Sightline has heaped praise on BC’s carbon tax, just as you might expect from an office full of Canadaphiles. But there’s more to the story. While the province has led in some areas—namely, by putting a meaningful price on carbon emissions—it has fallen down in some other important ways.
On that score, I highly recommend “BC’s Dishonesty on Climate Change,” by Mark Jaccard and Brad Griffin, which appeared in the Vancouver Sun last week. It goes like this:
When it comes to climate policy, Canadian provincial and federal governments have a perfect track record -they have consistently failed to achieve their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets.
Our governments have been setting targets since 1988, initially for 2000 and 2005, and then for 2010 at the 1997 Kyoto conference. In every case, governments have broken their promises, by a wide margin. But few people seem alarmed, as long as politicians deftly replace missed targets with bold-sounding new targets a safe distance into the future.
