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Trudeau goes bold on emissions; Sheer attacks, but has no plan
The Trudeau government has taken the bull by the horns and imposed a carbon-pricing scheme on four provinces — Manitoba, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Ontario — which account for nearly half of Canada’s population.
Other provinces have their own mechanisms consistent with federal carbon-pricing targets. Ontario was one of those others until Doug Ford became premier and cancelled all measures designed to combat climate change. The result for Canada’s most populous province is a projected increase in carbon pollution, by the year 2030, equal to the emissions of 30 coal-fired electricity plants.
As Justin Trudeau’s Liberals promote their greenhouse-gas reduction plan, they point out that three of the cooperating provinces — Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia — are among the top economic performers in Canada. The Liberal message: putting a price on pollution does not kill jobs and growth. To the contrary, they say, taxing pollution actually creates good jobs.
This is a government that was elected on a pledge to focus like a laser on the economic well being of the middle class. And so, even as it takes steps to head off the global catastrophe a United Nations’ climate change panel so recently warned is imminent, the Trudeau government goes to great pains to emphasize its concern for ordinary families and their pocketbooks.
Government documents promoting its carbon-pricing measures offer few figures as to how much tax anyone will pay. What they emphasize is the need to prevent the huge and devastating damage climate change will bring, of which recent events like forest fires in B.C. and heat waves in Ontario and Quebec are mere harbingers.
The government does, on the other hand, go into great detail about the carbon-pricing rebates average families will receive, starting in the spring of 2019. Nearly three-quarters of Canadians, they say, will receive more money back than they will pay in increased fuel costs.
A two-tiered carbon-pricing system
The official opposition Conservatives claim to accept the science that tells us climate change is caused by humans. They even say they will, someday, tell Canadians their plan to reduce greenhouse gases. They are just not quite ready to make that announcement yet.
Instead of telling Canadians what they will do, Conservatives put all their energy into picking holes in the Liberal plan.
Their main line of attack is based on the fact that the government is imposing two types of carbon tax.
There is the levy of $20 per tonne of greenhouse gas, eventually rising to $50, on distributors of fossil fuels. Those distributors will, presumably, pass their increased costs on to consumers.
For large industrial emitters, there is a different mechanism, what they call an output-based carbon-pricing system.
What happens here is that the government sets an emissions limit for each industry. Companies that produce less than the limit pay no tax. Instead, they receive credits based on the difference between the limit and their emissions, which they can trade for cash with companies that produce more than their limit. Those latter companies will have a choice of paying $20 per tonne of emissions to the federal government, buying credits from other companies, implementing carbon offset measures (such as planting trees) – or undertaking a combination of all three.
The Liberals add the important caveat that the entire package of measures aimed at industry is calibrated, in their words, to “minimize competitiveness risks for emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industrial facilities.”
Conservative leader Andrew Sheer and his opposition colleagues have seized on that “minimize risks” part. They argue that the Liberals are giving an unfair special deal to large industrial polluters, while small businesses and ordinary Canadians will have to absorb the full brunt of increased fuel costs.
Conservatives hammers this message daily in the House.
On Wednesday, October 24, Sheer accused Trudeau of protecting “large corporate emitters by giving them a massive exemption from the costs that they will have to pay.” At the same time, he said, “small businesses who will face rising fuel and home-heating costs will have to bear the brunt of his new carbon tax plan.”
The Liberals do not bother answering this argument, which simplifies their complex carbon-pricing regime beyond recognition. Instead, they pillory the Conservatives for their refusal, since the time of the previous Harper government, to commit to any sort of climate-change measure.
As Trudeau put it on Wednesday:
“We are moving forward with putting a price on pollution … something the Conservatives were unwilling and unable to do for 10 years while in government…. They have no plan to approach the fight against climate.… They want to make pollution free again.”
A polarized campaign in 2019 could help Trudeau
The NDP and Greens both offer at least qualified support for the government’s most recent move.
The NDP successfully pushed for an emergency debate on the UN report on climate change, but has held its fire in the House on the most recent developments in the government’s carbon-pricing scheme.
When asked to comment, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh expressed concern over the more than $4 billion the Liberals paid for the Trans Mountain pipeline, suggesting that money could be better invested in alternative energy solutions. He also worried, in a general way, about the impact of carbon taxes on those least able to absorb the increased costs. He did not take issue with the principle of what the government is doing.
Green leader Elizabeth May was all for the most thorough solutions during the recent emergency debate in the House. Among other measures, she called for completely getting rid of internal combustion engines and ensuring energy efficiency and retrofits for every building. The carbon-pricing measures imposed on the four provinces might not be quite so radical, but May was still happy to give the Liberals at least a passing grade, while adding that there is “much more to be done.”
“Adequate carbon pricing is a start,” she said, “but we need to eliminate the use of fossil fuels altogether, especially in the production of electricity.”
When the Liberals last adopted a carbon-tax policy, they called it a “Green Shift.” That was a bit more than a decade ago when Stéphane Dion was leader. It did not work out at that time. The Harper Conservatives lambasted the Liberals for their “tax on everything” and won the 2008 election with an increased seat count.
This time, the Liberals hope public attitudes have changed.
Since they made a point of not changing the first-past-the-post electoral system, having solemnly promised to do so multiple times, Trudeau’s party also hopes a polarized campaign between those who want to save the planet and those who deny science will drive NDP and Green voters into their arms. The next election is a year away.
Karl Nerenberg has been a journalist and filmmaker for more than 25 years. He is rabble’s politics reporter.
Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of Naval Operations, rebuffed pointed interrogations by GOP lawmakers who grilled him over his decision to recommend sailors read a book deemed by some conservatives as anti-American.
The U.S. Navy’s top admiral also defended moves to address and root out racism and extremism in the forces as well as its efforts to bolster inclusion and diversity, which have prompted criticism from some conservatives and Republican lawmakers.
“Do you personally consider advocating for the destruction of American capitalism to be extremist?” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., asked Gilday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday, referring to a passage from Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist,” which argues capitalism and racism are interlinked.
Banks continued to interrogate the admiral over specific quotes from Kendi’s book, which was a No. 1 New York Times best seller in 2020, and statements he had made elsewhere in the past.
Visibly distraught, Gilday fired back:
“I am not going to sit here and defend cherry-picked quotes from somebody’s book,” he said. “This is a bigger issue than Kendi’s book. What this is really about is trying to paint the United States military, and the United States Navy, as weak, as woke.”
He added that sailors had spent 341 days at sea last year with minimal port visits — the longest deployments the Navy has done, he said.
“We are not weak. We are strong,” Gilday said.
Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., also challenged the admiral by citing specific quotes from the book and asked him how those ideas laid out by Kendi would further advance or improve the Navy’s power.
Gilday responded by arguing the importance of transparency and open dialogue about racism.
“There is racism in the Navy just as there is racism in our country, and the way we are going to get out of it is by being honest and not to sweep it under the rug,” he expounded, adding that he does not agree with everything the author says in the book.
The key point however, he said, is for sailors “to be able to think critically.”
The exchange was the latest in vociferous complaints from some conservative leaders and lawmakers who suggest the armed forces are becoming a pawn for the country’s culture wars and “wokeness” ideology, as the military takes steps to address issues of racial inclusion, extremism, racism and white supremacy.
And only last week, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., accosted Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin about Kendi’s book, which Cotton said promoted “critical race theories” at a different Senate Armed Services Committee hearing where Austin was testifying.
Days earlier, Cotton and Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas — two combat veterans — launched a “whistleblowers” online platform to report examples of “woke ideology” in the military.
“Enough is enough. We won’t let our military fall to woke ideology,” Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, said in a tweet.
Also in February, Austin instructed a one-day stand-down across the Defense Department pausing regular activities to address extremism and white nationalism in the ranks — an issue Austin declared as a priority after a number of rioters at the U.S. Capitol in January were found to have military backgrounds.
The stand down completed in April was an effort to better understand the scope of the problem of extremism in the ranks, Pentagon press secretary John F. Kirby said in a briefing then.
Earlier, Austin had revoked a ban on diversity training for the military.
More recently, in May, a U.S. Army animated ad focused on soldier diversity — featuring the real story of a soldier who enlisted after being raised by two mothers in California — drew criticism and political backlash from some conservative lawmakers.
“Holy crap,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in a tweet. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea. . . .”
Cruz was referring to a TikTok video that compared the U.S. Army ad with a Russia campaign that showed buff soldiers doing push-ups and leaping out of airplanes, adding that the contrast made the American soldiers “into pansies.”
The confrontation Tuesday is also the latest in reproaches by Rep. Banks, who is a Naval Reserve officer, and other GOP members over Gilday’s recommendation to include Kendi’s book in the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program.
In February, Banks sent a letter to Gilday arguing that the views promoted in the book are “explicitly anti-American” and demanded Gilday explain the Navy’s decision to include it on the reading list or remove it.
Gilday responded to Banks in a letter obtained by Fox News saying that the book was included on the list because “it evokes the author’s own personal journey in understanding barriers to true inclusion, the deep nuances of racism and racial inequalities.”
Lamborn and Rep. Vicky Hartzler, D-Mo., also wrote a letter to the admiral to convey their concern about the inclusion of Kendi’s book as well as Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Jason Pierceson’s “Sexual Minorities and Politics.”
The GOP lawmakers argued the books “reinforce a view that America is a confederation of identity categories of the oppressed and their oppressors rather than a common homeland of individual citizens who are united by common purposes,“ Lamborn and Hartzler wrote, according to Fox News.
Our understanding of events refines with time. New developments reframe the issues, and prompt reassessment of the solutions applied, their design and outcomes. What does looking back on the 1991 reforms in 2021 tell us?
For three decades, India celebrated and criticised the 1991 reforms. The reformers of 1991 say that the idea wasn’t only to tide over a Balance of Payments (BOP) crisis; the changes they brought in went beyond the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) conditionalities for the bailout. The reforms, they insist, were ‘home-grown’. In the years leading up to 1991, technocrats in government had been thinking and writing about how India’s economic policies had been blocking the country’s rise to potential and the structural changes needed. If the broad range of reforms—including tearing down the industrial license permit raj, an exchange rate correction, and liberalising foreign direct investment and trade policies—could be launched within a matter of days of a new government joining office, they argue, it is because the blueprints were ready, waiting for the go-ahead from the political leadership.
The reformers of 1991 say that the idea wasn’t only to tide over a Balance of Payments (BOP) crisis; the changes they brought in went beyond the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) conditionalities for the bailout.
At least two well-regarded technocrats that were important in the 1991 reforms disagree—publicly and in off-the-record conversations. In a media interview last month, one of them, the economic adviser in the reforms team, Dr Ashok Desai, suggested that if there were any reformers in government before the IMF “forced” India to liberalise in 1991, “they hid themselves very well”. According to him, after the BOP crisis was resolved, finance minister Dr Manmohan Singh turned “dead against reforms”.
The multiple versions of the reforms story make it difficult to separate fact from romance. It cannot be disputed, though, that the 1991 BOP crisis was a turning point for the economy. India had tided over BOP crises earlier with loans from the IMF, repaid them prematurely, and avoided going through with the bailout’s conditionalities. 1991 was singularly different because India was on the brink of default, which is likely to have forced politicians to set politics aside and listen to technocrats. Any default on external obligations would have meant hurting India’s credibility grievously and an inescapable sense of national shame. The government probably took the view that there was no choice other than to take corrective steps. Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao named Dr Manmohan Singh, who had been a technocrat in government and was well regarded in global policy circles, as his finance minister. Dr Singh clearly had the Prime Minister’s, his party’s and the IMF’s trust. Records irrefutably show that the Congress party’s acceptance of the reversals in the interventionist economic policies of the first four post-Independence decades was not secured by the Prime Minister. He had delegated the task of tackling doubts and resistance within the party to his ministers, in particular, the finance minister and the commerce minister, and an aide in his office. The finance minister defended the reforms on the floor of the house in Parliament.
National Public Radio (NPR) ignited a social media firestorm Thursday night over a tweet that appears to mock capitalism, despite taxpayer dollars accounting for much of the organization’s annual budget.
The outlet posted a story titled “And Now, Crocs With Stiletto Heels” that explores a curious new collaboration between luxury fashion brand Balenciaga and Crocs, the rubber slipper company responsible for fashion faux pas among the millions of comfort-clinging owners nationwide.
The caption accompanying the article, which was written in both uppercase and lowercase letters, appears to mock the collaboration: “CaPitAliSm bReEds InNovAtiOn,” it reads.
The tweet’s language sparked outrage on social media, with figures like conservative Tim Young calling out the irony in NPR’s three-word post.
“You wouldn’t exist without capitalism, clown who is tweeting on behalf of NPR,” he wrote.
“Job at public news station wouldn’t exist wo capitalism,” another user echoed. “Are you guys ok?”
“Our tax money shouldn’t pay for this,” one person expressed.
“It’s still a hell of a lot better than communism at breeding innovation, even if some of the products are silly,” one woman fired back.
