Mark Carney’s war against the fossil fuel industry is just the beginning

It is hard to imagine the global policy environment around climate change can get any wonkier through 2020 than it has been through 2019. The Oxford Dictionary declared the two-word slogan “climate emergency” to be the 2019 Word of the Year, although that was before the crash and burnout of the 25th United Nations’ intergovernmental Conference of the Parties (COP25) in Madrid. It’s a climate emergency, but let’s put the whole thing off until COP26 next November in Glasgow. Propelled by Greta Thunberg, who attempts to live without consuming energy, the 2019 extremist policy options range from $250-a-tonne carbon levies to new climate taxes on ice cream, restaurant dining, meat and alcohol. “Might taxing ice cream help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?” said a Globe and Mail column headline this week. The food tax idea is a bit of a retreat from an earlier Globe opinion piece that described climate change as a war that required such wartime measures as national rationing. -- More...