Pretty much all of those opposed to this “pollution price” we know as a carbon tax are not climate-change deniers. There is evidence throughout recorded history of proven climate change: From the recently (relatively speaking) discovery that the Middle Ages were actually quite a bit warmer that originally thought to the “Little Ice Age” which caused far colder winters than normal off and on from the 16th through the 19th Centuries.
It is nature that CO2 is extracted from the atmosphere by plants and converted into food through photosynthesis. What’s left over and released into the air by these plants is good old oxygen, a gas necessary to animal life. This is grade 4 science. There are still no conclusive studies however if the increased gas is beneficial or harmful to plant life.
Every living thing affects the environment around them. This is a non-debatable fact of life. Certainly, the number of life forms on the planet contribute to the rising levels. Exhalation and emissions are obviously the main factors, but something not mentioned by those who favor a price on carbon is the decrease in plant life due to heavy deforestation of green spaces. Simply put: The more trees that are clear-cut in the name of progress, the less plant life there is to take in CO2.
One single tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon per year. That is a lot of gas removed from the atmosphere. Think of all the trees lost due to clear-cutting in just the Amazon alone, never mind anywhere else in the world. In the ultimate irony, millions upon millions of trees are chopped down to make room for windmills and solar farms, both of which have shown to be woefully inadequate in producing enough energy for any given area. Not one single model this writer has researched has taken this into account when spewing out the increase in CO2 levels since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
The best the B.C. and Alberta governments and the federal Liberals can come up with to combat greenhouse gas emissions is to punish its citizens with an added tax. This carbon tax is then taxed itself: We are charged GST on it. We are paying taxes on tax.
This effectively kills the argument that carbon tax is revenue neutral. It isn’t. You are paying for it exponentially, in every single step taken from manufacture to transportation to the end consumer. Carbon tax increases fuel costs, which increases freight costs of goods and services. This increase in cost gets passed onto the consumer in the form of higher prices on everything that needs to be transported from one place to another, which is basically everything we buy.
The carbon tax has not resulted in the reduction of emissions anywhere. In British Columbia, emissions have actually risen 2.7 percent since the introduction of the tax in that province. Meanwhile, the United States has seen a reduction in gas emissions over the same period of time. That country walked away from the Paris Accords and has been outspoken against this extra taxation.
The carbon tax is a scam. It does nothing for the environment. More precisely, the governments are doing nothing for the environment with this money. There is no actual investment in clean energy research. The only plan is to punish people for heating homes in winter and getting to and from work. Meanwhile certain big industries – the heaviest “polluters” in Canada – are being exempted from the carbon tax. The reasoning is that the government doesn’t wish to drive investment out of the country. How is this not an admission that the tax is a failure?
Further proof of it being nothing more than a cash-grab for an out-of-control group of spend-thrifts is Justin Trudeau himself accidentally admitting – in French, in an interview – that Canada can do nothing to prevent “greenhouse gas emissions”. This is an even starker statement when you realize that Canada’s carbon emissions make up 1.6% of the global total output. This happens to be negated by our Boreal forests which absorb 2% of the total global output, meaning Canada is already doing its part, naturally, to help reduce emissions.
All of this leads to one simple fact: A carbon tax is nothing more than finally taxing the air we breathe (out). If you are actually serious about reducing the amount of carbon in the air, plant a bunch of damn trees.
0
795
20