May 11, 2008By Charlie Smith
This weekend, the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson wrote yet another column praising Premier Gordon Campbell’s carbon tax.
To Simpson, it sometimes seems that B.C.’s premier can do no wrong.
Simpson never demonstrated a great deal of interest in climate change until the past couple of years—most notably, when he hooked up with SFU professor Mark Jaccard and researcher Nic Rivers to coauthor Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge.
The authors advocated a carbon tax, long a favourite of Jaccard, a former chairman of the British Columbia Utilities Commission.
In the mid-1990s, Jaccard promoted integrated resource planning, which means full social and environmental costing of electricity generation. More than a decade ago, Jaccard was talking about a $25 per tonne tax on carbon—which demonstrates how far ahead he was of everyone else on climate change.
