It
didn’t take long for the prompter of yesterday’s blog post, “The carbon tax was
really nothing more than a tax grab, designed as a phoney green initiative, and
the government knew that from the start”, to pose a follow-up question to me.
The
response was:
That isn’t completely true. Initial design of
tax was to have monies available for companies to access for Research and Development etc
I
noted their wording of the response, which included … “isn’t completely true” … and ‘initial
design of tax’.
So
how much of what I said, did this person think was true? I’m not sure, but hey, let’s take a look at
just some of the grants, given to businesses in BC, by the Pacific carbon
Trust. And remember … this is money that
has in large part come from each one of us, through the carbon tax, which we pay
to the government.
Encana Corporation has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 85 per cent at a drilling program in northeastern British Columbia by conserving gas during drilling and reducing flaring. The system safely and reliably recovers up to 80 percent of the natural gas produced during a typical underbalanced drilling operation. This method reduces greenhouse gas emissions by about 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per well drilled.
IF
they are now recovering 80% of what was previously lost, was it not to their
benefit to do this anyway. This recovery
process provides them with more natural gas they can sell, so why was a freebie
give-away from the government necessary?
Pacific Carbon Trust has invested in an Improved Forest Management project that will result in the conservation of select old growth stands on TimberWest's private land. This is the first forest project to use BC’s Forest Carbon Offset Protocol (FCOP). The project is located on a 26,000 ha of Timberwest’s old growth forest free-hold property on Vancouver Island.
Just
in case you missed it in news reports sometime back, TimberWest had announced they were not going to harvest this wood, as they had determined it would be too expensive to do so.
PCT has contracted to purchase offsets generated from Randhawa Farms Ltd.’s greenhouse project. The greenhouse operator installed insulating curtains at its three greenhouse locations in Abbotsford to reduce the amount of natural gas used as a heat source. These offset activities reduce annual operating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions relative to the natural gas baseline.
Let’s
see … they add the insulating curtains, and that then reduces the amount of natural
gas they had previously required. Seems
like it should have been a project they would have undertaken in the first
place, to reduce their production costs.
