OTTAWA - The Green Party is calling for carbon taxes that would increase gasoline prices by at least 12 cents per litre as a way to help avert what it calls global environmental mayhem.
"We need carbon taxes," Green Party Leader Elizabeth May proclaimed as she introduced her party's new climate change plan, entitled A New Energy Revolution to Avert Global Catastrophe.
"Right now the Green Party of Canada is the only Canadian political party prepared to state this obvious reality," said May.
At $50 per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, May acknowledged the carbon tax would hit consumers hard at the gas pump.
Under her party's plan, the proposed tax would double, to $100 per tonne, by 2020, thereby further increasing prices for gasoline and other fossil fuels.
But the money the measure would generate could be used to progressively reduce other taxes, and to offer Canadians tax incentives to reduce their own emissions, she argued.
"We will use those carbon taxes to reduce taxes elsewhere. We will reduce income taxes. We will reduce payroll taxes."
May urged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to adopt her party's proposals, and criticized the Conservative government's climate-change plan as a model for planetary disaster.
"Please steal these ideas," May urged Harper.
"This is no time to align ourselves with the laggards of the world," she said, referring to the environmental policies of U.S. President George W. Bush.
Harper was in Germany, where climate change was expected to be a divisive issue at a meeting of G8 leaders.
The prime minister has proposed intensity-based greenhouse-gas targets as a first step in tackling the climate challenge.
The intensity model is based on reducing emissions per unit of production. So, for instance, if a manufacturer tripled its production output but only doubled its pollution levels, its emissions intensity would actually drop.
That model would create environmental havoc, May warned.
"The reality is the position Mr. Harper is taking at the G8 summit right now, should other countries listen to him, we would have a global disaster," she said.
May acknowledged that introducing carbon taxes would be difficult, but she was adamant that it could be achieved, as other difficult things have been accomplished by other world leaders of past generations.
"This is tough. Meeting our Kyoto targets is tough," she said.
"But it's the kind of challenge that (former) President John F. Kennedy set before the United States when he said: 'We will put a man on the moon."'
Beyond carbon taxes, the Green Party plan also advocates:
- adopting a carbon trading market that also puts caps on the amount of carbon dioxide emissions large industries would be allowed to emit.
- supporting a global verification and certification standard for carbon credits.
- negotiating more creative ways of reaching Kyoto targets beyond 2012 by, among other things, ramping up use of solar energy and investing in electric vehicles and other low-carbon technologies.
- making up Canada's initial shortfall in meeting its Kyoto commitments by investing in clean development mechanisms in developing countries.
- retrofitting buildings to a high level of energy efficiency by 2025 and phasing out inefficient appliances and light bulbs.
The party also advocates methane taxes on landfills that don't capture emissions, paying farmers for methane sequestration in soils and removing subsidies for coal, oil, gas and coal bed methane.
