According to the Globe and Mail, three provinces are working independently to introduce a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade system that would price carbon. Along with Ontario and Quebec, the province of British Columbia will join California and New Mexico as part of the “Western Climate Initiative”.

The most frustrating part of learning about this is that British Columbia already has a carbon tax, which currently sets a price on carbon at around $20 per tonne of CO2 emissions. That price is set to rise to $25 per tonne in 2011, and $30 per tonne by 2012.

According to the BC government website, the carbon tax will top out at 7.24 cents a litre for gasoline at the pump by 2012. But although some people living outside of the province might think the tax only applies to gasoline, the list is much larger and more comprehensive than that.

Diesel will be 8.27 cents per litre, along with light fuel oil. Heavy fuel oil will rise to 9.33 cents per litre; aviation gasoline to 7.34 cents; jet fuel to 7.87 cents; kerosene to 7.68 cents. But it doesn’t stop there.

Home owners pay $1.49.64 per Gigajoule on natural gas heating, widely touted as a “clean energy”. We also pay taxes if we buy propane for our barbecues, butane, ethane, pentane, and oven gas. Hell, the province will charge $62.40 in taxes for each tonne of whole rubber tires.

The carbon tax has already pushed Vancouver to the distinction of having the highest gasoline prices in the country. Not that it’s managed to magically remove cars from the road, as the B.C. government had predicted. If anything, the roads have never been more congested.

The problem with energy consumption taxes is that Canada is heavily dependent on non-renewable energies, and the government isn’t really offering us any alternatives. So the carbon tax has the effect of increasing our overall tax burden, without having any positive environmental effects whatsoever. In fact, in 2008, B.C. was the only province to increase emissions in Canada.

Energy taxes are responsible for inflation in the province, as the costs to business are passed on to consumers. The transportation costs of delivering food aren’t swallowed by the food industry. They distribute that increased cost in each item that arrives in the supermarket. So when you wonder why your B.C. grocery bill is $250 a week, a part of that cost must be factored into the carbon equation.

A carbon market would likely act in very much the same way, but with much worse potential pitfalls. Carbon trading manipulation can lead to people “playing the market” in order to earn millions of dollars, and would pave the way for “green lobbyists” trying to get the government to subsidize their industries. None of that will do anything toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s just moving a fictitious commodity price around.

It’s particularly disturbing that the federal Conservatives are entirely on board with this scheme. They must realize how poorly the European carbon market has fared, and how much it will affect the common taxpaying mule. Yet we still have Jim Prentice representing the Conservative Party’s continued policy of pandering to pie-in-the-sky ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with stopping global warming, whether that be real or fictitious.