cap and trade – Page 3 – mackaycartoons

Wednesday April 15, 2015

April 14, 2015 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday April 15, 2015

Like a carbon tax, but much worse

If you want to put a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, there’s an easy way to do it. You implement a carbon tax, like British Columbia did, and add it to the price of gasoline and other fossil fuels. The higher the emissions, the more tax people pay. Anyone can understand how it works.

Then there’s a second way, which is much more complicated and expensive. It requires a big bureaucracy to administer and is highly vulnerable to special interests. Lots can go wrong. In Europe, where they’ve been trying to get it right for a decade, it’s been an abject failure. This system is called cap and trade, and nobody but the experts can understand how it works.

Kathleen Wynne’s Ontario has chosen the second way. The fact that cap-and-trade schemes are incredibly opaque is considered a feature, not a bug. The government can swear it’s not a tax, even though the taxpayers will wind up paying for it anyway as industry passes on the extra cost.

Cap-and-trade schemes are supposed to encourage companies to find cleaner forms of energy. A cap is set on the amount of pollution each industry is allowed to emit. Individual businesses are then granted (or sold) permits to pollute. They can then buy or sell these permits on the open market. If they want to emit more pollution, they have to buy more permits, and vice versa. Finance people love carbon markets because there’s good money in it for them. (Source: Margaret Wente, Globe & Mail)

Tuesday April 14, 2015

April 13, 2015 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday April 14, 2015

Premier Kathleen Wynne says it’s time to fight global warming by putting a price on carbon

Cap-and-trade is nothing more than a tax grab, critics say.

But Premier Kathleen Wynne says to do nothing to fight global warming will cost the economy far more.

“Cap-and-trade is a carbon tax by any other name,” Interim Progressive Conservative Leader Jim Wilson shot at the government to kick off question period.

“When businesses pay more, consumers pay more … it’s a tax on everything,” Wilson said.

Wynne said earlier at a news conference Monday that Ontarians are already paying for the effects of climate change in higher insurance premiums, among other things.

“Climate change is not a distant threat … we are talking about something is upon us … it is already imposing costs on the people of Ontario,” she said. “The sooner we get carbon pricing in place the better.”

The government estimates the 2013 ice storm cost $200 million in insurance payouts, while severe floods in the Greater Toronto Area resulted in nearly $1 billion in damages.

A cap-and-trade system discourages carbon emissions through a complex system of credits. While details were scarce, Wynne did acknowledge that motorists can expect to pay 2.5 to three cents a litre more at the pumps under the proposed plan.

But other than that, the program revealed little on exactly will pay and how consumers can expect to be impacted.

“It would be irresponsible of us to speculate on exactly what the costs are going to be when we haven’t worked to design the mechanism yet,” Wynne said, adding that critics can call it a tax if they want “even though it is misleading.” (Source: Toronto Star)

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