Vancouver, Canada
Friday, December 20, 2007
As always, it's good to see the churches rallying around the popular issues of the day. The headline in Thursday's Vancouver Sun is "IMPOSE A CARBON TAX, CHURCHES URGE GOVERNMENT", and "Saving planet a sacred duty, Anglican and United officials say." No doubt the government (provincial, it seems) will listen closely to this helpful plea, and wonder again why, when we can't manage our own affairs, we're so free with advice. If you think about it for a moment, you'll see that church buildings are the worst offenders in the country. We specialize in energy-expensive, drafty, old and inefficient architecture. not much of an example if we actually wanted to do something about the problem rather than talk about it.
My wife, Aldyen Donnelly, has been taking up room on the Op-Ed page of the Financial Post lately, in an interesting dialog with Mark Jaccard, a prof from SFU. Naturally the fuss is about climate change and government policy.
Dr Jaccard is a carbon tax advocate. His idea is to stick a heavy tax on things like gasoline, heating fuel, industrial energy consumption, so that people and businesses will be motivated to use less, or maybe find some greener form of energy. Aldyen points out two problems: carbon taxes are highly regressive (which means that low income people suffer the effects more than high income people) and that as a general rule, taxation or raising prices doesn't seem to do much to change people's behavior.
To the problem of regressive taxation, Dr Jaccard offers that governments will collect the carbon taxes and wisely use the funds to reduce income taxes for the poor and otherwise correct the imbalance the carbon tax creates. Of course, there is some history around specific-issue taxes in Canada. Anyone remember when we started a gasoline tax and the funds were to be dedicated to road improvements? (That was a $4.7 billion item federally last year.) Or the various provincial and national lotteries that were to benefit sport and culture? Generally governments have a nasty habit of taking taxes into general revenue, and doling them out according to the needs of the day. But it also costs a lot to run money through the government tax collection process and then back out the door as grants or subsidies. Maybe up to 30 percent is lost in the shuffle.
A large issue around home heating, which matters a lot as we move outside the Lower Mainland, is that low income people are the least able to make the changes to their houses or apartments to make them more energy efficient. Aldyen argues for a national "fix up the housing stock" fund to allow people to improve their dwelling places.
To change people's behaviour, Aldyen argues that raising prices, through taxation or any other system, actually doesn't do much. A good personal test might be to sit down and compare the driving you do this week, with gas at $1.20 a litre, against the driving you did this time last year when gas was at 90 cents. I'm guessing you're spending about the same time in your car. Not much change in behavior after a 33 percent increase.
Aldyen's message is that governments have the power to change all this by simply making regulations as needed. Car manufacturers are obliged to maintain a fleet average of so many miles per gallon. If they don't meet the targets, they can't sell the cars. And those regulations, of course, are the reason that fuel efficient cars actually exist (otherwise I'm pretty sure we'd be even more overrun with SUVs and the like.) There are many other places in the system where simple regulation can get the job done, with certainty and with care, under appropriate regulation of industries and consumers.
Beyond that, we are in a world of perverse incentives. The Alberta tar sands project is quite useful if you're looking to produce more gasoline, but it's highly subsidized and a huge contributor to climate change. The Americans hugely subsidize the production of ethanol from corn, which isn't a very good way to make ethanol anyway, and it's driven up the price of corn, a major feedstock for the rest of the agricultural economy. And so it goes.
It's a wide and important discussion, with huge potential impacts on our lives and the lives of our children. My hope is that those of us in the church will do what church people are supposed to do (other than offer up well meaning petitions and press releases). We can pray for those in our governments to be wise and thoughtful. We can model good behaviour by fixing up our buildings, our cars and trucks. We can engage with the discussion from a place of knowledge, by trying hard to understand the economics, by dealing in hard facts, and asking those with grand ideas to tell us how they're going to work out in real life.
Probably the most important, start to understand that solving the problem is going to take sacrifice. Major industrial enterprises are going to close. Jobs will be lost. Food will cost more. Driving will cost a lot more. Christians understand sacrificial life, albeit somewhat theoretically most of the time. But now it's time to get down to it.
Everyone gets that we have a problem, even government. Time to start working on solutions.
jrc
