Climate was barely mentioned by anyone on the campaign trail, and despite being not-Conservative, the Liberal Party has long been a friend of the fossil fuel industry. Carney provided no indication that his leadership would be any different. If you want action on climate, you can’t keep electing Liberals and Conservatives.
What would one do to fight climate change. I’m assuming the first step would be taking over zoning laws federally to rezone for density, then investing hundreds of billions into mass transit instead of social programs.
Then it would be cutting off Chinese imports, obviously dramatically raising interest rates due to inflation, potentially toppling our housing bubble.
Then ending immigration from low emitting countries, causing a dramatic fall in GDP, and an immediate recession. Does this sound right?
I get it. You’re convinced that global warming isn’t a serious threat, or maybe you’ve just decided that it can’t be because you’re not willing to consider alternatives to how you live. That’s why it’s easy to invent a bunch of nonsense policy and pin it on a stranger. It makes it easy to pretend that you’re the reasonable one in the room. I understand it, but it’s still an idiotic position to take.
Here is some basic policy that Canada can and should adopt to combat climate change at the federal level. Some of it may well hurt the economy, but compared to the catastrophic damage the climate is already doing, it’s nothing.
- Limiting the damage
- Ban all expansion of oil and gas extraction. When your bathtub is overflowing, the first thing you do is turn off the tap.
- Fine oil & gas firms for every abandoned well, then sue them for covering up the truth about global warming for decades and then for running disinformation campaigns about CO₂ after the truth came out.
- Energy
- Invest in solar, wind, and hydro because it’s cheap and fast to deploy. Much of this will have to come from China initially, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be trying to build this industry locally as well. Megaprojects should be championed as a national effort, and showcased to the world as Canada doing what needs to be done.
- Leverage our many water systems to serve as flow batteries.
- Offer subsidies for the insulation of homes and the conversion to heat pumps. Combine this with mandates for landlords that the homes they rent out are up to high efficiency standards.
- Transport
- Ban short-haul flights, especially those between Toronto/Ottawa/Montréal, Victoria/Vancouver/Kelowna, and Calgary/Edmonton.
- Charge more per-person per additional flight every year, so that your second flight from Vancouver to Toronto in the same year costs 20% more, your third flight, %40 more, etc.
- End all federal funding for highway expansion, redirect it into grants for transit and active transport like cycling.
- Require a commercial license for any vehicle larger than a 4-door sedan or weighing more than 1 tonne, and apply a nation wide speed limit of 30kph off the highway.
- Limit all non-highways to no more than 2 car lanes. Give that extra space up to slower traffic like pedestrians, bikes, hell even golf carts.
- Offer financing for e-bikes and cargo bikes or work with private banks to make this available.
- Invest in intercity rail, ideally along those same short-haul flight corridors.
- Limit the size of vehicles permitted on all roads and lay out a plan to reduce that size over time.
- Construction
- Apply a 400% tax on any new big-box store development. They’re terrible for the economy anyway, but they’re also a terrible waste of resources.
- Stem the expansion of suburban sprawl with the above traffic regulations and tax benefits for urban density.
- Form a national housing agency for the federal government to start building homes again. The target for this agency should be densification, clustering around the transit initiatives mentioned above.
- Support the production and use of concrete alternatives like hempcrete where possible.
- Food
- Tax beef to gradually higher amounts, and subsidise alternatives – even other meats. Chicken for example is leaps-and-bounds better for the climate than cow.
- Support beef producers by helping them financially to transition to alternatives in exchange for agreeing to reduce their herd sizes every year.
- Foreign Policy
- Build an alliance of other nations to operate as a trading bloc for countries living up to their climate agreements. Membership in the bloc awards reduced trading friction, while non-members are hit with tariffs.
I don’t know where you got your three bananas ideas, but the above is a pretty good start for actual action on climate. Every one of these will improve quality of life, while the alternative is watching one city like Jasper go up in flames every year until it’s two cities, or three. Major cities like Kamloops, or even Vancouver are definitely already at serious risk even now. What do you think the economic cost would be if we lost them too?
Well I’m not denying climate change I just dont think its a smooth process, peoples ability to waste energy is their standard of living, and you’ll be voted out the second you limit their consumption and crash the economy.
It would drastically raise interest rates, since oil and gas make up a significant portion of our current account balance, and the housing bubble cant survive higher rates I dont believe; which you’ll also raise interest rates dramatically borrowing money to invest in renewables and meat production. We have an over 90% debt to GDP federally and provincially, which is a large weight on growth according to studies, if we cut off our exports what does that do to our debt load and productivity?
I like many of your ideas, but its economic suicide. I’ve not heard of this flow battery idea built into nature it sounds pretty neat, why are these not used in any other countries, can you really just pump water into a natural reservoir?
- Limiting the damage
Good thing that climate action is a part of the Prime Ministers plan for Canada Eh?
I’m so glad Canada elected someone who is well versed in both climate change and economics, he might actually be able to build a more climate friendly economy in Canada.
Our other option wants to deny climate change as an issue and reject just about anything that hurts profits for the benefit of the climate, fresh water, ecosystems, or animals.
During the debates, all three parties were falling over each other to profess support for more oil pipelines. I don’t think your faith here is well placed.
We aren’t going to get off of oil tomorrow and alberta is throwing a temper tantrum about leaving Canada. We need time to invest in green energy, public transit, denser housing, and electric vehicles extensively before we can significantly cut our oil demand. Even getting off oil as a fuel source, we will still depend on it for plastics and lubricants until we can develop new solutions there.
I hope if carney is going forward with a pipeline it will at least need extensive environmental assessments and monitoring.
Carney praises carbon pricing in his book Values, but had to strategically cancel it as he saw consumer carbon pricing dividing more canadians (still in effect for industry, where the tax can spur the most impactful changes). Its easier to get people to change by building an economy that less carbon dependent than it is to tax consumers into making the right choice. For example, building quality, reliable high speed rail would get people to switch their prefered transportation method just for their personal convenience, with a side effect of being more energy effecient and less carbon intensive than driving.
Carney also praises green energy as part of a sustainable future. All of this gives me more hope than if Pierre was PM, whom has pretty much rejected anything concerning the environment in his political career
So much to cover with this.
We need time to invest in green energy, public transit, denser housing…
The argument that “we need time” to wean ourselves off of oil is dead. It just is. I know this because I’ve been hearing it for forty years and absolutely nothing has changed in that time. Well that’s not true, it’s gotten worse. We burn more oil and gas, our transport infrastructure is dedicated to private vehicles and crumbling, and the world is literally on fire. “We’re not ready yet” was being passed around in the 70s during the oil crisis ffs, and somehow it’s all the excuse we need to do nothing. The very same arguments were used then as you’re using now and they’re a big part of the reason that we’re still not ready.
You cannot extricate an economy from fossil fuels by building new pipelines. It sounds obvious, but apparently I have to say it anyway. More market liquidity, lower fossil fuel prices, and increased trade in (and dependence on) fossil fuels do precisely the opposite. Instead of backing away from fossil fuels 40 years ago, Canada has committed itself again and again to a “burn the world now, fix it never” strategy for my entire lifetime.
So just stop with this “we’re not ready” excuse when what you really mean is “I don’t want to”. It’s a terrible position to take, but at least it’s an honest one.
I hope if carney is going forward with a pipeline it will at least need extensive environmental assessments and monitoring.
Just what kinds of assessments and monitoring were you hoping for? Oil and gas come out of the ground, we put it into pipelines, ships, and trucks and eventually set it on fire, pushing up the temperature of the planet. The more we burn, the worse it gets. That’s objective. It doesn’t need an environmental assessment, there’s nothing new to monitor. We know what happens when we do it, so asking for it is performative at best.
Its easier to get people to change by building an economy that less carbon dependent than it is to tax consumers into making the right choice.
This is true, though it ignores the fact that the reason carbon taxes are so praised is that they work as both a carrot and stick: they make burning fossil fuels more expensive, while funding the infrastructural changes to give people alternatives. The Liberals brought in a carbon tax alright, but true to form treated it as more of a performance, dumping those public funds into fossil projects, and doing absolutely nothing to provide alternatives in more than a decade. Essentially, they taxed Canadians so that we could extract and burn more fossil fuels.
Personally, I’m not happy that Carney cancelled the consumer carbon tax, but I can appreciate the pragmatic reasons for it. My problem is that my experience with Liberals and neo-liberal bankers is that I fully expect them both to lack a grasp of basic physics when it comes to the environment and pretend that the biosphere can be someone else’s problem, and his performance in the debates wherein he wouldn’t stop talking about how much he loved pipelines was completely unsurprising.
Carney is a neo-liberal banker in his 60s. My daughter is 6. He’ll be long dead while she’s trying to stay alive on a burning world.
All of this gives me more hope than if Pierre was PM
…and this is why we can’t have nice things. So long as people pretend that there are only two parties: “Burn the world”, and “Burn the world slowly”, we’re basically fucked.
