Andrew Jackson, in the Globe and Mail Report On Business, writes about carbon, taxes, troubled economies and his view of a prosperous future (or at least less dangerous one). To me, his thoughts are starting to seem like orthodoxy, and the truly radical views are held by those who advocate business as usual. What, he asks, would be the path to a lower-carbon world? And what would happen if we took it, and didn’t keep motoring along fossil-fuel freeway?
It is now often said that the environment and the economy are not in conflict. But it is even more true to say that addressing the crisis of global climate change in a serious way could revive a moribund global economy. . . .
. . . . But the world does, as the IMF underlines in a special feature on the energy transition, have a massive challenge to deal with in terms of the needed reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. . . .
The sheer scale of the needed energy transition is such that it could drive a global economic recovery. But only if our political leaders are up to the challenge.
Andrew Jackson is an adjunct research professor in the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University in Ottawa and senior policy adviser to the Broadbent Institute.
