By Heather Exner-Pirot, June 6, 2023

People in industry have called the government’s mandates for reducing emissions, charitably, a regulatory stack of pancakes; or derisively, a Frankenstein of policies over-ambitiously mashed together, with each one adversely affecting the other.

Any of these mandates is not a too-terrible idea on its own. The carbon tax may be unpopular, but it’s at least rational. It puts an explicit price on carbon, thus incentivizing lower-emission alternatives. It is technology agnostic, promising to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the most cost-effective manner possible.