‘Effective’ tool

Dear Editor:

RE: Money, April 15.

Dushan Divjak asked how sending money to Ottawa would alter billions of years of change on Earth.

About four billion years of change gave us a beautiful planet to share with all manner of plants and animals, but in approximately the last 200 years we have been industriously and greedily mucking it all up.

We are discarding millions of tonnes of plastic into the oceans; we are dumping toxins and sewage into our lakes and rivers. We are destroying insect, animal and plant species at alarming rates. And now, we are trying to fry everything by pumping mega tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It’s the change we humans have made, particularly in our own lifetime, that we have to stop or reverse.

There are many tools we should be using to address the climate crisis, and one of the more effective ones is a steadily-increasing carbon tax, that will give industry and consumers time to adjust their habits, and a rebate that will help those with lower incomes.

Now that the Conservatives have finally decided that a carbon tax is a good idea, it’s unlikely you will be able to avoid sending money to Ottawa – unless, of course, you stop burning fossil fuels.

Ron Moore,
Hillsburgh