2y ago

NDP to back Conservative motion calling for carbon price off all heat sources

www.ctvnews.ca

The New Democrats say they will back the Conservatives on a motion to pull the carbon price off all home heating until after the next election.

34 comments

I do not support this. They never should have pulled it off anything.
We've been telling people to go electric for years to be better off, and they just ignored it.
- Exactly, and because of the revenue-neutral nature of the Carbon pricing, this hurts all Canadians, and especially hurts the Canadians that are poor and/or care about being efficient and conserving resources.
  
  And if people are suffering, the solution is to increase the rebate (or increase it's frequency). If it ends up being revenue deficit temporarily, fine, still better than vanity exemptions like this. This breaks the whole model. It removes the incentive to switch for people already looking replace old equipment, it removes the reward for those who did change, and it creates a whole inefficiency of administration for figuring out which fossil fuel burning is "free" and which is taxed. That bureaucracy is just going to burn money that could have went into the rebates.
  Almost ALL brand new furnaces being installed even the most heatpump friendly places in Canada are NG or propane right now, and will continue to be for years to come. Even new home builds are virtually exclusively gas. This is taking away event he slightest incentive to change that.
- That's fair, but not everyone CAN do that even if they want to
  
  In case anyone is wondering
  Trudeau said the Liberals are increasing the maximum amount of funding towards the purchase and installation of a heat pump from $10,000 to $15,000. They will be doing this by adding up to $5,000 in "grant funding to match provincial and territorial contributions," which, according to a PMO release, would mean most households will be able to get their pump for free.
  https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/canada-doubling-carbon-price-rebate-rural-top-up-pausing-charge-on-heating-oil-trudeau-1.6618613
  
  And those who can't are also producing less carbon overall and therefore getting more back from the carbon rebate program.
  
  Exactly, you can throw all the incentives you want at me and I'd be happy to switch today, but my landlords don't care because they're not the ones paying the carbon tax.
- I get it, my 2010 Ranger gets 8L/100km, why would I trade that in for a $60k new car?
Very disappointed to see the federal NDP backing the climate-denying Conservatives in attacking the carbon tax on natural gas heating.
Canada's carbon tax is (mostly) revenue neutral - if you've average heating needs, you break even. So cutting it on heating is a de-facto subsidy on large, inefficient homes.
Revenue neutral carbon taxes won a Nobel prize in economics. Anybody with alternate ideas on fighting climate change: show me your Nobel prize.
But the modern NDP is left-populist. They want simple, brute-force top-down solutions to problems. They're big believers in "if you're explaining, you're losing". Any level of indirection in policy solutions is bad.
If unions didn't exist today, and Liberals proposed them as a solution for protecting workers, NDP would scream "no, we want direct top-down government workplace inspections, don't you dare charge me union dues!"
When obviously: do both. Both the econ-based bottom-up program and the top-down legislation.
If the Liberals want to reduce the tax on oil, they could make heating fuels a flat rate per BTU (or gigajoule, we're metric - 1 BTU is 1055 J, so a GJ is about a million BTUs).
Natural gas (CH₄) is 0.0373 GJ/m³. It's also carbon priced $0.1239/m³ -- this amounts to $3.32 per GJ.
Fun coincidence - there's about as much energy in an L of fuel oil as in an m³ of CH₄ - 0.0383 GJ/L.
Currently, heating oil CTax is $0.17/L. Pricing it per-GJ would reduce the CTax on a litre of heating oil to about the same as an m³ of CH₄ -- $0.127/L CTax.
Obviously pricing per GJoule of fossil-fuel would be a de-facto subsidy on less-efficient heating fuels, but it would mean the incentive is not to upgrade from oil to gas, but to upgrade to zero-emissions forms of heating like heat pumps.
And it would be a 25% discount on heating oil CTax, so rural people on heating oil would no longer feel "punished" by the CTax - they're paying the same per unit of heat.
Of course, this assumes rural grievance is rational.
- well said.
  The carbon tax is the lightest touch, least effort possible for addressing climate change, and to say "yea, but lets cancel it" is just kicking the can down the road for another 5 years.
  I heat via natural gas, and pay the carbon tax to do so. I'm ok with that.
Are the libs not going for pharmacare?

34 comments