Carbon is life. Liberals will tax it anyway
National Post, 19 December 2020
Given the vast amounts of polluting dry ice that the government is welcoming into Canada, might it be permissible to suggest, even as the government proposes to more than triple the carbon tax, that CO2 is not pollution?
May a mischievous query be permitted with the arrival of the coronavirus vaccine in Canada?
No, not about what happened to all those voices who rose as one to denounce U.S. President Donald Trump as deluded when he promised a vaccine before year end. It may be that the various infectious syndromes the Trump era brought to public life will linger long after he leaves the White House.
My question is about all that dry ice used to transport the Pfizer vaccine at ultra-low temperatures. Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide (CO2), which means that when it melts — “sublimates,” to be accurate — it releases carbon dioxide emissions. Big clouds of carbon-laden vapour, which is exciting as a theatrical effect on stage, but nevertheless an apparent existential danger accompanying the life-saving vaccine.
The critical question, then, from the exchequer’s point of view, would be: is all that dreaded CO2 leaching out across the land subject to the federal carbon tax? Solid and liquid forms of carbon — coal and oil and gas — that are burned for energy give off carbon dioxide. So, too, does dry ice. Who should pay the associated carbon tax? The pharmaceutical companies? The transport companies? The medical facilities where it is stored? The nurse who gives the jab? The indigent elderly?
The federal government considers CO2 a pollutant. Hence the carbon tax is described by all and sundry federal officials as a “price on pollution.” One dutifully refrains from the obligatory jokes about CO2 emissions from cabinet ministers being equivalent to methane-rich bovine flatulence, in terms of gaseous pollution.
Given the vast amounts of polluting dry ice that the government is welcoming into Canada, might it be permissible to suggest, even as the government proposes to more than triple the carbon tax, that CO2 is not pollution?
Carbon is life. Mammals exhale it. Trees use it. Decomposition releases it. Useful things — like coal, oil and dry ice — release it when used.
Leave aside the entire set of questions about CO2 and climate change. Examine what might be called the philosophical question. Carbon is life. To say that CO2 is pollution is saying that life is pollution. That view is congenial to ecological radicals, for whom human life is thought of as a cancer on the planet, but it ought not be the position of a democratic government, which governs in the name of the people. The people are not to be considered pollution generators.
In addition to philosophy, there are practical questions, too.
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