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| Green legislation from other parties is never quite as good as promised. |
It’s great when governments finally do the right thing, yet
frustrating when they try but screw it up. Over a decade of Green Party policy,
I’ve seen many Green ideas migrate into the platforms of other parties and even
enacted by governments, who rarely carry it through the way Greens would.
For example, the Ontario Liberal government started out with
the best way to increase the use of clean renewable energy like solar, wind and
biogas: a feed-in tariff. Basically, it guarantees that producers of clean
energy can sell their product at a reasonable markup, which gets individuals
and businesses the necessary start-up financing. It’s nothing unique to
renewables, of course; nuclear, gas, and other electric producers also get
guaranteed rates. By extending this mechanism to renewables, the playing field
is levelled.
Unfortunately, the McGuinty government screwed this up a few
ways. At the smallest level, they keep adding more and more restrictions on the
microFIT program: they limit the size of a solar installation to 10 kilowatts,
they won’t allow installation on a second property, whether it’s a business,
cottage, or rental house, and farmers with panels on poles or
frames, instead of existing farmhouses or barns, get lower prices. It’s like they can’t decide if
more solar production is a good thing to foster, or a bad thing to restrict! At
the mega-level, they gave initial preference to major corporate producers,
including a multi-billion dollar deal with Samsung. Only many years later did
they partially address this through preferential opportunities for local
community co-ops, which should have been the norm in the first place. The end
result of these blunders was to unfairly stain the whole idea of renewable
energy among the public.
Similar problems are recurring around carbon pricing. As most
environmentalists and just about every economist will tell you, the best way to
reduce climate destabilizing greenhouse gas emissions is putting a price on
carbon pollution, so reduction becomes part of every economic decision at the
business, institutional, or family level. Even Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown
now endorses that approach. Yet as he notes, but as our Premier Kathleen Wynne
seems to have missed, the best carbon price is revenue neutral, returning all
monies paid to pollute back to the economy through a tax shift or a dividend.
Although a carbon tax can be a “price on everything” (although not on many things
that are carbon neutral), it can also fund a “tax cut on everything” or a poverty-fighting
rebate to everyone.
British Columbia showed the way; their carbon tax shift
reduced pollution while economic growth continued without financial pain.
Ontario and the rest of Canada should follow suit. Instead, though, Ontario is
setting up a cap-and-trade carbon regime. Experience in other parts of the
world predict this system will be complex, expensive, and hand unearned profits
to the traditional polluters who got us into this mess in the first place,
because they get free or discounted credits to use or sell. And as far as we
can tell, the revenue will mainly be used to balance the budget, with some of it directed to emission-reducing projects like transit or efficiency.
By making the carbon price a burden on the economy, instead
of a boost to innovation and efficiency, the government besmirches climate
action like it did renewable energy. And with a federal Liberal government that
seems unwilling to provide any better direction (2008’s Green Tax Shift plan apparently
wholly forgotten), it looks like the best we can hope for on climate policy is
half-measures and unnecessary pain.
Published as my Root Issues column in the Barrie Examiner as "Pain associated with climate policy"
Erich Jacoby-Hawkins is
the vice president of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
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