Daily Score Blog

The David Suzuki Foundation just released a new report on the state of British Columbia's wildlife. The title pretty much says it all: "Rich Wildlife, Poor Protection." To take just one example of the problem straight from the press release:

B.C. has lost 49 known species and subspecies since pre-settlement (including the Dawson caribou, greater sage-grouse and western pond turtle).

The problem is particularly acute in the province because -- and this is something that few Americans realize -- neither BC nor Canada has an endangered species act. So while American policymakers have been busy stripping away the ESA's power; Canadian advocates are still pushing to get the law on the books in the first place.

I should mention too that the Suzuki Foundation sets a high bar for quality, and this report is no exception. It correctly points up the contradiction between the province's impressive land conservation on the one hand, and the location of species that actually need protection on the other.

I'll also add that BC and the US Northwest can learn a lot from each other when it comes to wildlife protection. As Sightline's wildlife indicator and many maps demonstrate, the US Northwest is inches away from losing the last remaining caribou in the continental US; BC should take note and get serious about protecting the caribou's Rocky Mountain habitat farther north lest the Canadian caribou make like their American cousins -- and vanish. Just so, sage-grouse have already disappeared from BC, and nearly so from Canada entirely; meanwhile in the US, sage-grouse populations are so depressed that the bird's existence in many places, including Washington, is under serious threat from dozens of causes.

Coverage of the report in the Globe and Mail, here.

You can color me unimpressed by the big news today in the Globe and Mail: Quebec just became the first Canadian province to pass a carbon tax. For one thing, the tax is tiny, just 0.8 cents per liter of gasoline, and at comparably low levels on natural gas and diesel. (For non-metricized Americans, that's 3 cents per gallon.) So that makes Quebec's new approach not quite as aggressive as -- to pick just one example at random -- Idaho's 5 cent per gallon increase circa 1996.

Now in fairness to Quebec, the new carbon tax revenue, which weighs in at about $200 million, will be spent on seeking greenhouse gas reductions. That's a big improvement over previous gas taxes in the States, where the money normally gets shoveled back into roads.

Strangely, however, Quebec's government seems intent on preventing the tax from actually influencing consumer behavior. To wit:

Natural Resources Minister Claude Béchard called on the oil companies to be good corporate citizens and do their share to protect the environment by absorbing the cost of the new tax. “We call on their good faith and social responsibility.”

Wait, what? If by some bizarre turn of events the energy companies actually did absorb the full cost, that would mean consumers would receive no price signal whatsoever from the carbon tax, thereby nixing one of the principal reasons why carbon taxes can fight climate change. Presumably, energy demand would stay constant and so would greenhouse gas emissions. (Though I suppose the tax revenue can be put to work.)

I'm going to give the last word to an economic analyst who gets it right:

“Because of the lack of production in the province, refineries will pass the costs on distributors, who will pass them on to consumers,” said Andrew Neff, a Washington-based analyst at consultancy Global Insight. “To attempt to address climate change, the costs have to be passed on to the consumer at some point.”

Yep.

Two final notes. First, lest readers think I'm Canada-bashing, allow me to officially register my guffaws over the US agreement at the G-8 to "seriously consider" a European proposal to reduce greenhouse gases. Hoo boy, that sure sounds serious.

And last, for the title of this post I apologize to René Magritte and French speakers everywhere.