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.