The California/Quebec cap and trade market Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is counting on to fund her $8.3-billion climate action plan just crashed, again. This is the highly speculative carbon trading stock market Ontario will join next year that Wynne is relying on to fatten her government’s coffers by $1.9 billion annually.
This so it can fund its various and sundry green energy initiatives, such as subsidizing Ontario’s electricity rates by up to $1.3 billion – which isn’t actually a green energy initiative.
The problem now confronting Wynne is that in three of the last four quarterly auctions under the California/Quebec cap and trade carbon pricing scheme, only a fraction of the available carbon permits have been bought by industrial greenhouse gas emitters.
Since the sale of these permits is how governments make money from cap and trade, it means their anticipated revenues from carbon pricing have been repeatedly slashed by hundreds of millions of dollars, throwing the future of their green energy programs into doubt.
Ontario will hold its first internal carbon permit auction later this month, although it’s hard to see how even the Liberals could screw that up since they set all the rules.
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