Ever since Gordon Campbell neutered the BC NDP stance on all things green by subjecting taxpayers to the Carbon Tax in 2005, the BC Liberals have claimed the high ground in the war on carbon dioxide.
Buried in the details on the carbon tax is the reality that B.C. pays more out in industry carve outs and subsidies than the tax generates in revenue. What was an act of electoral genius on the part of Campbell has become a fiscal albatross around the neck of Premier Clark.
B.C. generates all of its electricity by hydro, and provincial CO2 emissions are a rounding error in total naturally occurring atmospheric CO2. Clark is nonetheless forging ahead with a more confiscatory scheme to tax us to prosperity in the name of Gaia.
B.C.’s Climate Leadership Plan is the BC Liberal’s new method to tax us more, under the guise of “planet saving.” Despite average global temperatures remaining unchanged for 19 years, as overall CO2 concentrations rise, BC’s Liberals see CO2 pricing as a “politically risk free” revenue source.
To launch B.C. into a leadership role when it comes to cooling the earth, Clark has assembled a team to provide the Liberals cover for the massive energy rate increases that are sure to follow.
The team reads like a who’s who from a pipeline protest, with Matt Horne from the leftist Pembina Institute and Tzeporah Berman, a long time Greenpeace activist and Broadbent Institute fellow and “eco – Hero.”
The fix is in. Like it or not B.C. is on its way to becoming a Climate Change Leader and the taxpayers of B.C. are lucky enough to pay for this distinction.
For the honour of leading on Climate, B.C. taxpayers will pay even more at the pump, more to heat and light their homes, more to institutional entrepreneurs in big wind, solar and bio-mass and more to fund questionable carbon trading schemes like the Pacific Carbon Trust.
No student from B.C.’s high school class of 2015 has experienced any global warming in their lifetime. Both the arctic and antarctic ice caps are at record extents and thickness. Polar bears are thriving around the arctic. One need not wear his galoshes in downtown Vancouver despite Al Gore’s sea level rise predictions. None of the catastrophic climate change models have been proven correct. Yet B.C. is doomed lead on climate.
All this from a spendthrift Liberal government, desperate for revenue and afraid to cut spending, that purports to be conservative. We could ask the last one leaving B.C. to turn the lights out, but who can afford light with this leadership like this?
Mark Walker
Penticton