Renewable opportunity from carbon pricing setback, Whse Star, 21 Nov. 2016

Renewable opportunity from carbon pricing setback

In her column “U.S. bombshell need not be a curse for Trudeau”, Chantal Hebert had examined cross-border opportunities and challenges such as having to rethink carbon pricing in Canada. 

She overlooked a potential for increased Canadian competitiveness from sustainable economies during a Donald Trump presidency.

Carbon pricing has a track record of subsidizing fossil expansions and for framing a status quo to slow down long-overdue renewable infrastructure initiatives. 

Let’s not be fooled and oiled by the good cop, bad cop routine of carbon pricers, like Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson or B.C. Premier Christy Clark and their support crew of Flat-Earthers, climate deniers.

We should have stepped out of carbon price magical thinking already and put the shoulder to the wheel of profitable renewable energy production and export such as from wind power.

Suppressed rights and freedoms, as well as deeply wounded economic and ecological justice, have a way of reasserting themselves destructively.

The resentment that brought Trump into the White House has a regressive flavour beyond the frequent confederate flags at his rallies, harkening back to another troubled changeover in energy economies.

Borrowing from Leonard Cohen’s title for his poetry collection The Energy of Slaves, Calgary journalist and author Andrew Nikiforuk named his book on the political unpleasantries of petro-oriented economies like Canada The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the new Servitude.

Staying in Nikiforuk’s analogy, we can use for a moment the Mason-Dixon line along the Ohio River that once had separated northern states from a South where slavery was legal, to better visualize modern divisions between outdated and appropriate energy initiatives. 

French writer Alexis de Tocqueville travelled widely in the U.S., and his observations from 1831 deliver a warning from history: 

“On the north bank of the Ohio, everything is activity, industry. Labour is honoured, there are no slaves.

“Pass to the south bank and there appear changes so suddenly that you think yourself on the other side of the world. The enterprising spirit is gone.”

Canada can push back economic weakness and lower emissions, without B.C.-type carbon accounting fraud, and thrive with resilience as industrial society.

With the Trumpists in charge of the White House, Congress, Senate and soon the U.S. Supreme Court, the opening Canadian opportunity is logically not in unconventional oil and gas expansion, but in renewable development.

Perhaps this means energizing the 49th parallel not as wall but as quasi Mason-Dixon-inspired demarcation of Canadian independence going hand-in-hand with sustainable players in North America and beyond.

Peter Becker
Energy consultant
Whitehorse

U.S. result was predictable months ago (Whitehorse Star, Nov. 9, 2016)

Re.“Clintonomics created Trump; only Sanders can beat him” (Star column, June 17, 2016). 

Quality journalism is often published in the Star. If you can’t find it in your newspaper stack or in the Star online archives, just go to:

http://yukonblogger.blogspot.com/2016/06/clintonomics-created-trump-only-sanders.html or simply google yukonblogger. 

Seriously, many who are not sucked or plugged into the neoliberal echo chambers of mainstream media like the CBC, or the U.S. equivalents National Public Radio and CNN, etc., could see Trump coming.

Independent American authors and journalists, among them Barbara Ehrenreich and Thomas Frank, through months and years, had warned and left little doubt that people needed revenge on the elites and were going to get it.

Ehrenreich and Frank are a joy to read; they are that good. Also, one comes along much better prepared for what happens and when it happens.

Their wisdom inspired me to write the opinion piece for the Star, which I feel has become even more relevant.

Peter Becker
Whitehorse

Carbon tax commands no GST like compliance (Whitehorse Star column Nov. 8, 2016)

Carbon tax commands no GST like compliance (Whitehorse Star column Nov. 8, 2016)

Nobody asks for a carbon tax from renewable energy drivers Denmark or Germany, where carbon pricing is a joke, so they would live up to Paris and previous climate agreements.

Similarly, the announcement for a federal carbon tax has its specifics so far spelled out in the Vancouver Declaration which requires greenhouse gas-reducing actions, but not carbon pricing.

The heavy climate lifting lies in infrastructure reform from which substantial behaviour change can follow.

One can only get on an electric transit bus, like in Winnipeg, if it’s there.

Carbon pricing puts the cart before the horse, in the all-important problem awareness, to prevent such improvements.

The climate survival crisis is a global one and renewables climate action that is for real breaks the bind of the carbon tax shell game scientifically, morally and also legally.

There is broad precedence building internationally but also nationally, where many of the First Nations in Canada have taken a lead in the Canadian climate discourse by denouncing the emission-increasing, pipeline-pushing fraud of carbon pricing.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report part 3, with input from thousands of scientists, spells it out clearly that carbon pricing has never worked anywhere.

But it acknowledges that a regionally adaptive diversity of renewable energy frameworks and ecological agriculture reforms have proven more than emission reductions, even carbon sequestration success.

A new generation of First Nation leaders is especially tough-minded and brilliant, and have evolved from uphill struggles for justice where they could never afford to be scholarly illiterate like streamlined political elites.

Universalism of the oil status quo/carbon pricing kind always was a mark of empire ideologies. French, British, German, Dutch, American, Roman, Persian, Mongol and Spanish empires projected one and one only concept of marching, dinner etiquette, economics, power structure, etc.

The non-Western learning understands this very well, and the Global South overwhelmingly rejects carbon pricing as frozen group think levied by undemocratic fossil cartels and morbid financial speculators.

Not everybody supports a sales tax, but its revenue-collecting purpose is widely understood or agreed upon.

Whereas a carbon tax is climate-counterproductive, politically divisive and legally self-combusting, as it offends a sense of evidence based thinking.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.