Canada’s Carbon Price Working, So Of Course It’s Being Attacked::How Do You Defend A Working Carbon Price That’s Benefiting Poor People?
Canada’s Carbon Price Working, So Of Course It’s Being Attacked::How Do You Defend A Working Carbon Price That’s Benefiting Poor People?
But we see this exact thing happening in Germany right this moment. The Greens got into power as the party with the second most votes, and they get made the boogieman by everyone for everything. Why? Because they moved a ban on new oil and gas heating systems forward, as well as subsidizing carbon-neutral heating systems. They didn’t even introduce the ban, they just moved it forward by two years. They were getting sabotaged from the get-go and are facing constant attacks from all sides. The Greens most likely won’t make it into power the next election cycle. The conservative bootlicker party CDU will get the most votes and the near-to-full Nazi party AfD will get 30% of all votes. And all that backlash, because the Greens dared to do anything about reducing green house gas emissions.
I’m Dutch, and German energy policy is truly brain dead.
The Canadian policy is much better and more effective.
What’s the fundamental distinction if you don’t mind?
For one, Canada isn’t closing perfectly good nuclear plants prematurely. Germany could have saved a billion tons of CO2 emissions and billions of euros by just letting the last six plants run to their end of life.
Second, Canada didn’t risk their whole industry on Russian pipeline gas, which everyone warned Germany against and now the worst case materialized with the Ukraine war.
Third, Germany is pumping in a huge amount of free carbon credits into the EU ETS. And Europeans don’t get any benefit of the ETS fees.
The Canadian scheme directly kicks back part of the benefit to citizens, which makes it much more palatable
And fourth, the amount of subsidies that Germany is pouring into wind and solar energy just isn’t sustainable. It’s better to have carbon pricing and letting markets transition to low carbon energy, paid for by private capital.
Seriously, like how is German energy policy so bad? The whole things seems so poorly thought and implemented? I just don’t get it