Carbon pricing blames ordinary people with little say ( Comment Whitehorse Star, Dec.24 2015 )

Carbon pricing blames ordinary people with little say ( Comment Whitehorse Star, Dec.24 2015 )

This is a rebuttal to Sally Wright’s letter (Star, Dec. 21).

The “price on carbon” gave everything away.

The second-last line – “This will mean a price on carbon and a regulatory framework which integrates it” – diminished her well-intentioned thoughts on energy planning.

As if there was no price on carbon, as if there was no oil and gas subsidy framework that implements it. Beware of platitudes in the spin zone.

Transportation is not everything, but it is the one sector that Big Oil has a stranglehold on and their spin doctors and greenwasher front groups fight hardest there.

Emissions are not retail or market-driven when it costs close to 10 times more to fuel up a gas or diesel truck than an equivalent electric truck.

Greenhouse gas emissions are largely not a broad, diffuse and consumer-controlled issue but a narrow, precise infrastructure initiative task.

The carbon price doesn’t go there except for locking in the status quo, and instead blames ordinary people with little say on infrastructures available to them.

Ms. Wright’s opinion deflects attention from this fact, which provides comfort to the oil and gas industries trying to wreck Yukon.

To fight Jimmy Carter’s energy reform attempts, 30 years ago, Big Oil PR came up with the ideological carbon price strategy to falsely dress up in a market-responsive image with the option to become greenwashing solution providers as a fox in the henhouse.

It became their successful tool to disguise the infrastructure and oil cartel nature of the problem and to advance protectionism, militarism, polluter permits and rights against energy markets, against renewable economies and agricultures, against capping extraction and emissions, against science-based carbon accounting and against reducing fossil energy subsidies.

In B.C., carbon trading caps emission reductions not emissions, and offset rewards are paid to Encana. The supposedly revenue-neutral carbon tax subsidizes gas fracking and corrupts carbon accounting.

Even after the B.C. Auditor General investigated and exposed the mess in 2013, which is not fixable but simple certainty on a grade two math level, the Pembina Institute continues to herald it as a successful model.

Corporations’ powers to legislate under certain free trade provisions protect oil subsidies similarly to carbon pricing mechanisms.

Different political parties highlight a different focus of protectionism for over-mature fossil resource cartels and run a very effective good cop/bad cop routine.

Ms. Wright overlooks carbon pricers and climate deniers in unison reject the core fact of accumulated greenhouse gas emissions as the climate impact.

As in Copenhagen before, in Paris, the OECD carbon pricers insisted only current emission levels are relevant and fought the renewables-oriented and science-based G77 position (poor countries) tooth and nail. Because by killing climate science, along with it, one gets to kill climate justice.

There are more similarities.

Naomi Oreskes, who co-wrote the political self-defence guide, Merchants of Doubt, observed there are scientists who are so-called climate skeptics.

However, after reviewing close to 1,000 studies, she could not find even a single climate skeptic academic who had examined the issue.

I recommend to make use of this piece of wisdom from atmospheric and oceanic science review.

Let us not focus on mere policy opinions, be it from climate science or economics actors who, with support from corporate media bias, tend to get parroted by many of the environmental NGOs.

In order to find an evidence base for energy and climate policy, it might be more helpful to pay attention to economists as well as climate scientists who have produced a peer-reviewed and respectable body of work on the issue such as Vandana Shiva, Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Hermann Scheer, Patrick Bond and others.

Ms. Wright’s letters bring up the counterproductive carbon price frequently, and just as regularly ignore renewable energy source legislations which actually achieve impacts on emissions.

As the late Hermann Scheer observed brilliantly, carbon pricing mechanisms, together with talk thereof and renewable market frameworks, are in zero sum opposition everywhere (referenced and sourced by yukonblogger).

Renewable infrastructure priorities ahead of even conservation and efficiency, together with feed-in tariffs, zero emission transportation fast charge points and local industrial content requirements, re-created vibrant energy markets in Denmark, China, Germany, Spain, Ontario and other places.

Keep an eye on some of the smaller regions like around Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., with an independent local power utility where renewable economies, jobs, profits as well public finances are healthy and electrical rates are competitive, characterized by a situation that is shielded from the now carbon price-talking Ontario government and its subservient Ontario Hydro.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker