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Comment by toomuchredbull | Hacker News Reader

As a Canadian, even I am surprised by how shallow the rhetoric of our PM is in terms of "building back better" and green future. He basically helicoptered an insane amount of money on the population for rampant consumerism and bailed out companies indiscriminately whereas built basically no transit, no green infrastructure whatsoever.

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> He basically helicoptered an insane amount of money on the population for rampant consumerism.

I take no issue with this. Keynes is right you need to prop back up aggregate demand, and keep people fed.

> bailed out companies indiscriminately whereas built basically no transit, no green infrastructure whatsoever.

That's the bad part. The demand-side stimulus should be indiscriminate because the supply-side policy should be extremely targeted. People buy whatever the good deal is, like an electric field pulls hardest on the stuff with the most charge. Its essential to to puppeteer the supply side so the environmentally good things are the good deals.

Yeah, one of the good things about just randomly throwing money at the crowd is that the crowd has a lot of brains and each brain can make the best possible decision for that person. There is no way a group of politicians is going to spend the money more efficiently.

However, without a serious CO2 tax a lot of that money will be allocated to CO2 intensive consumption.

Yup! Vigorously seek out and tax the externalities, helicopter money, and publicly administer natural monopolies (like transit, telecommunications, electricity, etc.).

It's a great simple recipe; amazing how much ink we spill beating around the bush.

Our PM also walks behind the US and reiterates whatever climate target they state, like X % by 2030 and y % by 2050. I have seen exactly 0 plan on how to get there. I suspect he'll retire in 2029.

Mostly carbon taxes, infrastructure investments, and small things like subsidizing electric cars (5k$), countered unfortunately by supporting pipeline constructions for Alberta.

So for example, the federal is funding the suburban train system in Montreal, and the tramway in Quebec City. Those projects will have a huge impact. And the federal will not fund the absurd proposed 10 G$ tunnel that Quebec wants to build.

Trudeau uses the excuse that "infrastructure programs do not fund roads, only public transport, it's not my fault if I don't want to support the program", but that's how it works: the federal mainly proposes policies that meet certain targets, and then provinces get funding in exchange for implementing those changes.

Do you think those policies are anywhere on the scale necessary to meet the climate change goals he has set out?

I don't know what his goals are but a sufficient CO2 tax can easily result in 20%-50% less CO2 emissions.

Sure, but those reductions will only be in the jurisdiction with the tax and will be matched by a corresponding increase in other jurisdictions. So if the goal is to migrate emissions to countries like China that don't have the tax, it's easy to do. If the goal is to reduce global emissions, then that's another matter entirely..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

I've been thinking about this, and if that CO2 tax results in that less CO2, who feels the brunt of it? What does it look like to people? Is everything 20-50% more expensive, so we buy less of it? Would be great to see the CO2 reduction, but I don't see our government going the route of forced austerity. I guess the idea is to then force low-carbon innovation to bring prices back down?

Any suggestions? I'm not going to argue with myself :) I merely explained my understanding of how federal policy works, the good and the bad, because I get rattled by cynicism.

Imo a great way to get things done in Canada is at the municipal level, but the money often comes from the federal. c.f. Montreal's current admin (I did my small bit, even ran for office)

I asked the question because I was actually wondering your thoughts, like, maybe I'm being too negative to think what has been done so far has been far from what's necessary. I wasn't trying to be cynical about it.

In terms of suggestions, the book Drawdown contains many. It lists 100 contributing solutions to climate change. I'm going to go read it again, but the gist is that there are no silver bullets.

Two things that were campaign and earlier year promises we've yet to see.. planting 3 billion trees, and ending fossil fuel subsidies.. those still haven't happened.

Yep, I agree. No silver bullet, and funding fossil fuels makes no sense (although part of me understand they want to avoid a situation such as in France, where it could could price hikes, inflation, and the population is not ready for it.. carbon taxes make more sense)

You don't say ey, the situation is approximately exactly the same here in Australia. In fact, 'gas lead recovery' is the closest we have a to 'building back better'.

Fellow Canadian, and can confirm: current Federal regime is all hat no cattle.

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