Up in the Air: B.C. Carbon Tax
Will the controversial carbon tax cost the Liberals – or kill the NDP?
It was the smog in China. B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell says – with apparent conviction – that he never had an epiphany on climate change. There was no single book (although he mentions Al Gore’s 1992 classic, Earth in the Balance), no single person, no transformational event that caught his attention. Rather, in 2006, he just started to feel the weight of evidence that climate change was one of the greatest environmental challenges that humans had ever faced.
But even while denying the single trigger during a late-March conversation in his Vancouver offices, Campbell immediately mentions a 2006 trip to China in which he endured a series of “hazardous air” days: days where particulate pollution exceeds 500 parts per million. For those who have not experienced such a day, imagine standing right behind a badly tuned diesel transit bus, inhaling particle-laden fumes that make you want to spit and that leave you – come the afternoon of the second day – suffering what seems like an advancing case of bronchitis.
Campbell understands the difference between smog and carbon dioxide. He understands that the kind of pollution that makes your eyes weep is different from the greenhouse gas that warms the planet. But travelling in China, he says, it dawned on him: “ ‘Hazardous air’ shows the effect that one person’s actions, repeated 16 million times, can have on the environment.”
Campbell also knew that B.C. had been feeling those effects in different and expensive ways. The province had been subjected to floods, fires and pestilence – a mountain pine beetle infestation that alone has destroyed billions of dollars’ worth of Interior forest – and the premier became convinced that something must be done. This doesn’t make him particularly special: almost every politician on
the continent proclaims a personal commitment to tackle climate change.
But Campbell walked the talk, and in February 2008 his party introduced a carbon tax – a measure that has enjoyed significant success in Europe but that was untried in North America.
To hear Campbell tell it, this was a relatively obvious choice. “A carbon tax is the most cost-effective regime,” he says. And a “revenue neutral” regime – one in which you shift taxes away from good things like income and onto bad things like greenhouse gases – “creates incentives for people to do the right stuff.” It was, perhaps, a little complicated, but Campbell concludes that, on balance, it was the right thing to do.
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