Included the cost of lost jobs and reduced oil production but not the impacts of climate change
To the Expositor:
The carbon tax and rebate system, or what I call “cash-back carbon pricing” puts more cash back in most people’s pockets than they spend on fossil fuels. That is clear from a recent report from the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO). The “fiscal monetary impact” will be more money in most people’s pockets right up to 2031. That’s looking at “money paid out and money returned” to taxpayers.
The PBO’s report then went further, including the economic costs of reduced production of oil and gas, jobs lost, and other factors, but leaving out jobs gained in renewable energy, improved health and other benefits of reducing emissions. They looked at the issue as “all costs, no benefits” to the Canadian economy.
Climate change is a new reality for economic research. It’s hard to put a number on the increasing costs of fires, droughts, floods, hurricanes and other extreme weather events. Then there are the costs of famine, migration and political instability. But it’s not impossible to estimate at least some of the costs. The Canadian Climate Institute produced a report last Fall which found that by 2025 climate change will cost the Canadian economy $25 billion per year.
The PBO was upfront about leaving out the benefits of carbon pricing, saying, “The report does not attempt to account for the economic and environmental costs of climate change.” But that omission was a big prize for Conservatives, who oppose both carbon pricing and most regulations. The National Post splashed the headline, “There is going to be a cost: Federal carbon pricing to generate ‘net loss’ for most households, PBO finds.”
Of course, the entire point of reducing carbon emissions is precisely to reduce economic, environmental and other costs of climate change. Scientists have been predicting the effects of greenhouse gas emissions since the 1980s, and they have been sounding the alarm ever more insistently as the years passed. Just like the tobacco industry muffled warnings about tobacco sixty years ago, the fossil fuel industries and their allies have muffled the alarm bells. The PBO report has helped them by telling only half the story.
Why price carbon emissions from fossil fuels? In general people use less of something when the price goes up, and carbon pricing is no exception: it is an effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2021, in another report, the PBO found that by 2030 Canada would achieve more than half its emissions reduction goals from carbon pricing alone. But they didn’t even attempt to quantify the benefits of lower emissions, and that has fed the false narrative that there are no benefits.
Sincerely,
Jan McQuay
Mindemoya
