I strongly advocate and support stiff carbon taxes, carbon taxes large enough to do the job they’re ostensibly intended to do. I understand Mark Jaccard’s point, repeated over many years, that we have to phase carbon taxes in gradually, ratcheting them up over time, to avoid undue shocks to the economy or, more germanely, to the political system, and I suspect he and I would end up at the same level of carbon taxation in the end, but I’m inclined to disagree with him on the scheduling: I think the economy would actually respond extremely quickly and very well to a large, hard carbon tax imposed very suddenly, provided capital is made available very generously to companies and entrepreneurs who are willing to respond with investments in green technology. I have far more faith in markets, really, than do all the carbon-tax-hating market-god ideologues out there. I’m not motivated by a fear of changes in economic incentives; I’m much more interested in what happens to the biosphere if we don’t let go of that fear and create the conditions that will stimulate everyone, everywhere, to get to work on solving the damn problem.

I think we could move from a brown energy economy to a green energy economy with amazing speed, and that in fact we have nothing to fear from a large carbon tax: on the contrary, provided capital is made generously available for green energy investments, we would experience an unprecedented economic boom that would last for many years as we set about rebuilding our entire energy infrastructure and manufacturing processes on a low-carbon-emissions basis. It would be “all hands on deck” for years to come. It would be awesome.

We could easily set up the conditions to unleash the monumental forces of free-enterprise capitalism in solving the carbon emissions problem. In Canada, this could be achieved via a new low- or no-interest, large-scale green investment lending mission for the Business Development Bank of Canada, and a large pool of venture capital funds raised from a stiff carbon tax applied to fossil-fuel industries, in concert with a carbon tax somewhere between $50 and $100 a tonne.

I keep waiting for people to wake up to this, to lose their fear and embrace the future. And to stop pretending that the threat of abrupt, horrifically destructive GHG-driven climate change will go away if we pretend it doesn’t exist — if we just agree to pretend that climate science is a hoax, that the prognoses of the great majority of working climate scientists, based on several intersecting lines of empirical evidence, that increasing GHG levels will cause the extinction of most species on this planet and fuck up our grandchildren’s future, is somehow a Big Lie perpetrated by a conspiracy of thousands of scientists from dozens of countries who have met somewhere in secret and agreed to falsify all their results and lie to the public (a completely, entirely, thoroughly ridiculous proposition to anyone who has actually ever met a working climate scientist or who has any idea of how the culture of science functions).

We are setting about radically changing the conditions of life on this planet because fools committed to a stale ideology are so entrenched in their own dogmas, and so ignorant of the culture of science, and so intellectually lazy, and so committed to their self-imposed identities as, for example, “oilmen” rather than showing any willingness to redefine their careers and retune business planning skills as sustainable energy production engineers or financiers, and so motivated by fear and greed and short-sightedness, instead of by hope and creativity and a sense of adult responsibility to their own grandchildren, that they’re blind to the fact that the challenge of rebuilding our economy on a minimal-carbon-emissions basis is a megalicious business opportunity of unprecedented scale, and not in fact something we need to fear at all. We should all be stoked to the max at the opportunities this presents. And all we need to do to activate those opportunities and release those energies, overnight, is to set up a level playing field whose boundaries are defined by a carbon emissions tax somewhere between $50 and $100 a tonne. What the hell are we waiting for?

I’ll tell you what we’re waiting for: Leadership. We’re waiting for leaders with the intelligence and the balls and the sheer political ‘game’ to explain this to people, leaders who will help people let go of their misguided collective fears and stop listening to these nutty Terence Corcoran types who are telling us constantly to fear change, as if by denying the seriousness of climate change we could stop massive change from happening.

We need leaders who will persuade people to stop clinging obsessively to a thoroughly unsustainable fossil-fuel-powered status quo that has never been, and could never be, more than a passing phase in the history of humanity, given the fact that fossil fuel resources are finite in any event. We need leaders who will show the way and give us permission to replace our instinctive fear of change and our illusion that we can keep doing what we’re accustomed to doing, who can kill our obsessions with stale ideologies and call us out and get us to step up displace our fears with hope and determination, and unleash a flood of vibrant pragmatism, energetic entrepreneurialism, and capable hands building new technology.

Leaders like that are already emerging all over the place. All we need is a serious carbon tax and the game will be on! Reconstruction can commence immediately; all the requisite technology is already waiting in the wings. I ask again: What the hell are we waiting for?