Carbon Tax vs Arson Subsidies in an economic battle royale over civilization’s survival.

In chapter one of every Introduction to Economics textbook on the planet, it explains the fundamental idea of a price signal. Prices affect consumer behaviour. If you own a movie theatre, you’ll fill more seats if tickets only cost five dollars than if you crank them up to $50. It’s not hard to understand.

This behaviour is why we have what are sometimes referred to as “sin taxes.” In Canada, where health care is publicly funded and universally delivered (because you get better care more cheaply that way every single time), the public cost of lung cancer treatment for smokers is significant. Sin taxes on cigarette sales raise the cost of the habit. Smoking rates resultingly go down. Discouraging smoking saves money and improves public health.

That’s the whole point.

Economists demand climate action, too.

95% of economists agree that we have to urgently cut emissions to maintain global economic stability. 60 central banks from around the world agree that climate change is a clear and present danger to our entire financial system. The International Monetary Fund agrees with them.

Nobel Prize winning economist Nicholas Stern calls it “the greatest market failure in history.” Economists at the World Bank estimate that the world is risking $158 trillion dollars in losses — that’s about twice the entire world’s total annual economic output— by 2050. The economic picture worsens by the day. It’s why the insurance industry — whose profit margins are directly dependant upon effective risk assessment — calls it “the mother of all risks.”

That’s without considering non-financial risks like the collapse of our food supply, a lot more wars and interpersonal violence, and what every organization of medical professionals calls the greatest health risk of this century. Just the economics should be enough to get us to take it seriously.

But we don’t. At least not yet.

So economists want us to use one of the most fundamental tools in their toolkit — a price signal — to avoid catastrophe.

Enter carbon pricing.

A carbon price, whether in the form of a carbon tax or a cap and trade model, discourages the activities that make climate change worse. If it costs more to roast the planet, fewer people will do it. If it costs more to drive, people will drive less.

We really, really need people to drive less.

Dozens of countries already have carbon prices. They’ve had them for years. So we have lots of good data to show what the economic impacts are. That evidence shows us conclusively that carbon taxes do effectively reduce emissions, and that they do not hurt the economy by creating inflation. This was proven so thoroughly that the proof won the Nobel Prize in Economics, the highest honour recognizing excellence in economic research in the entire world.

After years of research, eleven teams at Stanford university comprehensively stated that “We find robust evidence that even the most ambitious carbon tax is consistent with long-term positive economic growth, near baseline rates, not even counting the growth benefits of a less-disrupted climate or lower ambient air pollution.”

Canada’s carbon tax is far too small.

The design of Canada’s federal carbon tax is excellent, based on a fee-and-dividend model that gives rebates directly to citizens to offset its cost. The money the biggest polluters pay ends up in the pockets of those who are doing the right thing. The problem is that it’s too small to make enough of a difference.

On April 1st, Canada’s federal carbon tax rises to $50 per tonne (in Canadian currency, which is closer to $40 USD). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the largest collective scientific effort in all of human history — tells us that carbon prices need to average somewhere between $140 and $590 USD a ton, and be accompanied by other measures, to avoid the absolute worst.

$50 isn’t going to cut it. It makes you feel like you’re doing something, even though it isn’t doing remotely enough. Climate tokenism can be more dangerous than outright denial, because it encourages complacency.

But $50 is enough to feel, especially within the context of the highest inflation rate in decades. The carbon price is just now finally starting to bite at the gas pump.

That’s what it’s supposed to do.

It’s what it’s there for. That’s the entire point.

It may already be too late. Irreversible tipping points are already starting to topple like dominos. The arctic is 30ºC above normal and the antarctic 40ºC higher. Climate scientists are filling their underoos about it. This is crunch time. It’s now or never. If we’re really lucky, this decade will provide us one final chance to avoid complete global catastrophe. We will not get another.

Death is inevitable for all of us, but we don’t have to be paying top dollar to hasten its arrival. More than 150 years since science started warning us about greenhouse gases, we’re still throwing financial support behind climate arson like nobody’s business. Add together direct subsidies (“Here, have a million dollars”), indirect subsidies (“We’re not going to ask you for that million dollars you owe us”) and non-monetary gifts (“We’re spending another million tax dollars on that pipeline you wanted to get built”) and the world is hastening its own demise by a staggering eleven million dollars every single minute of every day.

Beside that, a couple of cents of carbon tax at the gas pump just can’t do the heavy lifting.

But people hate it. Virtually our entire generation has been conditioned since infancy to treat any mention of the word taxation as almost a war crime, and filling up a ninety thousand dollar pickup truck that gets less than ten miles a gallon as a god given right. Right wing politicos magnify anger about it online 24–7.

They call giving fossil fuel tens of billions in gifts “a war on oil and gas” when really it’s a war on the well being of our entire ecosystem.

Now the end game: undoing even the tiny good we’ve accomplished.

Climate is hunger. It’s disaster. It’s thirst. It’s war. It’s economic collapse. It’s violence. How are we responding?

Government after government is now creating special subsidies to make gasoline cheaper and encourage more fossil fuel consumption. Alberta is eliminating gasoline taxes to cater to SUV drivers. Ontario will almost certainly follow suit. Canada’s federal Conservative Party demands a new special tax exemption for gasoline purchases. The government of British Columbia is cutting checks for $110–165 for drivers to help them drive as much as possible. It doesn’t matter how badly climate chaos keeps hammering them, they’re determined to dig the hole they’re in even deeper.

Its not just in Canada, of course. California is giving every car owner $400 to subsidize their driving. $800 if you own two cars.

It’s an orgy of new fossil fuel subsidies.

Ecocide is apparently our economy’s apex value.

And let’s be perfectly clear: this is not a noble effort to help struggling citizens, no matter how loudly pundits declare it so. Grocery costs are sky high with nowhere to go but up, but they aren’t proposing to help struggling families put dinner on the table. Housing costs are at an all time high, but they aren’t trying to help citizens afford a decent place to live. This flurry of new measures are aimed only at burning more gasoline. Voters who don’t own cars might as well not exist. They get nothing.

Except a planet transformed into a brutal hothouse hellscape for millennia to come. We all get that whether we want it or not.

So I’ve had it with climate deniers deliberately missing the point.

The more fossil fuel we burn, the more screwed we are. You. Me. The whole planet. I want gasoline prices to go up. That’s what they’re supposed to do. It’s what the carbon tax is for. It’s supposed to change people’s behaviour.

Incentivizing more gas burning is the dumbest political decision we could make.

It’s little different from global Covid response. Covid kills and disables, damaging brains, hearts, lungs, kidneys, and more, increasing stroke and diabetes risks. Long Covid affects growing millions. What are we doing as cases of the most contagious variant yet climb? Blindfolding the health care system while racing to help it spread more widely.

At this point our politics basically boil down to a straight-up death wish. Because they’re not just missing the point. They’re missing the target. They’re moving as fast as possible in the opposite direction.

And once we roast the climate, nothing else we might want for our future is going to matter.

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