It’s a phrase mumbled a thousand times across a thousand tense family dinner tables, “Your economists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Today, we put a price on carbon, tomorrow carbon pricing schemes have learned to open economic doors like fiscal velociraptors! Nobody will be safe. Roaming packs of taxes will barely pause to tear open our pocketbooks before moving on to rip the economy to bloody shreds! Or so the story goes.
In reality, not only have experts thought about if they should implement carbon pricing, they have already implemented carbon pricing, around the world. In the U.S., pollution pricing was used in the 1980s to address the problem of acid rain. European nations have used carbon pricing since the early 1990s, Asia, South America, and African countries are adopting them as we speak, or heat up, as the case actually is, and they’re in place right here in Canada, with the results showing that this particular clever girl “protects our health, maintains economic growth, and keeps life affordable for households,” as Ecofiscal puts it. Alberta brought in North America’s first carbon price in 2007. British Columbia followed suit in 2008, and then Quebec in 2013. The mundane truth is that 85 per cent of Canadians lived in a province with carbon pricing before a national carbon price policy was even a twinkle in the national policy eye.