Reason to Support: We know…

Reason to Support:
We know from the last run-up in oil prices that higher cost means less consumption, which is the whole point: in order to reduce emissions we have to burn less fossil fuel, and higher costs for fossil fuels produces that result. Subsidising consumption by abolishing cap and trade to lower prices of emissions-causing elements, such as gas, is counter-productive. A price on carbon emissions is the easiest, least governmentally intrusive method that puts everyone in on the program. If regulation for carbon emissions had delivered, we would not have had the continual increase in total carbon emissions we have over the past half century. If the goal is “smaller government”, replacing a market system with a regulatory system does not achieve that, which leaves me confused as to what the government is actually trying to do beyond ideologically cancelling climate-change mitigating efforts and being anti-tax. I expect better of my government than that
What’s to say any new regulation won’t be unevenly placed on certain interests, while exonerating others, based on political expedience? We don’t know, because there’s no replacement plan yet, and no hint on what it could look like. It’s almost insulting that we have no plan at all from them to replace this. Maybe the current government’s plan is better, but how can we have that discussion if we don’t know what it is?
Cap & Trade is not a tax – it’s a market to buy carbon credits, while regulation at the government level sets limits for what carbon you’re allowed to release free of charge. Without Cap & Trade, almost no pollution has fees attached to it, meanwhile, more often than not the government, read taxpayers, is saddled with clean-up costs as the offending companies either don’t do it themselves, or simply disappear. As far as I’m concerned this is a crime against our future. As a Conservative friend of mine once told me: “I don’t understand why companies don’t commit to good environmental practices, because in the long run, it’s cheaper”. Making not doing those practices more expensive is even better, because then good practices become even cheaper, and will happen faster. Cancelling Cap & Trade shoves the costs of clean-up and coping that we’ll have anyway to higher amounts for future generations. We have to do something now; this system is already in place. Abolishing it simply to reduce gas prices, and waiting a year or more for undefined regulation, is its own brand of inefficient.
Cap & Trade is probably better than a carbon tax – the legislation actually decreases the pool for acceptable emissions across the system, rather than simply adding costs to pollute, which means it should be more effective at actually reducing emissions faster than a carbon tax.
Can’t blame the feds for the Carbon Tax: the Federal Government would have exempted Ontario from its Carbon Tax with the Cap & Trade System in place, and the current provincial government knows that. It’s clear this will lead to a tit-for-tat, and finger pointing about who did what with the Federal Government, which is bloody unproductive, and does nothing to leave a better world for our children.
Carbon Pricing is also becoming more popular across the world; Ontario could exercise Bold Leadership, and lead on this, or it could drag itself to catch up.