A carbon tax—an ethical imperative

The following article was published in the Calgary Herald on January 7th under my byline. You can read it here, along with comments, or below.

A carbon tax allows us to clean up after ourselves

Like most people, one of the life lessons I learned at my mother’s knee was that if you make a mess, you clean it up.

Indeed, I am perhaps somewhat anal about it. If, for example, I see someone toss candy wrappers on the street, or see a kid write graffiti on a building, I find it offensive. I believe respecting other people’s property, whether public or private, is merely a matter of good manners and good ethics.

And yet I can drive my car down the street, or ride a bus — the vehicle spewing clouds of noxious gasses into the air, clouds of garbage, so to speak — with complete impunity. And most of my fellow citizens are quite prepared to allow me this extraordinary privilege.

Their generosity arises no doubt from the fact that the mess I am making cannot be seen. Therefore, it doesn’t exist. Out of sight, out of mind. But it does exist. It exists, and it is a far fouler mess than candy wrappers or graffiti. It poisons the very air we breathe, and worse, it contributes to global warming, thus endangering global society.

But how am I to stand accountable? I can hardly collect the emissions in a balloon on the end of my tailpipe and throw it in the bin when I get home. Fortunately, there is an answer, a rather obvious one — a carbon tax.

If I am unable to actually clean up the mess, I can still compensate for my behaviour by paying a tax that can be dedicated to reducing the ill-effects of the emissions.

If I am taxed on the amount I produce, and that tax is dedicated to reducing pollution, then I am, indirectly, at least, cleaning up after myself. I can then confront the candy-wrapper tossers and graffiti artists with a clear conscience.

And the carbon tax is as fair as it is ethically responsible. It allows us to compensate for our sins and it does so in a perfectly equitable way: the more you pollute, the more you pay. So forget for a moment the contribution of greenhouse gasses to global warming — personal responsibility for our actions in itself demands a carbon tax.

But we can hardly forget about global warming, can we? It is real and we are responsible for it, largely from our consumption of energy. We should, therefore, be prepared to account for our actions for this reason as well.

And this responsibility falls heavily on Albertans. We are, current oil prices notwithstanding, one of the richest provinces in one of the richest countries in the world. Few can more afford to pay for their sins more than we can. And our sin is great. Our province is the biggest greenhouse gas emitter in a country that is, per capita, one of biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the world.

Few are more individually responsible for the sin of anthropogenic climate change and few are more able to accept their responsibility.

With the recent election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, some voices have claimed that as the Americans will now shrink their commitment to combating global warming, we should drop the idea of carbon taxes.

Quite aside from positing Trump as a moral exemplar, we should base our conduct on what is right, not on the irresponsible behaviour of our neighbours. That, too, is one of those life lessons.

It is time we stood accountable for our littering of the public domain with gaseous garbage. A carbon tax is no more than acceptance of personal responsibility.