@nationalpost "Even his climate change plan was better than most give him credit for. The Liberals created a false political narrative that any climate agenda that didn’t involve carbon taxes was necessarily deficient."
@nationalpost Worth recalling that during #elxn43, Andrew Scheer's campaign vowed not only to scrap the federal carbon tax (the least big-government, least intrusive, least regulatory approach to CO2 mitigation, widely endorsed by free-market economists), the revenues of which were returned...
@nationalpost ... to the populations of the 4 provinces to which the CT applied, but also the 2022 federal clean fuel standard, and EV subsidies. So those were 3 policy tools, carbon-pricing, subsidies & regs, that Conservatives took off the table for addressing climate change. When asked,...
@nationalpost ...Scheer was unable to say what Canada's 2030 target for GHG emissions was & only belatedly even mentioned the words "climate change" in his communications. His attitude to the issue & his long-delayed, so-called "climate plan" deserved all the scorn they received & then some.
@nationalpost Here's a critique of Scheer's excuse for a "climate plan" that acknowledges that such a plan need not involve carbon pricing: thestar.com/opinion/star-c…
@nationalpost "Andrew Scheer is right when he says there are ways to fight climate change without imposing a carbon tax. Unfortunately, the Conservative leader hasn’t found them. (...)
@nationalpost His climate change plan, released with much fanfare this week, is a mishmash of ideas — some good, some irrelevant, most ineffective.
Missing from the plan is any concrete notion of how Canada under a Conservative government would meet its Paris greenhouse-gas emission targets.
Missing from the plan is any concrete notion of how Canada under a Conservative government would meet its Paris greenhouse-gas emission targets.
@nationalpost (...) Yet opposition to carbon taxes need not mean giving up on the fight against global warming. As Mark Jaccard, a respected climate-change economist at Simon Fraser University, has pointed out, there are other tools available. (...)
@nationalpost Writing in the Globe and Mail last year, Jaccard said that what he called flexible regulation would work just as well, if not better.
He argued that in British Columbia, regulations requiring BC Hydro to close generating plants fuelled by coal and natural gas have proved...
He argued that in British Columbia, regulations requiring BC Hydro to close generating plants fuelled by coal and natural gas have proved...
@nationalpost ...to be three times more effective than the province’s famed carbon tax.
Similarly, he wrote, California regulations on electricity generation and automobile fuel account for the bulk of carbon-emission reductions in that state. Its cap-and-trade carbon pricing system...
Similarly, he wrote, California regulations on electricity generation and automobile fuel account for the bulk of carbon-emission reductions in that state. Its cap-and-trade carbon pricing system...
@nationalpost ...accounts for only 15 per cent of reductions.
Had he wished, Scheer could have built on Jaccard’s critique to come up with a compelling alternative to the federal Liberal government’s carbon price strategy. Alas, he did not. (...)
Had he wished, Scheer could have built on Jaccard’s critique to come up with a compelling alternative to the federal Liberal government’s carbon price strategy. Alas, he did not. (...)
@nationalpost The closest he comes to using regulations in the fight against climate change is his plan to impose a cap on emissions from what he calls major emitters.
@nationalpost (...)But the only penalty for those that exceed the cap would be a requirement that they invest an unspecified amount of money in researching ways to improve their performance — which, presumably, they would do anyway. (...)
@nationalpost (...)These merely underline Scheer’s core problem. He had a chance to come up with a realistic climate-change plan that does not rely on carbon pricing. He squandered it." @MarkJaccard @seanspeer
@nationalpost @MarkJaccard Here is Jaccard's assessment: "unless the removed carbon price is replaced with regulations that require increased adoption of technologies like the zero-emission vehicle mandate of Quebec and B.C., such GHG-reducing actions would decline, and emissions would rise.”
