CLIMATE SCIENCE, ECONOMICS &…

CLIMATE SCIENCE, ECONOMICS & A SAFE CLIMATE FUTURE FOR OUR KIDS
The science is clear – time has become alarmingly short to prevent catastrophic climate change. Thus concludes a Special Report report published Monday October 8, 2018 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading body of climate scientists. There are only about a dozen years to make ‘urgent and unprecedented changes’ to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5º Celsius, IPCC warns.
In 2015, Canada and 194 other countries signed the Paris Agreement, aiming to limit the global temperature increase to well below 2ºC, and to ‘pursue efforts’ to keep it as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible.
That was then, this is now. As the IPCC Special Report spells out, even a half degree Celsius increase over 1.5º C – to 2ºC - will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. Still worse: At the current level of Paris Agreement commitments, the world is currently on course for a 3ºC rise in global temperatures. This will yield climate chaos.
And even if the world finds the political will to stay under 1.5ºC, there are agonizing climate times ahead. As contributing editor Crawford Kilian of the independent BC magazine The Tyee said about the IPCC report:
We are hurtling toward a multi-national pile-up, and we know it. Even if we slam on the brakes, the Special Report tells us, we’ll be seriously injured instead of maimed or killed. That is, no good consequences are foreseeable — only bad and less bad.

The economic options to address climate change are also clear. The same day the bleak IPCC Special Report was published, the conservative economist William Nordhaus of Yale University became a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for economics. His work over several decades has demonstrated that a universal price on carbon (i.e. a carbon tax) is the most efficient way to reduce the damages caused by climate change.

With significant credit to Nordhaus’s work, there are now 45 examples of carbon pricing around the world, with three times as many countries applying this policy as a decade ago. More are getting on board every year, including China and Mexico; 10 states in the United States already use carbon pricing, and British Columbia has led the way in Canada.
Dependable climate science and effective economic policies to successfully tackle this enormous challenge are critical, but front and centre should a safe climate future for our children and grandkids – and all generations to come.
If the phrase ‘carbon tax’ is anathema to Premier Ford and our PC government, why not change the language to something that focuses on our most precious resource – children, and their safe climate future. This is a policy that would establish a fee for carbon consumption, but – through a dividend system - put more money back in the pockets of most individuals and households in Ontario as an equitable way to fight climate change. The dividend would be in the form of a direct rebate cheques sent in an equal amount to every citizen/household in the province.
For example, a typical middle-income household in Ontario would expect to pay about $340 in increased carbon costs in 2020 under the federal government’s ‘backstop’ arrangement, but would get back a $517 dividend – $177 more than their carbon costs. Lower-income families would do even better, since while everybody receives an equal dividend payment, lower-income households generally spend less on transportation fuel or home heating. Wealthier households would also receive the dividend, but it would be less than they pay out for higher carbon consumption.
In other words, let the federal government do the heavy lifting on carbon pricing, but allow the provincial PC government to generate goodwill by agreeing to a dividend policy that would focus on a safe climate future for our children, while financially easing the transition to a carbon-free economy.