Seeker Blog

It’s been three days since the government of British Columbia announced it would impose a carbon tax and there are still no reports of civil unrest. No rioters roaming the streets of Kitsilano. No enraged snowboarders smashing up Whistler. No mobs in Victoria blazing a path of destruction to the provincial legislature.

Perhaps most remarkably, Gordon Campbell has not been strung up from a lamppost. He hasn’t even been dragged from his office and worked over. One assumes the premier has at least been burned in effigy, somewhere, and yet such an event has not been reported.

Astonishing, isn’t it? Who would have thought it possible?

Not most politicians. Carbon taxes kill careers. No question. Politicians of all parties and perspectives are dead certain of that. And they’ve treated carbon taxes accordingly…

Unfortunately, cap-and-trade systems are big, complicated things that require a bureaucracy to match. In a recent report by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, researchers compared carbon taxes with an “inflexible” cap-and-trade system (the simplest form) and a hybrid cap-and-trade designed to build in more flexibility. “A tax on emissions would be the most efficient incentive-based option for reducing emissions and could be relatively easy to implement,” the CBO concluded.

So a carbon tax is best, according to the research arm of the United States Congress. And how many presidential contenders have endorsed a carbon tax? Not one. Even Barack “Yes We Can” Obama has said no, we can’t. Carbon taxes kill careers, after all.

This near-universal fear is what makes British Columbia’s carbon tax remarkable. It’s not that it’s aggressive. Far from it. (It will be phased in slowly, starting at such a low level that it is expected to raise the price of gas by a mere 2.4 cents per litre this year.) But it is the first of its kind in North America.

European politicians haven’t been quite so craven. The United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway all have carbon taxes. Norway’s was put in place in 1991 and in the years since, the Norwegian economy boomed while its per capita emissions shrank. And no Norwegian politician has been strung up from a lamppost.

Neither has Gordon Campbell, so far. If his luck holds, and if his government is re-elected next year, North American politicians may realize that carbon taxes are not the career killers they thought they were.

[more from the Ottawa Citizen] And remember that the BC carbon tax is revenue neutral. It continues to amaze me that the press ignores this central part of the concept — perhaps 10% of the many reports on the BC carbon tax proposal even mention that the tax takes no money from the taxpayers.

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