Rethinking Lifestyle

I’ve been reading A Real Plan to Protect the Environment, the plan the Conservative Party has just released. The plan is intended to conserve our environment, protect future generations from the effects of climate change, and make a real impact on global emissions reduction. Unfortunately there is little in this plan that suggests this is a truly conservative response to the looming climate change crisis. It reads much more like a partisan response to a perceived vulnerability within the Liberal Party – the Carbon Tax.

The Plan makes it very clear that the Conservative Party believes that human activity is responsible for the climate change crisis, and that the observations and recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change need to be taken seriously. It recognizes that a responsible government needs policy to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions. It seems this debate is over in Canada! Hooray! We are in agreement that something needs to be done to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

But overwhelmingly the plan perpetuates the illusion that there is nothing wrong, nothing unsustainable about our current lifestyle where we willy nilly consume the earth’s resources. The problem is merely that we are using the wrong technologies. Let’s develop the right technologies, disseminate them globally, and everything will be OK. We can continue our current lifestyle complete with increasingly oversized houses, increasingly unrestricted mobility, and other manifestations of perpetual growth.

The plan is anti-carbon tax. We expected this. Unfortunately the Conservatives argue with misleading information, maintaining that this tax will take money out of the pockets of struggling Canadians, when in fact, most of the tax collected will be returned to Canadians in the form of a rebate. Effectively the tax transfers money from high energy users to low energy users. I am a low energy user. There is no doubt that I have more money in my pocket because of the carbon tax.

The Plan proposes numerous incentives intended to stimulate the adoption and development of green ideas. Some targeting homeowners, others targeting industry. Who doesn’t like positive incentives. We all do! But the implementation of these incentives will require funding and a substantial bureaucracy. The plan does not say how much any of this will cost, and where these funds will be coming from.

I can envision the development of an entire industry devoted to assisting business and individuals in accessing and exploiting these incentive programs. For example, the Plan proposes a Green Patent Credit that will reduce the tax rate on income generated from green technology. Conceptually this seems good, but how is such a credit implemented? The big question is what will be defined as green technology and how will government determine whether income is in fact derived from green technology. Government will need to develop a team of experts whose job it will be to assess whether the tax credit is applicable in any particular case, and then another group of experts will emerge who will help business arrange things so it will qualify for the credit.

We agree that we need incentives to go green, both individually and corporately. We all agree that some technologies are more practical than others. The question is which ones should we embrace. The Plan assumes that government will determine which technologies will be appropriate. Until now it has been the conservatives who have reminded us that government does not, by and large, chose well. It has been conservatives who have argued that the market should be allowed to determine which technologies we adopt. Ironically, this Plan does not propose market based solutions. In this Plan, government will pick the technologies.

A carbon tax is a market based solution. Given the vociferousness of the Conservative Party attack on the Liberal carbon tax, I had hoped they would come up with an alternative market based solution. Unfortunately there is none of this in this Plan.

As we consider sustainable living, it is appealing to think we can transition to a sustainable lifestyle by merely tweaking our technology, that extravagant living is not the problem. Oh that it were so! And unfortunately we remain without the political leadership we need to find a solution.