OPINION: Justin Trudeau’s climate mess – by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail – June 22, 2019)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

How’s this for incoherence? Last week the Parliamentary Budget Officer reported that Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax – his signature initiative on global warming – won’t be nearly high enough to make a difference.

To get people to change their carbon-hungry habits, the tax would eventually have to double from the $50 level it is scheduled to reach by 2022 (if the Liberals are still in power, that is).

The government immediately denied that it plans to do any such thing. “The price will not go up,” vowed Catherine McKenna, Mr. Trudeau’s earnest but preachy environment minister.

Can it be that there’s an election on? Ms. McKenna, who has lately gone out of her way to link every flood and wildfire to global warming, instead promised that the Liberals will take other measures to save the planet, such as banning plastic straws. You’ve got to wonder why her head doesn’t explode.

So now, Mr. Trudeau is stuck with the worst of both worlds: a carbon price that’s irritating and also ineffective. “It’s always been something that I feared, that this government would design a carbon price … but they wouldn’t actually rely on it to do most of the heavy lifting,” Christopher Ragan told The Toronto Star. As chair of the influential Ecofiscal Commission, he has been one of the chief cheerleaders for a carbon tax.

For the rest of this article: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-justin-trudeaus-climate-mess/