No to a carbon-tax, Ms. Elizabeth May and Mr. Jagmeet Singh! Part 1/2
Stop turning climate policy into a global war zone for the benefit of the World Bank’s ‘Carbon Pricing Club’
(Whitehorse Star 29 Mar. 2019 Open letter to Green Party and NDP leaders)
Concerned Canadians demand that you take initiative to remove from being in charge of climate policy, those who significantly caused the climate crisis, fossil/financial/chemical cartels that continue to escalate the neoliberal climate war!
We can’t get off the extinction track if you continue endorsing Big Oil-purposed and designed carbon-tax/carbon-trade/carbon-price, if you keep legitimizing their anti-renewable fox-in-the-henhouse plan!
Stop turning climate policy into a global war zone for the benefit of the World Bank’s “Carbon Pricing Club”!
Follow solidarity with working people, Global South and Indigenous Peoples in their renewable but resounding No to carbon-pricing!
As highlighted by economist Kate Raworth, Iron+Earth tar sands workers, climate scientists Vandana Shiva and Kevin Anderson, political leader Nnimmo Bassey and the Indigenous Environmental Network’s 2017 Carbon Pricing report!
Pay attention to a deep alignment between fracking and carbon-pricing!
A carbon tax is not, as often claimed, an alternative to carbon off-set speculator schemes.
Because it widely serves as a kickstarting and enabling component to carbon speculator markets (Indigenous Environmental Network Parbon-Pricing report P. 42).
March 4, 2016 in Whitehorse Star and yukonblogger: “Alberta Carbon Price Plan ambushes Clean Energy”.
“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 Julia 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.”
Path of danger, such capitalizing of fracking and off-set derivative speculation siphons moneys away in order to deepen the renewable deficit in the industrial world towards another catastrophic banking-heist.
The carbon-tax is not a practical component to fuel taxes and not named a polluter penalty for a reason; it is none of those things.
Not surprising, really, the carbon price language is legally owned, semantically finessed and purpose-designed by oil-cartel and Wall Street stink-tanks.
Who also love structural mass unemployment, predatory debt slavery aimed at public coffers and to destroy individual citizens’ well being, driven by privatized central banks, while hating the common good once underwritten by people-owned national banks.
Carbon pricers are more than neoliberal fanatics, perhaps a nuance different to gullible chemtrail believers, both lost in oil complicity.
Carbon-pricing opened a campaign of racist dog whistling that shifted climate blame from fossil cartels to ordinary people, mostly non-Western, mostly non-white.
Carbon-tax leveraged colonialism in the Global South typically appears as land theft and rain forest slash-burning campaigns administered through a World Bank’s own internal group, the “Carbon-Pricing Club”. Big carbon budget for white people!
Racism so offensive that some time after the Paris climate conference in 2015 it went off-stage until, in April 2018, the club resurfaced under the new name of “High-Level Leadership Forum on Carbon Pricing and Competitiveness”.
Particularly aggressive component is the neoliberal REDD carbon-pricing program which operates under the greenwashing false label of “Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation”.
"Carbon markets in the Paris agreement – an early holiday gift” says a Dec. 17, 2015 blog posting, of some glee, by Carbon Pricing Clup Mandarin Vikram Widge, then head of Climate and Carbon Finance at the World Bank Group.
Carbon Pricing Club and Redd face a stiffening peoples resistance in the Global South spearheaded by the No REDD in Africa Network and Global Alliance against REDD.
From Johan Rockström, Bill McKibben, David Suzuki, James Hanson to Nicholas Stern who promotes climate destructive gas-fracking, carbon-pricing academics back up their own attack on the Kyoto principle of climate justice, with an attack on science.
Carbon-pricing exclusively validates/navigates current emissions with a clear objective to increase emissions while thieving from poor countries and from ordinary people.
Injustice breeds resentment and paralyzes collaboration, no accident.
Whereas peer-reviewed climate science is unequivocal: accumulated emissions, which are largely driven and controlled by western elites, cause the crisis, not at all levels at any point in time.
Consequently, on a practical and logical level of how we got here, carbon-pricing climate science deniers equip and even create flat-earth climate deniers.
Disturbing but real, carbon-pricing wussy neoliberals supplement and enable their climate denial brethren in the flat-earth neoliberal camp.
Also by in a science discrediting, public deceiving fashion, conveying carbon-pricing policy as supposed part of atmospheric climate science.
Respect evidence in former B.C. Auditor General 2013 special report detailing methodical designs for disproportional carbon-tax returns to frackers and finance players!
Important, because fraudulent B.C. Carbon-Pricing became heralded template of Alberta and Canadian climate plans.
While the associated Pacific Carbon Trust off-set credits further subsidize Encana and other frackers plus exclude such major frack emitters from carbon accounting.
Recognize the toxicity of an increasing and high carbon-price with its powerful divestment incentive away from renewable infrastructure investment, as in Sweden!
Which has fallen hopelessly behind its neighbours and rivals Denmark/Scotland, which operate not on the basis of carbon-pricing but with a renewable energy framework!
Pay attention to the narrative of elite infrastructure decision-makers, from oil cartels to neoliberal Western governments, who use the carbon-pricing smoke screen to harm clean cheap electron opportunities!
Respect basic market economics of “price elasticity for demand”!
Carbon-pricing violates this most basic rule of practical market policy.
Price nudging can be expected to change behaviour towards luxury products, but not staples such as potatoes, ground transportation needs and heating buildings.
In fact, the unfair economic pressure of the carbon tax against ordinary people very much aligns with the flat tax concept as introduced by Margaret Thatcher.
Under which a low income person pays the exact same flat amount, say a 1000 dollars annually, that a billionaire pays, all out modern aristocracy.
Such a clamp down in the fashion of an unfair carbon tax tends to have an inverse effect by shifting even more consumption to carbon-intense basics and gas guzzlers.
Not surprising as the carbon tax strain moves long term cost effective and renewable/sustainable upgrade investments further and further out of reach for ordinary people.
Carbon-pricing prevents climate mitigation, but its mind numbing cynicism also kills all important adaptive survival efforts.
Precisely because climate models, treaties and carbon-pricers have hopelessly understated the case, because we already are in a non linear acceleration scenario.
In the free fall section of omnicide, it is a good and hopeful time to fight back in a transformative way based on sound problem awareness, following the best courage of our ancestors, so they will not be ashamed to meet us.
Part two demonstrates how the clean cheap electron outcompeted the expensive, militaristic oil cartel ages ago, and how the anti renewable bias in the carbon-tax promotes polluter rights and opposes communities rights.
Peter Becker, Whitehorse
(Donations welcome, just paste into URL window: paypal.me/yukonblogger )
A Renewable No to the Oily Carbon-Tax. Ms. May and Mr. Singh! Part 2/2
Part one showed how the racist carbon tax gives a free-frack-ride to the finance and oil cartel, blaming, endangering and impoverishing ordinary people, mostly non-Western, non-white.
Carbon pricing increases emissions in several more ways. Particularly the carbon tax marks a new turn of subsidies beyond externalizing fossil extraction caused cost of ecological and economic harms.
The carbon tax pushes into the Commons the actual core production cost of tar and frack extraction.
Yes, a pushing into the Commons of fossil processing and shipping cost, a carbon-tax bulldozer blazing trail for an accelerated increase of fossil subsidies, currently assessed at 5.3 trillion annually by the International Monetary Fund.
Reason being that tar and frack extraction generates no net revenue. Based on a diminishing net energy output of unconventional O & G, criminal carbon-pricing subsidies are sought.
Neoliberal propaganda platitudes claim the opposite of plain facts, that supposedly the carbon tax internalizes costs of fossil harm to society.
Don’t be fooled by the carbon tax refund and rebate schedules and stick to the facts on the ground in B.C. and Alberta, from where best practices (best for neoliberal elites) are detailed and rolled out across the country.
Again, pay attention to the 1980s far right origin and neoliberal concept frame of the carbon-tax!
Consequently flat-earth neoliberals, posing as conservatives, cannot be trusted either to oppose carbon pricing.
Because their reasoning is phoney, artificially narrow and weak to the point that it can and will flip over night.
Doug Ford remade Ontario carbon pricing, and surprise surprise, as under Kathleen Wynne, Cap and Trade still caps not emissions but caps emission reductions.
Contrary to carbon-pricer propaganda the ozone hole and acid rain were counteracted with emission caps and the U.S. was least successful in trying off-sets.
Preston Manning is a leading, well-established carbon tax cheerleader.
Stephen Harper promoted the carbon tax when and where it counted, such as in his support of B.C. carbon pricing as launch of an unCanadian anti-renewable tar and frack expansion template.
Often overlooked is the position of Manitoba’s conservative government, with cutting edge green policies such as for 100% electric public transit, which represents in substance a renewable no to the carbon-tax.
Carbon-pricers consistently oppose the effective outlawing of criminal behaviour, such as to ban fracking, and oppose legislating communities’ rights to intact life support systems, such as clean water and green energy.
The oil cartel’s clawing into the fossil status quo is increasingly based on deceptive carbon-pricing propaganda, which falsely associates renewables with subsidies, falsely depicting them as expensive and fossil resources as supposedly competitive.
Whereas renewable cost parities are decades and generations in the past, market-hostile carbon-pricers look to a fossiltopia future.
And searching in the wrong place these wussy neoliberals, de-facto climate deniers in bed with flat-Earth neos, consequently will never have to find anything humanly of meaning.
Rachel Notley’s energy policy, as laid out in the 2016 Alberta Climate Leadership Plan, mocks Albertans’ very natural aspirations to better their common wealth by renaming the climate bomb of water polluting/job killing frack gas into “cleaner electrical supply”.
The feds’ Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change secures protectionism for fossil cartels and associated debt/poverty profiteers well into the second half of the century.
Carbon-pricer fossilism is hardening as ecological, democracy, energy scarcity and affordability crises are deepening.
Canadian veteran petroleum geologist David Hughes probably is the best known petroleum energy expert internationally.
However, nobody among the unpatriotic, political elites seems to get even the most basic of petroleum geology and energy economics.
Do not ignore the signals of economic failure in the unconventional extraction that come from an empty North Dakota Legacy Fund and an empty Alberta Heritage Fund!
Compare that to a similar-size petroleum economy with accumulated savings of $1 trillion-plus in the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund from problematic but conventional crude reservoirs.
Realistically, Norwegians are not better or less corrupt people than Albertans, but they had an economically viable, conventional petroleum geology to work with. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and others had it all wrong.
Meaning Norwegian shallow off-shore shelf reservoirs actually could be emptied out more or less like a heating fuel tank at the side of a house.
Which is different to “carpet bombing” (industry jargon) or frack pulverizing a rock geology to release micro natural gas bubbles, or digging/steaming up tar blobs with unaffordably insane processing requirements.
Whereas in a real economy the clean cheap electron, similar to the digital byte, approaches a marginal cost of zero, a rapid renewable transition is long overdue on all fronts.
North American Peak Oil occurred before 1970, Global Peak Oil around 2005, of conventional resources which is all that it counts.
There is now a cost of around one cent per kWh in major wind energy developments accordingt to the 2018 US Dep. of Energy report.
At a cost level of over 10 cents per kWh, electric road and rail transportation still fuels up five times cheaper than equivalent combustion powered vehicles.
“Polluters pay” is typical neoliberal deception. All evidence suggests carbon-pricing makes citizens pay to subsidize polluters.
Carbon-pricing is a core dogma of neoliberal recruiting for complicity with fracking.
A no to the carbon-tax is not everything but it is a vital door opener for responsible policies.
“When you have foxes eating hens, Kumbaya is a recipe for slaughter (Anand Giridharadas, fmr. New York Times correspondent on Democracy Now Mar. 15, 2019)”
Wall Street/Bay Street aligned political and NGO elites apparently have forgotten the language of our country while turning into some sort of a beaver toothed franchise to the neoliberal Chicago School of Economics.
No excuse for you to dodge the question: Do you march with the people’s resilience and rapid green transition wave or with the philanthropic green-washers and apologetic NGO carbon-pricers in bed with the fossilized ecocidaires?
There is a force with great appetite for gobbling up Phoneys and Wussy-Neos. If you feed it, it will eat you; learn from the Notley-Trudeau-Liz Hanson experience!
Especially wussies are eaten, who are perennial election losers. While for many people they represent no bigger an evil than the flat-Earthers, to some they appear even as lesser evil.
Why, then, do Jason Kenney and Andrew Sheer have the wind at their backs?
They live closer to the earth, they don’t have and are not to betray the Notley/Trudeau type of civic, social and ecological aspirations.
A solidly polled fact: on average ordinary people have better ethics than the elites in society, and logically don’t like neoliberal criminals of any persuasion to form government.
But without meaningful choice, a preference of some integrity favours values, like honesty, over oil-complicit carbon pricer policies and their deceptive sustainability cosmetics.
A vacuum, an absence of the mentoring signature in a truly populist character force, along the lines of Jeremy Corbyn, FDR, Agnes Macphail or Tommy Douglas, produces opportunity for demonic, bigoted, reactionary character force.
As a way of analogy: It is as if somewhat transparent career gangsters and mobsters with long criminal records win out over child molesters hiding behind suits, benefits packages and penthouse floors.
Case in point, before flunking the 2016 election, a once hopeful but carbon-price compromised Yukon NDP caucus, in a serious case of double dealing, voted for fracking in Dec. 2015, while others were out Christmas shopping!
Fossil greenhouse gases will not go away overnight, but give not one inch further expansion to antidemocratic and market hostile polluter rights!
Ms. May and Mr. Singh, take away the frack beast’s carbon-tax bone now!
Peter Becker, Whitehorse
(Donations welcome, paste or type into URL window: paypal.me/yukonblogger )
