Politics, policy and climate change...and maybe the aftermath of the BC election

So that would be a "no" to providing an alternative verifiable data source?

And what's the economic rationale that transit ridership should increase at the same ratio of oil price increase? 

And wouldn't we expect residential heating to be even more inelastic than gas consumption?

And what's your personal need to add words like "niddling", "muddled", "pedantic" to other's arguments rather than just addressing their points?  Are you trying to over compensate for something?

the key is the overall policy framework.  which is why i thanked Blair Redlin for mentioning that the NDP's work in BC may have helped build the movement for keeping BCHydro public.  this is a key part of the key overall policy framework.

why?

1) the major stakeholders in fossil fuels industries and the NAFTA energy corridors, including prospective water and electricity infrastructure financiers, ARE THE SAME PEOPLE.  They all sit on eachother's boards and with the co-opted Campbell and Harper gov'ts in various 'free' trade and investment forums.  This has been documented by NGOs and unions of all stripes.

2) Where infrastructure is forced into a P3 framework- public private partnership- via Campbell/Harper policy and regs, the private sector gains control.  They gain control because of the current unregulated nature of the global financial system, and because of  privacy legislation covering intellectual property rights to data including financial data.  Scads of documentation on the difficulty of getting actual info on P3 arrangements.  Usually they mean a straight channeling of public taxpayer dollars to said private equity investors.  * Note: at this point, the showings of actual publicly traded corp stock is not the equivalent of the holdings of actual private players.  The latter is quite secret- we don't know who is invested in what, where offshore they're hiding their paper money, or how much of it, nor what they'll pick up when enough of everything has crashed to firesale levels.  Those decisions are simply not in our hands.  And that is a big problem for democracy and the environment.  WE NEED TO KEEP ENERGY PUBLIC and reclaim what has been privatized to date.

3) a carbon tax in the context noted at 1) and 2) will simply take some $ from one branch of the casino and give it to another branch of the casino, both of which are in the practice of exploiting more energy sources to send the product/s south of the border.

They will exploit more fossil fuels (note Campbell's support for pipelines and offshore exploration), more nukes and more water to send energy south.  consumers and residential taxpayers will be paying through many different mechanisms for this carboniferous and drought-producing giveaway.

4) Comparing with Europe is useless, as they simply rely on nukes and fossil fuels imported from Russia, at the expense of the environment in their countries of their suppliers.  I'm sick of people holding the EU up as some sort of model.  They mine Africa and Eastern Europe and other parts of the globe to prop up a few windmill showcase numbers. 

5) i'm physically tired because i've been doing a lot of digging and outdoor work in recent weeks, so this is coming across in a very slow way and i probably need a coffee.

6) a cap has to happen, a tax on pollution too, but primarily in a context of public energy and major public green infrastructure development in a combination of wind/sun/geothermal/conservation etc.  no one particular alternative is going to do it, because of the vagaries of climate.  ie) in some places you get more wind, some more sun, at different times of the year, etc.

7) we really don't need fossil fuels or nukes.  this has been gone over umpteen times in many sources.  we need clean energy interactive grids, but public grids, especially when global finance is still such a free-for-all-private-players.  otherwise we won't get what we pay for, who knows what we'll get, and whatever bubble we get will be crashed again in any case.

8) I don't know what Suzuki or other environmentalists think or don't think, except from the bits i read here, or have seen in the past.  there seems to be disagreement on babble threads as to what has been said and motivations.  i don't know.  all i know is that having done work on some environmental issues for a number of years, i have noticed a great reticence on the part of some environmentalists to speak out about necessary economic structural changes. 

Maybe it will take the crash of the 'Green' Energy 'Revolution' to mimic the crash of the 'Green' agriculture 'Revolution' (which was neither) for us to all get on the same economic page??

How many fossil fuel hydro generating plants do we use in BC Brian?

KenS wrote:

You and others like to referr to the success of the carbon tax in Scandanavia- where it didn't have to be that high before there was impact.

This points to the necessity to have carbon pricing in tandem with aggressive green initiatives.

Which is corraborated by the experience that we have that the kind of energy price increases that will come with a carbon tax cannot be expected to bring any more than minimal drops in comsumption compared to the pricing sledgehammer that is driving them.

And in North America whenever Liberals bring in carbon taxes, they bring it in with negligible green initiatives, and tax and fiscal regime that militates against spending intitiatives.

 The real question is how do we get a carbon pricing regime and the ramp-up to agggressive green initiatives that are its requisite complement.

And the relevant overall package of the Liberal carbon tax plans that are in place or have been offered, not only lack the green initiatives, they decisively cut off the political-fiscal capability of getting them.

I agree with your major point KenS - carbon taxes need to be combined with major green initiatives to drive behaviour change and low-carbon investment decisions by corporations and communities.  I hope you'd also agree with the inverse statement - the major green initiatives are not effective without robust carbon pricing.  The federal retrofit programs under the Libs and Conservatives, the "One-Tonne Challenge" Paul Martin disgrace with the Rick Mercer ads, the Harper tax credits for bus passes...those are all useless without carbon pricing.  They only benefit those who would have rode the bus or renovated their home anyway. 

While it's true that carbon taxes give certainty on price but not the emissions levels, and cap-and-trade is in theory the reverse, in practice, carbon taxes are simple and quick to implement (Gordo announced it in February 2008 and it was effective July 2008) and as we found out Tuesday night in BC, carbon taxes are politically viable.  Cap-and-trade is cumbersome to enforce, loaded with loopholes in practice (the current Waxman-Markey bill in the US Congress is already being weakened by giveaways to special interests and free allocations of credits, instead of the 100% auction required to establish an effective carbon pricing regime via cap-and-trade) and takes years and years to implement.  It's by no means certain that cap-and-trade will even pass the US Congress - being so complicated and unclear on price levels, it is easy for the opposition to demonize.  Carbon taxes are like the GST - everybody hates them and loves to bash them, but if a government has the courage to proceed, they have a lot of staying power.

Finally, where I disagree with KenS is that the most important green initiatives don't always require a lot of $$ - regulations on equipment and appliance energy efficiency, building codes, low-carbon fuel requirements, renewable energy mandates to utilities, local government land-use bylaws, landfill and agriculture practice standards, etc, are the key pieces.  A robust carbon price will make public transit economically attractive and increase ridership (as we saw in the last 12 months) and the increased farebox revenues will support higher service levels over time.  There are lots of federal and provincial tax breaks and incentives for energy efficiency renovations and a high carbon price will drive consumers to make those improvements much better than simpy increasing the incentives.

The 2008 BC Climate Action Plan includes modelling by Mark Jaccard and Associates (see Appendix I in the PDF file) which indicates that the BC government's policies (including carbon tax and cap-and-trade, it's important to remember that BC is doing both) will achieve 73% of the 33% GHG reduction target by 2020.  Some on babble will view Jaccard as a Liberal hack - in fact, he's a world-renowned academic expert on climate change.  The BC NDP appointed him head of the BCUC in the 90s and Glen Clark appointed him to do a study on high gas prices, so he's hardly an anti-NDP partisan.  In any event, I suggest you read the modelling work before slamming it.  The constant claims that "BC has no green initiatives because the carbon tax is revenue neutral" and "the carbon tax will do nothing to reduce GHG emissions" are simply nonsense, as the report at the link above indicates. 

Closing, long thread.