Nora Schmidt, wrote to you on Jan 26, “The Sky Is Not Falling.” She “believes” there is not a “serious enough threat … to warrant the concern and near hysteria” of Premier Rachel Notley. She’s concerned about the carbon tax and believes it is unnecessary.
Two scientists told her the temperature has increased less than two degrees since temperatures have been recorded, 120 years. This is true and it doesn’t sound like much, but it is in fact a lot. This is the reason that every country in the world agreed in Paris last year to take actions required to lower CO2 emissions, and eventually decarbonize our economies. These actions were supported by virtually every academy of science in the world and by all major scientific agencies and organizations.
The need for economic and cultural transformation is unprecedented, but obviously critically necessary. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has asserted that if we continue on a “business as usual” path of carbon emissions, “our world will be forced into an unknown, hard to predict and scary climate regime” (Grinspoon, 2017). The evidence for this is everywhere, namely: melting ice caps, out-of-control extinctions, a one-half degree of warming between 2013 and 2016, sea level rise, rapid increase in the number and severity of storms and wildfires, longer droughts, and floods which threaten billions of people.
There is obviously a need for governments to act and a carbon tax is a conservative solution to address the challenge of decreasing carbon emissions. Governments are free to impose regulations limiting emissions, but these are often considered intrusive and difficult to manage. As the world’s countries have agreed, doing nothing is not an option.
It is also apparent that we develop alternative energy sources and other ways to mitigate the environmental and ecological problems created by excessive greenhouse gas emissions. Funding for this global effort will be generated by the new tax.
Hugh Pepper
