Canada's government should double the
price companies pay to exceed limits on greenhouse gases because
the current cost won't slow pollution enough, the country's
leading environmental activist groups said.
Carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global
warming should cost at least C$30 ($30) a ton next year, and
reach C$75 a ton by 2020, according to a report today co-written
by 11 groups. The price could be set by imposing a tax on carbon
or through regulations with emissions trading, said Matthew
Bramley, director of climate change at the Pembina Institute, a
group that advocates for cleaner energy generation.
The price must be ``high enough to really change investment
decisions so that investments stop going into highly polluting
technologies,'' Bramley said at a press conference in Ottawa
today. ``The policies, including the regulations that the Harper
government has proposed to date, are far too weak to meet even
the government's own targets.''
Prime Minister Stephen Harper rejects a carbon tax. That
position was backed in January by Stephane Dion, leader of the
Liberal Party, the biggest opposition bloc. Harper's Conservative
Party government last year set regulations where the only carbon
price was an option for companies to pay into a technology fund
at C$15 a ton in 2010, C$20 a ton in 2013, then rising along with
economic growth.
Environment Minister John Baird last year pledged to
regulate all industries' greenhouse-gas emissions and cut them 20
percent by 2020.
Today's report echoed a January paper by a government
advisory group that said the government should consider a carbon
tax. The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy
predicted the price of carbon could rise to C$200 a ton by 2030
from C$20 a ton in 2015. Source
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