Today is July 1, and that means North America’s first ever carbon tax will take effect in the Canadian province of British Columbia.
The carbon tax, introduced in the Feb. 19 budget, taxes carbon-based fuels like gasoline, diesel, natural gas and home heating fuel. The rate of taxation is $10 (Can.) per ton of greenhouse gases generated. The carbon tax will rise $5 a ton for the next four years until it hits $30 per ton in 2012. The tax increase works out to an extra 2.4 cents a liter on gasoline, increasing to 7.24 cents per liter by 2012.
The government has said all carbon tax revenue (roughly $1.8 billion over three years) will be returned to British Columbians through reductions to income and business taxes. But with rising gasoline prices, the addition of the new carbon tax will certainly be making some British Columbian drivers cringe when they fill up at the pump.
In an op-ed piece at the Globe and Mail, Gary Mason points to the political battle brewing as these two economic forces collide and drive up fuel prices. Mason cautions that knee-jerk reactions from the “well-orchestrated but morally bankrupt campaign led by the NDP Opposition” will only feed the division between those who think the tax is the right way and those who don’t. Mason writes:
“Suddenly, it’s being viewed as a financial burden in a way it wasn’t before. Now, combined with the current price of gas, the tax is forcing people to seriously contemplate changing their emissions-producing ways, which is precisely what it was intended to do.
Still, it wouldn’t take much for people in B.C. to recoup the money the carbon tax will cost them. They could do it by driving into the office four or five times less a year or taking transit the equivalent of a couple of weeks. They could also do it by implementing any number of cheap, energy-saving measures in their homes.
But the NDP in B.C. doesn’t want you to believe that. It just wants people to feel rage over how “wrong and exploitive” the tax is. I say don’t listen to the NDP’s leaders, because what they are doing is playing politics with the planet.”
Other posts about the BC carbon tax:
“Canada Unleashes First Carbon Tax in North America”:: gas2.0
Photo: woody1778a via flickr under a Creative Commons License
]]>
Over the last 7 years, the current administration has meddled with the affairs of the Environmental Protection Agency to such a degree, that the badgering and tampering is having a detrimental effect on the morale of agency staffers. And the latest news that EPA officials have ceased their efforts to follow a Supreme Court order to propose regulations for carbon dioxide emissions from automobile tailpipes is, yet another, in a long list of examples where the Bush administration has overstepped its legal boundaries and asserted its political will in matters where it shouldn’t. Even though EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson agreed with the court’s findings and proposed motor vehicle regulation to the Department of Transportation back in December, the agency has not evaluated dangers nor proposed any regulations - and is not expected to.
The Morale Problem
The recent cover story by Margaret Kriz the National Journal paints a rather dramatic picture of the downward spiraling morale at the EPA and the agency’s decrease in overall effectiveness as a result. Legal experts say that even more than under Bush’s two previous administrators, Christine Todd Whitman and Mike Leavitt, Johnson’s EPA is regularly pushed around by politically powerful advisers at the White House and in other departments. The article states that agency morale is almost as bad as it was in the early 1980s after President Reagan appointed pro-industry Anne Gorsuch Burford to head it. Georgetown Law Professor Danield Esty, said that the current administration has pulled the EPA
“[O]ff to the extreme end of the right-wing perspective on the environment, reflecting not even a consensus within the Republican Party but the views of some who are particularly hostile to the agency’s historic mission.”
The Money Problem
At a time when the nation’s top environmental regulators face increasingly complex pollution problems, President Bush is pushing for dramatic cuts in EPA’s budget. The White House’s proposed fiscal 2009 budget would provide just $7.1 billion — fewer actual dollars than EPA has received in any fiscal year since 1997.
Riding It Out
In the meantime, disgruntled EPA professionals are longing for the day when the next administration takes over their agency and they can go to work knowing that their science will receive the attention it deserves and the funding it requires. A scathing editorial in Nature wrote that
“In a rational world, Johnson would resign in favour of someone who could at least feign an interest in the environment. Alas, it seems that he will probably stay on until January 2009, refusing waivers, fighting lawsuits and further depressing employees’ morale.”
The National Journal
Nature
Photo courtesy of keeping it real via flickr
