Dear Editor,

I continue to be dismayed by vote-gathering conservatives vehemently denouncing the Carbon Tax.  Surely the real point is that our species' intent to make the world inhabitable through climate change has to be addressed.  Those who chant nonsense such as "Technology, not tax!" are missing the real threat: our persistent, often mindless use of fossil fuels. 

No current technology at scale can solve this profound problem.  We need an everyday consciousness as to the damage our behaviour is doing to the future of all life on Earth.  That's why the gentle and affordable carbon tax is essential if we are to avoid the real taxes of burning our way to very temporary satisfaction with the illusion that we are masters of our only planet.

The real taxes caused by carbon emissions are just starting to kick in.  Rising home insurance rates are a direct function of the destruction caused by increasingly extreme weather:  the fires and floods may be elsewhere, but they cost us all.  Then there are the worldwide losses of   once dependable crops, heightened by human starvation and migration.  The over harvesting and carbolic acidifying of our oceans are a tax on everyone everywhere.  Again, the losses tax everyone when our profligate use of carbon-based energy in any form continues to rise unabated.  How much smoke to we need to breathe before we understand that a stable atmosphere cannot exist as a vast carbon dump.

The "axe-the-tax" folks will only make things worse.  Transportation, for example, should cost us more in order to cause us to live locally, not carbon-blast across the hemispheres, as does a lot of our food, so that we can luxuriate in tropical delusions for a week or so...  The environmental taxes are becoming overdue day by day, and our kids will pay beyond what we choose to understand if we listen to simplistic, craven conservative denialists, provincial and federal.  There will be no going back to business as usual. 

- Richard Youds, Comox