbon footprint of any country in the G20 (16 tonnes), that we are the tenth biggest emitter in the world if emissions are counted from 1900, that Canada’s North is warming at three times the global average, and that Canada in general is warming at twice the global rate, among the major effects the devastation in the North about which we learned this spring and summer - melting ice and refreezing ice slabs, eroding permafrost, raging fires, warming oceans - and several sustained dome-like heat waves in the South.
And the effects of carbon emissions will be with us forever: the temperature we experience at the Earth’s surface will not decrease if/when we actually manage to stop carbon emissions. It will remain at whatever level it is at the precise moment when we fully stop emissions. That's why net zero* strategies are ineffective: they still allow for the continuous production of CO2 emissions, and seldom do the offsets actually balance that output. Recent research on the significant carbon debt incurred between old forests and new forests of four decades to 100 years are a good example of that failure. In other words, biomass/biofuels (whose carbon debts are misleadingly not budgeted accurately in national carbon ledgers) as well as reforestation are not quite the salvation we might think they are as raging forest fires spewing carbon around the world continue.**
Our carbon dioxide*** emissions are 415 parts per million and accelerating. We burn two-thirds more fossil fuels today than in 1990, and one-half of all fossil fuels burned in human history have been burned since 1990. Another way of saying that: emissions have gone up by 46% in the last 300 years, half that amount in the last 30 years! They will be with us for thousands of years. In other words, the longer we wait to get the process of aggressive decarbonization going, the hotter it will be and the more the economic fallout even if we finally do manage to stop emissions completely.
Much, much more than a carbon tax is required. We'll find out soon enough that only binding government legislated regulations with legal consequences will actually work to reduce emissions and mitigate their effects with the dramatic intensity we need. We will learn that we need to shift the focus to the larger perspective of systemic change - no easy task given that the entire global economy is driven by fossil fuels. Carbon taxes can play a supporting role,**** to be sure, but the sooner all our political parties stop flirting with a price on carbon and market based solutions in general as their main climate change policies, the sooner we can get on with the job that needs to be done right now.
That job is five-fold: 1) Recognize fully at every level of government the scale of the challenge and that we all have a moral responsibility to work against the undeniable harm being inflicted on our world. Global warming even now affects every single aspect of our lives. Its effects are economic, social, and psychological; and it is already emerging as the number one health issue in the world as conditions worsen. 2) Reduce carbon emissions radically now through legally binding regulations. 3) Aggressively mitigate through whatever methods available the effects of carbon emissions already present in the atmosphere. 4) As politically difficult as this might be, shut down through legislation the production of any and all fossil fuel infrastructure (no more pipelines no more new extraction, no more subsidies). And 5) develop adaptation and survival strategies in all our communities big and small. Why this last? Because we long ago reached the point of no return and there is no going back.
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*Net zero emissions or emissions neutrality means that the amount of emissions generated is no more than the amount taken out, a theoretical complete offset. But the new emissions generated in this process nevertheless remain in the atmosphere, thus extending the presence of those emissions in the atmosphere for decades to come. This is an inadequate form of mitigation in my judgment simply because we’re still burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon. What we need to get to is a state of carbon emissions negativity whereby our carbon footprint is less than neutral by reabsorbing the carbon emissions already in the atmosphere. That job is undermined with net zero strategies. As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels at our current rate, that will not happen and matters will only get worse.
**See Eddy Isaccs in his recent report from The School of Public Policy (https://tinyurl.com/y3vdfc5m): “This is because of the time lag between the instantaneous CO2 release from combustion of wood and the decades of regrowth required“ - 44 to 100 years.
***Why Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a Problem
Two conditions are always in play with respect to Earth’s atmosphere: the amount of sunlight (solar radiation) that reaches the Earth’s surface through the electromagnetic spectrum and the amount of greenhouse gasses in the air.
Greenhouse gas levels control the amount of heat (infrared radiation) absorbed into the atmosphere as it radiates up from the Earth.
Nitrogen and oxygen make up 99% of the atmosphere, but they really don’t have an effect on the Earth’s temperature because they do not absorb heat (infrared radiation). Carbon dioxide does indeed absorb heat, a process that prevents CO2 escaping from the atmosphere into space. Thus the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the hotter the Earth’s surface temperature. Fossil fuel emissions are the biggest source of C02 emissions, and C02 can last in the atmosphere for thousands of years.
****I agree with Eddy Isaccs in his recent report from The School of Public Policy (https://tinyurl.com/y3vdfc5m) that revenue from pricing carbon emissions should focus not on recycling that income for whatever reason, political or otherwise, but on investments in solar and wind infrastructure that can actually contribute directly to the reduction or mitigation of emissions.
