Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 21st, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)
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on www.CTV.ca
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Environmentalist David Suzuki gestures while speaking with CTV’s Question Period on Sunday, May 18, 2008.
Environment Minister John Baird appears on CTV’s Question Period on Sunday, May 18, 2008.
‘Instead of taxing things we want more of, like income . . . we shift taxes to things we don’t want, like greenhouses gases,’ Liberal environment critic David McGuinty explained on CTV’s Question Period, on Sunday, May 18, 2008.
Suzuki slams NDP, Tories, backs Dion’s carbon tax
Updated Sun. May. 18 2008 10:48 PM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
Famed environmentalist David Suzuki has strongly backed Liberal leader Stephane Dion’s emerging carbon tax plan and slammed the NDP and Conservatives.
After hearing the NDP’s criticism of Dion’s plan, Suzuki said: “I’m really shocked with the NDP with this. I thought that they had a very progressive environmental outlook.”
“To oppose (the carbon tax plan), its just nonsense. It’s certainly the way we got to go,” he said Sunday on CTV’s Question Period.
While Dion has not fully revealed his plan, this week he said that he is proposing a revenue-neutral carbon tax, where the carbon tax is paired with a reduction in other taxes.
“Instead of taxing things we want more of, like income … we shift taxes to things we don’t want, like greenhouse gases,” Liberal environment critic David McGuinty explained on Question Period, while stressing the plan is not yet finalized.
NDP MP Peggy Nash said the NDP’s environment plan is not revenue neutral. She said her party wants a system where polluters pay and the money is put into “green solutions.”
Environment Minister John Baird told Question Period that Dion’s plan was “made on Bay Street” and is actually supported by big business and polluters.
“Mr. Dion wants to give some kind of licence to pollute and simply allow big business to buy their way out of this problem,” Baird said.
Baird touted the Conservatives’ environmental plan, saying that the Harper government would force big business into polluting less.
“Our plan we deliver an absolute 20 per cent reduction by 2020,” he said.
However, the Tories plan uses 2006 as the baseline year, which Baird failed to mention. The world generally uses 1990, the Kyoto Protocol’s baseline.
Most environmental groups have slammed the Conservatives’ environmental plan as ineffectual and say even if it works, it would still result in emissions that are eight per cent above Canada’s 2012 Kyoto target.
They also say the Tory plan relies on intensity targets, not absolute ones. Intensity targets mean that businesses must cut the amount of carbon that goes into each unit of production. However, that means total emissions could go up if output increased substantially.
Suzuki criticized Baird’s leadership, saying that the minister was working against and not with environmentalists.
Suzuki also said Ottawa politicians in general are too focused on the next election and not thinking of the future.
“Thank goodness for the United States or we’d be dead last (in the environment),” he said. “Let’s get on with hard targets and thinking more about what we are leaving our children and grandchildren.”
Suzuki mentioned that Swedes pay about carbon tax of $150 a tonne, while British Columbians are “yelling and screaming over a $10 tax.”
B.C introduced a carbon tax in February.
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Posted in Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from Washington DC, Canada, Poland, Denmark, New York
May 21st, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Mr. Suzuki and his acolytes are flogging a dying horse. The chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has had to , reluctantly, concede that in spite of the hysteria surrounding global warming the fact is that since 1998 the earth’s average temperature has been declining. In addition, Noel Keenlyside a team leader in environmental research at the Max Planck Institute, and a hardline advocate of global warming catastrophe, has admitted that the latest data plugged into the U.N. climate supercomputer predicts that the average temperature will continue to fall until at least 2015.
The escalating price of petroleum products has already had an impact on peoples habits. SUV and truck sales are plummeting, the airlines and trucking industries are having to impose fuel surcharges just to stay in business, and the tourism industry is promoting close-to-home travel packages as they face reduced travel plans by tourists.
Imposing a punative tax on a society struggling to adjust to the new economic realities will only lead to damaging changes in the social fabric of the country. The idea that this new tax would somehow be revenue neutral flies in the face of projections made by Stephane Dion and the David Suzuki Foundation. The former claim that the change in the tax regime will allow them to create a $12 billion dollar surplus that can be used to fund clean technologies. The latter say it could be as high as $18 billion. How is this possible if the scheme is revenue neutral? For anyone who buys into this boondoggle, pleas contact me as I have some nice ocean front property in Saskatchewan that I will let go at bargain prices.