Columnist has hidden the B.C. carbon tax scandal

 Columnist has hidden the B.C. carbon tax scandal (COMMENT, Whitehorse Star August 14, 2015

In British Columbia, the carbon tax generates incentives to greenhouse gas emission increases and cash handouts for gas fracking, local columnist Keith Halliday’s second pet project for two years running. He aligned with elite financial interests in his July 6 Yukon News column, promoting a Yukon carbon tax without fact-checking or journalistic balance.

The optical illusion of carbon pricing hides and expands the prohibitive carbon price economies and communities pay now.

It comes in the form of absurd subsidies for fossil resources to the tune of $ 5.3 trillion annually, according to 2015 International Monetary Fund figures.

Fossil resource oligarchies are known among every day people to continuously fix prices, break competition laws, environmental laws and human rights laws.

Halliday’s carbon tax talk attempts to greenwash anti-democratic monopolies into friendly neighbourhood market players.

This entrenches and expands emitter rights, siphons investment and focus away from renewables while working against rolling back Big Oil subsidies.

Carbon pricing measures, not by incremental fault but by the fossil industry’s spin doctors who designed them, incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases.

Halliday is eating it up, a language of uncompetitive old empire entitlements.

In its preface of the study, Carbon Trading —How it Works and Why it Fails, published by the widely respected Swedish Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, we read:

“At a time when carbon trading is still being promoted as the central solution to climate change, we continue that it is, instead, part of the problem.”

And, under the headline Taxation:

“As a means for altering behaviour, carbon taxes have many of the same problems as carbon (off-set) trading.”

Let’s test the carbon pricing in a real world example, say, for the driver of a Chevy Volt, an electric car that by way of an onboard gen set can generate its own electricity.

EVs drive at about 20 cents to the fuel dollar for a gas-powered car, and the Volt has both in one.

That makes fuelling up electricity about five times cheaper than gas or diesel, without a carbon tax.

But the Yukon lags behind without a single fast charge point. Halliday never once gave a chance to any such infrastructure basics of energy security, affordability and environmental responsibility.

What remains, then, is a carbon tax/trade nickel and diming scheme in the style of a Thatcher flat tax that could not be more cynical.

From the B.C Auditor General’s investigations, the carbon tax/trade scandal made its way through the whole spectrum of B.C. media.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives B.C. section Policy Note reported in January 2015 under the title: The case against a revenue-neutral carbon tax:

“Revenue neutral is the idea that all carbon tax revenues must flow back out the door as other tax cuts (typically income tax) but also could be in the form of tax credits or a fixed dividend. In some cases, people do not trust that this is going to happen as promised.

In B.C., they would be right, as two-thirds (very cautious reading) of carbon tax revenues have been used to support corporate income tax cuts.”

Those are new(!) tax cuts significantly to Encana and other gas frack operators.

It is cash funding for the climate bomb of fracking directly from the carbon tax!

The B.C. government and the assertions Halliday brought forward are false on both accounts:

“During this period, the (carbon) taxes reduced emissions and provided a net benefit to taxpayers of 300 million Canadian dollars in personal and business tax cuts.”

No and no. People as well as small- and medium-size business are being fracked into structural unemployment and robbed by the carbon tax. But it is a windfall for Encana.

At one point, even B.C. Premier Christy Clark had admitted that the carbon tax is burdening ordinary people and announced a plan to freeze hikes for five years.

The Globe and Mail’s Ian Bailey reported on Apr. 3, 2013: “B.C.’s Clark vows to freeze carbon tax for five years.”

The carbon tax-linked and leveraged Pacific Carbon Trust, as cap and trade agency, acts as a slush fund operation for cash handouts to especially gas fracking.

The B.C. government, in damage control mode after the Auditor General’s report, renamed it the Climate Action Secretariat in 2013.

It would be bad enough if Encana’s gas fracking in B.C. would be justified on the basis of them buying carbon off-sets.

But no. I was seriously shocked to read in B.C. General Auditor (outgoing) John Doyle’s 2013 report the B.C. government purchases carbon off-set papers from Encana.

You heard right: the worst and biggest polluters get to sell carbon credit derivatives.

Privileged polluters earn direct rewards and get to extract funds from the taxpayer to open the door to escalate pollution to new heights.

“Polluter pays”?

Watch out, NDP – there is no bottom in the cap and trade barrel!

Halliday’s claims of supposed emission reductions are as false as non-existing finance benefits to people.

B.C. carbon pricing policy corrupted carbon accounting by specifically excluding major frack gas facilities’ emissions, according to the Auditor General’s report, which named Encana.

Further, significant gas and diesel purchases during hugely popular cross-border shopping trips were neither factored in by the B.C. government nor Halliday.

CCPA senior economist Marc Lee followed up and posted a comprehensive data analysis on Policy Note, May 8, 2015: “B.C.’s Carbon Emissions on the Rise”.

As an industrial inventor and energy analyst, I have no intention of bashing corporations.

They can only rob us as far as governments corporatize the climate.

Corporate rights are increasingly legislated that incentivize emissions by way of the deceptive carbon tax and carbon-free trade mechanisms.

In short, Halliday writes like a courtier, a lobbyist who enables an anti-capitalist resource colonialism and protectionism that sabotage industrial progress.

He seems not alone in seeing carbon pricing and extreme oil and gas expansion in a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship.

Christy Clark agrees.

So do I.