Alberta carbon price plan ambushes clean energy (4 Mar. 2016 Whse Star coloumn)

Blacked out is renewable energy source legislation from Denmark to Texas to China that have become legend for reducing emissions and leveraging employment. 

Adopted is the oil industry’s and Wall Street’s carbon tax agenda, which shifts blame to people and subsidizes carbon increases.

Gordon Laxer, a veteran energy analyst from the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute, finished his Dec. 3, 2015 piece in the Edmonton Journal, “Opinion: Alberta’s climate plan stands in the way of Canada’s”, with the observation:

“Getting the NDP’s backing on expanding the oil sands lends more credibility than Big Oil could have got from a Conservative Alberta government. No wonder Big Oil is smiling. It’s time to reboot Layton’s dream” (of actually cutting emissions).

The carbon price-centred Alberta process lacks balance in single-mindedly adopting the recommendations of those close to corporatism, exemplified by its chair, Andrew Leach, from the Alberta School of Business.

Ignored are all investigations into these mechanisms.

Those include investigations by the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine and the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, which exclusively found corrupt carbon price designs that incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases.

Mitch Jones reported for foodandwaterwatch.org on Sept. 9, 2014, “Why a Carbon Tax Won’t Save the Climate”. Jones agrees with the financial services industry on an important point. Carbon taxes and carbon derivative trade are one beast.

B.C. Auditor General Doyle observed in 2013 that carbon taxes are not revenue-neutral, as falsely claimed by the B.C. government, typical for carbon pricers. 

Jones: “Wall Street hopes to build new financial markets and speculative financial instruments like those that brought down the global economy in 2007.”

Alberta’s carbon tax strategy as a launch tool for carbon derivative markets, separate to the real economy but siphoning investment from it, uses the playbook from B.C., the U.K. and Australia.

Economists Dr. Lynne Chester and Stuart Rosewarne, University of Sidney, lived through the carbon tax episode in Australia and were baffled by surprises.

In the very week the Gillard government enacted the carbon tax, it rolled back the renewable energy framework.

In 2011, Chester and Rosewarne published an interesting paper examining financial markets that generate subsidy structures towards fossil resource cartel interests, funded by the taxpayer, under the title: “What is the relationship between derivative markets and carbon prices?”

“More recently, Prime Minister Gillard announced an intention to introduce a carbon tax from mid 2012 to apply for three to five years until the implementation of a carbon trading scheme.”

Following the Gillard logic, the Alberta plan calls for tar sands emissions to expand from currently around 70 million tons of emissions a year to 100 million tons, and describes it as cap, which it is not.

There is a commitment to phase out coal by 2030, significant for Alberta electrical generation.

It is to be replaced with over its life cycle with even dirtier fracked gas, which is deceptively lumped in with renewables as “cleaner electrical supply.”

This reorientation from coal to fracking flavours the entire corrupt process. 

The plan for more, not less fracking appears recklessly based on oil cartel interests, bound to deepen economic disaster and unemployment.

China, ahead of Germany, shows how it’s done. Wind power grew over 100-fold since the 2008 financial heist.

Economics, energy security and affordability are the main drivers in the transition, even ahead of emissions concerns, recently phasing out brand new coal plants.

Economic decline in Alberta became visible with a lowering crude price during the second half of 2014.

However, already in 2013, problems accelerated when the price for one barrel hovered firmly above $100.

Because of growing unconventional reserve replacement, namely shale fracking and tar steam extraction that have no net returns, 2013 profits of the five Big Oil players had remarkably contracted by more than 25 per cent.

Not just in the Star and other independents but in the corporate mainstream media, the facts were widely reported. They are facts that cannot be repaired with returning higher prices, but can only deepen in their impact.

This happened after over a decade of continuous profit increases that had dipped only once during the financial heist of 2008/09.

Yet there is no awareness nor mention of such relevant facts in a document that needlessly incurs future debt by throwing more good money after bad.

The purpose of the carbon pricing terminology is to activate a well-grooved mechanism that is a trigger signalling to elite climate undertakers the feeding trough of carbon tax revenue.

By its nature, a carbon tax, similar to a sales tax, is always a regressive tax, a flat tax and never progressive nor socially fair.

In contrast, a fuel or alcohol tax can be transparently allocated by government toward clean energy infrastructure investments.

The unified carbon tax, for in reality widely differing products, has a vacuous abstract title for a reason. It is to fill in harm and prevent benefits for people and environment.

Tucked away within endless arrays of bureaucratic platitudes, a language of increased emitter privileges, permits and rights in the Alberta climate strategy further underpins multinational corporations’ powers to legislate under free trade agreements.

Unconstitutional powers of NAFTA chapter 11 Investment have already been exercised against environmental protections and renewable energy development in Quebec and Ontario. More undemocratic hostilities can be expected from CETA and TPP (former PM John Turner: real trade items are updated in GATT).

The plan falsely assigns the role of climate solution provider to the oil and gas industry with hard targets to accelerate emission increases for decades to come. Renewables are given meaningless, anecdotal mention, when, cost competitively, they are in a position to replace coal and more.

The plan is so badly one-sided, it was impossible to anticipate before reading it. Renewables can replace obsolete coal-fired electrical generation without stepping on the toes of a single existing oil and gas operation, but are shut out.

Unfortunately, the unscientific and dishonest Alberta process is now invited as a model for climate consultations in Yukon by Stuart Clark, John Maissan and Richard Price (a University of Alberta professor).

They take carbon price encouragement from Keith Halliday and John Streicker.

Electric cars and trucks are about 10 times cheaper to fuel up and service than equivalent combustion-powered ones. 

Obviously, there is an infrastructure flaw of lacking fast charge points and initial EV purchase rebates, not a retail market problem.

Ten-fold, that is how far out of touch the carbon tax proposal is with its five- or 15-percent price signal at the pump to supposedly nudge people’s behaviour.

General Motors Corp. has done its homework. The brainchild of CEO Mary T. Barra, the 2016/17 Chevy Bolt (not Volt) is essentially a half-price Tesla car with its 200-mile driving range.

With one 20-minute or so charge top-up, it can go from Whitehorse to Watson Lake, and likewise anywhere crosscountry without range anxiety.

The proposed carbon flat tax may take the economic freedom and dignity of lower-income people to buy an electric car, a bus pass, or force them to take their kids out of hockey practice and music lessons.

Made poorer by carbon pricing, the carbon tax won’t stop them driving to shop for groceries even more often than before to stay on top of deals, food bank hampers, etc. Underlying cynicism and vanity of the carbon price ideology are disturbing.

Homeless people with minimal or close to zero carbon footprints receive zero carbon credit benefits in the Alberta green washer process that directly rewards emission increases of big polluters.

Political fault lines of carbon pricing are not exactly what some think they are. The previous Conservative government already implemented part of Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s plan. And the most right-wing government in Canada then as now, B.C., has the most aggressive oil and gas subsidy regime.

Carbon flat tax dividends and carbon offset rewards are paid directly to gas frack operator Encana, whose emissions are to a significant degree excluded from carbon accounting.

Underneath false populist double talk, then-prime minister Stephen Harper had given full blessing to these mechanisms enacted by two carbon pricing governments.

The ethics code for professional engineers restrains statements made as an engineer to the scope of one’s trade competence.

And yet engineers Stuart Clark and John Maissan underwrote, with professional credentials in bold letters, what I believe are unsubstantiated political leanings in their Yukon News commentary on Feb. 17.