Calling your skeptic a liar

 Vincent J. Curtis

19 Sept 22

RE: Get the facts straight on carbon pricing. Editorial by Keith Brooks.  The Hamilton Spectator 19 Sept 22.

You can’t hold a discussion with someone who begins by calling you a liar.  That’s what Keith Brooks, Program Director of Environmental Defence did.  Given his vested interest in the cause, it’s his “facts” and assertions that are up for review.

For example, he writes,“Forget that clean energy is the cheapest form of new power.” 

Yeah, and that’s why India and China build coal-fired power plants – because it’s the most expensive; and despite China being the world’s leading exporter of solar panels and wind turbine parts.

Back to economics.  No less an economist than Ross McKitrick says that it’s hard to tell the effect of a carbon tax on emissions in the presence of other policies aiming at the same thing.  Yet Brooks has all the confidence of a religious fanatic that carbon taxes will reduce the production of CO2.  “But facts don’t matter when you can score political points.”

What political point is Brooks trying to score?  The salvation of Trudeau’s reputation that is married to carbon pricing, in the face of Pierre Poilievre’s popular commitment to scrap the carbon tax as a useless and pernicious tax churn.

What’s the evidence that a carbon tax will not change consumer habits?  Look at skyrocketing gas prices, which is what a carbon tax is tending to do.  People still had to drive to Toronto to work; they just got poorer.  Fuel consumption is inelastic, and not susceptible to gradual tinkering.  When it breaks, it breaks, catastrophically.

British Columbia has had a carbon tax since 2008, starting at $10 per ton.  It’s now $50 per ton, and hasn’t reduced CO2 emissions.

Brooks is just trying to shield Trudeau’s madcap climate policies from an increasingly popular Pierre Poilievre.  And that’s the truth.

Look, one of the biggest fallacies of the carbon tax idea, and there are many, is that climate change can be priced.  No, it can’t.  To start with, you don’t know how much a disastrous weather event was natural and how much was man-caused, and you don’t know because the climate crazies won’t permit funding of research to check that out.

The second part is that there is no market for “climate.”  There being no market, there can be no sensible price on “climate change.”  But, I’ve found that Arts Majors who think they know science better than real scientists do, also know nothing about economics.

What makes a carbon tax polarizing is that it is manifestly stupid.  It comes out of stupid progressive ideology and its failure to understand economics.  People don’t like being taxed for their stupidity, and the carbon tax is a tax based on the assumption that people are stupid.  That’s why it’s polarizing: it’s a battle between those who think other people are stupid, and those other people who aren’t stupid as their progressive better thinks.

Enough with stupidity, and enough with the carbon tax!  Hell, enough with this climate change B.S.!

-30-