We can do better at reducing emissions in Canada

By Letter to the Editor on March 31, 2021.

Editor:
We can do better at reducing carbon emissions. We must continue to try to.
Canada has emissions standards for vehicles. Many countries do not, such as Brazil, China, India.
Alberta has (had?) five coal-fired electric generating plants. China has thousands. India has hundreds. China and India are building more.
Our cities have a minor air pollution problem. Beijing can have days of thick, choking smog.
We do not have to be ashamed of how we are doing.
Why should Canada knock itself out of competitive standing against countries that are doing nothing to even strive for the standards we’ve had for decades?
Trudeau is being utterly lame-brained – or Canada-destroying – to further handicap our industries and our workers by putting on carbon punishments (“levies”) that suck money out of our pockets and pad the bank accounts of government employees who haven’t lost their incomes in the last 12 months, including MPs and MLAs and MOHs.
In the 2019 election, Trudeau’s campaign used a second aircraft to carry their physical platform and posters around, and apologized by paying money to polluting nations for “carbon credits”. In other words, the big-wigs in government pay with our money to keep on polluting on the “pollution allowances” of other nations that aren’t producing enough pollution of their own!
If there is to be any legitimacy to a carbon tax, it must be applied to wasteful, discretionary activities, not to the essentials that we have to engage in.
We need to travel to work, we need trucks to move product to market, we need to heat our homes in this non-equatorial nation.
We do not need to motor around the wilderness, we do not need to idle cars while chatting with people or waiting for someone, we do not need the hotel on Mayor Magrath Drive to burn torches, we do not need to buy gas-hog vehicles instead of a high-efficiency vehicle, we do not need to have auto races. It is these activities that should be hit with carbon levies; cosmetic uses, like those torches, could be prohibited altogether.
We could re-legalize incandescent light bulbs for the non-polluting heat that they generate.
Let’s kick out Trudeau and his cadre and elect people who realize Canada has nothing to be ashamed about when it comes to carbon emissions. We need to start lecturing the laggards like India, China and the oil-rich nations.
Geoffrey Capp
Lethbridge AB