Hey, Steve Harper, are you listening? The World Bank is calling. They want Canada, and every other country, to start putting values, okay price tags, on all their natural capital.
Forests, peatlands, coasts, water, wildlife - everything should be costed out. That way you can do a bit of math and figure out the mega-billion giveaways you've been doling out as freebies to industry- outfits like the Tar Sanders. You should be handing them an invoice, payment due in 30-days.
It's not a tax, nothing of the sort. It's simply them paying the value of what they're getting that belongs to Canada and the Canadian people. Yes it may be reflected in somewhat higher prices but that should be more than offset by the funds remitted by the users of our natural capital.
"Placing a monetary value on natural ecosystems is a key step on the road to "green" economic growth, according to the World Bank, which published a report on green growth on Wednesday at a conference in Seoul, Korea.
"By making such estimates, countries can develop policies that ensure the pursuit of economic growth does not occur at the expense of future growth potential, by destroying natural assets such as water sources or polluting air, rivers and soil.
"Rachel Kyte, vice president for sustainable development at the bank, said that the patterns on which economic growth had been achieved in recent decades were unsustainable, because of the amount of environmental degradation involved.
"She said: 'At current rates, we are in danger of undermining the basis on which growth has been achieved in the last decades. We do not believe that current growth patterns are sustainable.'"
And let's not forget, Steve, to start putting realistic prices on carbon emissions and the second part, collecting that from major emitters. And you can start all this in the Athabasca Tar fields. Those suckers have got a huge water bill coming and a bigger bill for environmental degradation costs and for impacts on forests and wildlife (don't forget to bill the pipelines) and for imperilling coastal British Columbia. What? That would shut the whole thing down? Why, of course it will. That's because this is all a giant Ponzi scheme in which you're robbing Peter, the Canadian people, to line the pockets of Paul, the fossil fuelers.
But no, instead the Feds (and other jurisdictions) pick up the cost of "mitigation" as in the statement from the commissioner of the environment yesterday, currently estimated to be 7.7 billion for 23,000 sites, which I would think is leaving out lots and thus conservative (and not in the Stevie Conservative meaning of the word).
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand one can take to the bank the blather of Peter Kent who had the gall or stupidity to stand up in the House yesterday in reply to Vaughn's report and say he and Stevie (and Rona and Flaherty etc.) had it all well in hand. What a joke these guys are, but not in a "funny" ha ha way!