Don’t make polluters pay
Regarding letter to the editor Dec. 15, “Its time to make polluters pay”.
Besides the fact that weather disaster deaths have significantly decreased since the industrial revolution, and that there have been many more recorded tropical storms before this revolution, there is absolutely zero factual evidence that “taxing” industries helps our environment at all, and in fact is shown to cause more poverty. Poverty causes more deaths than any tropical storm, especially in our current industrialized world. Using the “most costly weather event” as an argument, is a straw-man argument. Costs go up as infrastructure increases, therefore has no relevance in association to other weather events in the past.
350.org is multi-million dollar organization that gets very generous funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and is often criticized by other eco-activist groups around the world. If they wanted to really help, they would be rallying against the fact that 71 per cent of mining companies that are owned by Canada, many of whom use slave labour to mine minerals needed for the “clean” economy. Just another ‘Not In My Back Yard” initiative.
The only people who pay with increases in taxation to industry are average citizens, as we can feel currently. From multiple carbon taxes (food, gas, products, and more) set to rise 476 per cent by 2030, to local 0.5 per cent environmental taxation, these are passed to the consumer/citizen. Personally I cannot afford another taxation, and those calling for it may need to reassess their “punishments” to industry. One hundred per cent clean energy goals have been shown to further impoverish the poorest in the world, while creating multi-million dollar companies who buy, sell, and trade in the trillion-dollar carbon credit system. Clean your local streams, protect the local owl habitat, and let’s stop pretending that the western world, who benefited from oil and gas to become who we are, can just give that all up through taxation. All this “action plan” will do is impoverish average Canadians even more.
A. Richards
Duncan