Economy
Ottawa should abandon unfeasible and damaging ‘net-zero’ plan
From the Fraser Institute
A high-power AI chip uses as much electricity per year as three electric vehicles (and by the way, one EV per household would double residential electricity demand)
According to the Trudeau government’s plan, Canada will reduce greenhouse gas emissions to “net-zero” by 2050, largely by “phasing out unabated fossil fuels.” But given current technologies, virtually all fossil fuels are “unabated”—that is, they generate greenhouse gases when burned. So basically, the plan is to phase-out fossil fuel use, use wind and solar power to power our lives, and transition to electric vehicles.
But this plan is simply not feasible.
In a recent study, Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, spotlights some uncomfortable realities. Since the Kyoto Protocol was enacted in 1997, essentially setting the world on the path to net-zero, global fossil fuel consumption has surged by 55 per cent. And the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption has barely decreased from 86 per cent to 82 per cent. In other words, writes Smil, “by 2023, after a quarter century of targeted energy transition, there has been no absolute global decarbonization of energy supply. Just the opposite. In that quarter century, the world has substantially increased its dependence on fossil carbon.” It’s worth noting that Smil is not some “climate denier”—he’s a strong believer in manmade climate change, and sees it as a serious danger to humanity.
In another recent article, Mark Mills, renowned energy policy analyst, boldly declares, “The Energy Transition Won’t Happen,” in part because developments in computing technologies such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) will require more energy than ever before, “shattering any illusion that we will restrict supplies.” Mills provides some eye-popping examples of how cloud and AI will suck up vast amounts of energy. A high-power AI chip uses as much electricity per year as three electric vehicles (and by the way, one EV per household would double residential electricity demand).
And chip-maker Nvidia, Mills observes, produced some five million such chips in the last three years, and market demand for them is soaring. The appetite for AI chips is “explosive and essentially unlimited.” The data centres that power cloud computing are also mind-boggling in their energy use, each with an energy appetite often greater than skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building. The largest data centres consume more energy than a steel mill. And the energy used to enable one hour of video (courtesy of all that cloud computing) is more than the share of fuel consumed by a single person on a 10-mile bus ride.
And yet, on the march towards the unreachable goal of net-zero, government policies have forced out coal-power generation in favour of more costly natural-gas power generation, significantly increasing Canadian’s energy costs. Shifting to lower-GHG energy generation has raised the cost of power, particularly in provinces dependent on fossil-fuel power, while the federal carbon tax drives up costs of energy production. And all at a time when significant numbers of Canadians are mired in energy poverty (when households must devote a significant share of their after-tax income to cover the cost of energy used for transportation, home heating and cooking).
No government should base public policy on wishful thinking or make arbitrary commitments to impossible outcomes. This type of policymaking leads to failure. The Trudeau government should abandon the net-zero by 2050 plan and the never-gonna-happen fossil fuel phase-out, and cease its economically damaging energy, tax and industrial policies it has deployed to further that agenda.
Author:
Business
Trudeau’s new tax package gets almost everything wrong
From the Fraser Institute
Recently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced several short-term initiatives related to tax policy. Most notably, the package includes a two-month GST holiday on certain items and a one-time $250 cheque that will be sent to all Canadians with incomes under $150,000.
Unfortunately, the Trudeau government’s package is a grab bag of bad ideas that will not do anything to get Canada out of the long-term growth rut in which our economy is mired. There are too many to list all in one place, but here are four of the biggest problems with Prime Minister Trudeau’s tax plan.
- It reduces the wrong taxes. When it comes to economic growth, not all taxes are created equal. Some cause far more economic harm per dollar of government revenue raised than others. The government’s package creates a holiday on the GST for some items (only for two months) which is a mistake given that the GST is one of the least economically harmful components of the tax mix. Canada’s recent growth record is abysmal, and boosting growth should be a primary goal of any changes to tax policy. A GST cut of any duration fails this test relative to other tax cuts.
- Temporary tax holidays shift consumption in time, they don’t boost growth. The government’s GST reduction is actually a short-term tax holiday on certain items that will last two months. There are decades worth of economic research showing that when governments create short-term tax breaks, they may change the timing of consumption, but they won’t contribute to actual economic growth. Shifting consumption from the future to the present won’t help get Canada out of the economic doldrums. This is particularly true of the Trudeau tax holiday since purchases that Canadians may have made after the two-month holiday period will simply be shifted forward to take advantage of the absence of the GST. As noted above, there are better taxes to cut than the GST, but no matter what taxes we are talking about permanent reductions are vastly superior to temporary tax cuts like short-term holidays.
- One-time tax rebates don’t improve economic incentives. Perhaps the worst element of the Trudeau government’s announcement was a plan to send $250 cheques to all Canadians earning under $150,000. One-time tax rebates are a terrible way to provide tax relief. When you cut income tax rates, you improve incentives for people to work and invest because they get to keep a larger share of their earnings. This helps the economy grow. One-time rebates that you get regardless of the economic choices you make has no similar effect. This means that the rebate with its $4.7 billion price tag won’t help Canada’s poor growth performance.
- It borrows from the future to give to the present. The federal government is currently running a large deficit. This raises the question of who will have to pay the $4.7 billion bill for the one-time payments announced today. The answer is that the government will have to borrow the money and therefore future taxpayers will have to either pay it off or service the extra debt indefinitely. The money the Trudeau government will send out won’t come out of thin air, it’ll have to be borrowed with the burden falling on future taxpayers.
The Trudeau government got one thing conceptually right, which is that there are advantages to reducing the tax burden on Canadians. Unfortunately, the policy package it has put forward to provide tax relief gets everything wrong. It reduces the wrong taxes, shifts taxes temporally rather than cutting them, does nothing to improve economic incentives, and burdens future taxpayers. With the holiday season around the corner, this attempt at a gift to Canadian taxpayers is the economic equivalent of a lump of coal in the stocking.
Authors:
Business
Carbon tax bureaucracy costs taxpayers $800 million
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
By Ryan Thorpe
The cost of administering the federal carbon tax and rebate scheme has risen to $283 million since it was imposed in 2019, according to government records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
By 2030, the cost of administering the carbon tax is expected to total $796 million, according to the records.
“Not only does the carbon tax make our gas, heating and groceries more expensive, but taxpayers are also hit with a big bill to fund Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s battalion of carbon tax bureaucrats,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Trudeau should make life more affordable and slash the cost of the bureaucracy by scrapping the carbon tax.”
The government records were released in response to an order paper question from Conservative MP John Barlow (Foothills).
The carbon tax and rebate scheme cost taxpayers $84 million in 2023, according to the records.
There were 461 federal bureaucrats tasked with administering the carbon tax and rebate scheme last year, according to the records.
The CTF previously reported administering the carbon tax cost taxpayers $199 million between 2019 and 2022.
Projected costs for administering the carbon tax and rebate scheme between 2024 and 2030 are $513 million, according to the records.
That would bring total administration costs for the carbon tax and rebate scheme up to $796 million by 2030.
But the true hit to taxpayers is even higher, as the records do not include costs associated with the Fuel Charge Tax Credit for Farmers or the Canada Carbon Rebate for Small Businesses.
“It’s magic math to believe the feds can raise taxes, skim hundreds-of-millions off the top to hire hundreds of new bureaucrats and then somehow make everyone better off with rebates,” Terrazzano said.
The carbon tax will cost the average household up to $399 this year more than the rebates, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the government’s independent, non-partisan budget watchdog.
The PBO also notes that, “Canada’s own emissions are not large enough to materially impact climate change.”
The government also charges its GST on top of the carbon tax. The PBO report shows this carbon tax-on-tax will cost taxpayers $400 million this year. That money isn’t rebated back to Canadians.
The carbon tax currently costs 17 cents per litre of gasoline, 21 cents per litre of diesel and 15 cents per cubic metre of natural gas.
By 2030, the carbon tax will cost 37 cents per litre of gasoline, 45 cents per litre of diesel and 32 cents per cubic metre of natural gas.
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