A commentary by a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria and author of the just-released book, The Carbon Tax Question: Clarifying Canada’s Most Consequential Policy Debate.
The headline on Paul MacRae’s Sept. 28 commentary asked “What does a ‘common sense’ approach to climate change look like?”
Please allow me to answer that question.
A common sense approach to climate change accepts and embraces facts. It doesn’t cherry-pick or manipulate data in a specious effort to claim that human-induced global warming is insignificant.
A common sense approach embraces climate physics that have been increasingly understood and refined for going on two centuries. A common sense approach accepts the prediction made in 1861 and reinforced in 1896 that fossil-fuel burning would warm the planet via greenhouse-gas heating.
And a common sense approach doesn’t rely on the disproved musings of a tiny coterie of long-retired, octogenarian, superficial global-warming deniers who for decades haven’t conducted any credible research on Earth’s complex climate system.
Common sense requires a willingness to heed what is obviously happening in the global climate system: thermometers undeniably tell us that the planet is heating up.
Common sense asks why that warming is happening and recognizes that it is costing us. It asks why unprecedented rainstorms swamped Montreal on August 19 and Toronto in mid-July, noting that insurance claims for both events now run to $3.5 billion.
It asks why much of Fort McMurray was consumed by a wildfire in 2016, noting that that conflagration yielded some $4.5 billion in insured losses. It asks why one-third of Jasper burned to the ground this summer, leading to insured losses of $1 billion and counting.
It asks why the town of Lytton was destroyed by wildfire in 2021 and the town of Slave Lake burned up in 2011, leading to insured losses for both of nearly $1 billion.
It asks why such a high proportion of Canada’s forested lands burned up last year, and why in 2024 the forests of Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil are increasingly afire, wreaking havoc on the economies, environment, and health systems of those countries.
Moreover, common sense would ask why cities and villages in Turkey, the Philippines, Spain, Saudi Arabia (!), Mexico, France, Italy, India, Wales, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Guatemala, Croatia, Nigeria, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Japan, South Korea, Tunisia, China, Indonesia, Panama, Nepal and Sri Lanka have all experienced extraordinary and often historically unprecedented rainfall events and catastrophic flooding in just the past month!
Yes, anyone with common sense would ask why that is happening.
Real climate scientists know why: a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour. And when warmer more humid air runs up against a cold front, that heavier load of water vapour condenses and falls as rain, often in narrow bands that flood underlying watersheds. It is a worsening concern that we can lay increasingly at the feet of global warming.
And it’s not just intense flooding that is demanding a common-sense assessment. Why is sea level rising at an ever-increasing rate, threatening coastal populations worldwide?
Why is some 300 billion tonnes of ice per year melting away from the Greenland Ice Cap? Why are the intensity and frequency of heat waves increasing?
Why are we losing vast areas of sea ice from the Arctic in modern summers? And why are alpine glaciers retreating in mountain ranges around the world?
Any person blessed with common sense would immediately recognize that all of these unwelcome phenomena are linked; they are fundamentally being driven by changes in Earth’s climate system, changes predicted for decades by thousands of very smart, savvy climate scientists, changes wrought by our collective impact on the very atmosphere that supports our residency on this planet.
And that same holder of common sense would realize that governments and individuals who fail to act to counter that impact are outrightly abdicating responsibility.
So what does a ‘common sense’ approach to climate change actually look like?
Here is a key part of any rational path forward, a real common-sense approach that incentivizes utilization of low or zero-emission renewable energy, encourages innovation and conservation, and provides financial rewards to those who participate: put in place a tax shift that applies a broad-spectrum, revenue-neutral, slowly accelerating carbon tax on emissions from fossil-fuel combustion while returning every penny of the revenue collected to taxpayers and businesses via personal and corporate income tax reductions.
And to ensure fairness, support lower-income residents directly with significant cash subventions funded by the carbon tax revenues.
Is there an example of such common sense anywhere? Yes! We did it here.
The conservative government led by Gordon Campbell brought in exactly that type of tax shift in 2008, and over the next five years — until the tax was frozen by Christy Clark — our per capita emissions fell almost 20 per cent relative to the rest of Canada and every citizen and business got all or most of their money back via either lower income taxes, direct subventions, or lower corporate taxes.
There was a bonus: any individual or business that lowered emissions paid less tax carbon tax directly and still got the money back because they were paying less tax on their earnings.
Good choices yielded financial rewards. Campbell summed it up this way, as I describe in my book: “You choose. You save.”
Campbell’s common-sense approach has been described by leading economists as a template for the world. It’s abundantly clear that any politician or Times Colonist correspondent who advocates taking an axe to such a template is not only turning his back on global warming, he is acutely demonstrating that in some quarters Voltaire was right: sense is not necessarily common.
When we ignore economics, history and our own past successes, as some politicians and newspaper contributors in British Columbia are still wont to do, it is to weep.
Let’s stop ignoring. Let’s bring real common sense back to the forefront. And let’s vote accordingly.
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