With the provincial election in full swing, all parties are making environmental promises. The reigning Liberals are promising to:
• Create a tough new toxic reduction law
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6% below 1990 levels by 2014, 15% below by 2020 and 80% by 2050, e.g. by
- Continue to replace coal-fired electricity, doubling renewables and doubling conservation
- Build more rapid transit
- Provide rebates / tax incentives for energy efficient appliances and home improvements
- plant 50 million new trees by 2020
- Eliminate inefficient lightbulbs
- Encourage real time energy metering
• Work with Cancer Care Ontario and the Ontario Medical Association to identify, target and reduce the number of cancer-causing agents released into our environment
• Ban the cosmetic use of pesticides
• Implement the new Endangered Species Act, beginning with caribou habitat in the Boreal Forest
• Create stronger protections for threatened lakes like Lake Simcoe
• Consider applications by regional and county governments to grow the Greenbelt
• Support sustainable forestry by purchasing more FSC certified paper, and
Work with retailers to reduce packaging.
It’s good to see environmental issues staying high on the political agenda.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Nathan Muir
Neither the Liberal government nor any of the other parties has adopted the most important driver of reduced greenhouse gas emissions – carbon taxes. Carbon taxes would drive both industrial innovation and altered personal purchasing habits through polluter-pay pricing. Instead, we continue to spout political rhetoric about some future cap and trade emission system, under-fund transit, refuse to endorse Califormia tailpipe standards, and are subsidizing the production of muscle cars while promising green license plates. These are not tentative first steps: they are conscious decisions to favour the economic status quo rather than protect the planet by fast-tracking a shift to more appropriate technology.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007 – 07:14 PM
I think it is amoral to tax destructive behaviour as one would tax a luxury. Amoral activity should be regulated like illegal activity, not taxed. Taxes should be paid by the rich; not by criminals. Criminals should be in jail. Cap-and-trade of carbon pollution is pay-for-pollution. Those with deeper pockets can externalize the cost of polluting. The big business agenda and the World Bank however is driving the acceptance of pay-for-pollution because, in the case of carbon, it is $22 trillion market. Emissions trading is the culmination of the demise of environmental regulation.