Yahoo Finance Peter Foster: A rose is a rose is a … carbon crime?
If you haven’t bought those Valentine’s Day roses yet, Canada’s largest bank has some stern advice: Don’t.
This Feb. 14 passion killer comes from RBC’s Climate Action Institute. It was in an item attached to a press release last week about a “flagship” study of “Canada’s climate progress.” Which is to say, Canada’s forced stumble towards economic self-destruction. But first the roses.
Regurgitating a six-year-old article by a U.S. activist, RBC presents the allegedly shocking fact that roses imported from Colombia into the U.S. for Valentine’s Day generated emissions equivalent to those from 78,000 cars. RBC also notes that Colombia is the top source of cut roses in Canada. Thus they offer a “Hot Valentine tip … look for locally-produced perennials and tell your friendly florist to drop the plastic wrapping.”
Well, you don’t take a tip like that from a giant institution like the RBC lightly, so I set about looking for locally grown alternatives. But guess what: according to a well-placed source in the cut flower business, there have been no significant commercial Ontario-grown roses for over 20 years!
Why in the name of all that’s sustainable isn’t there more cut flower production in this country in winter? Is it the shortsightedness of Canadian romantics, or the naked greed of Canadian florists, concerned that there might be net-zero demand for $150 hothouse bouquets?
Locavorism — the belief that consuming locally-sourced produce is more virtuous — is one of the most facile examples of do-it-yourself economics. Adam Smith pointed out 250 years ago that you might well be able to produce Scottish wine from Scottish grapes, grown “By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hot walls.” The only problem was that it would cost perhaps 30 times as much as imported wine. And think of the carbon footprint!
We Neanderthal free-marketers once used to bang on about the nanny state. Now we have to face the Nanny Corporation, wagging its finger and telling us to eat our locavore greens, or in this case not to buy imported flowers. Which leads to the far bigger, but related, issue: the Climate Action Institute’s climate progress report.
Why would RBC appear so firmly committed to promote policies designed to cripple one of its largest customers, the fossil fuel industry, and, by extension, itself?
A big part of the answer lies in the identity of the star guest at the report’s launch: Mark Carney. Carney — former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, current chairman of both Brookfield Asset Management and Bloomberg Inc., World Economic Forum poobah and, perhaps most important, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance — is perhaps the most significant figure in forcing the green revolution in finance. He has warned that any company that fails to climb aboard might wind up as “climate roadkill.” RBC thus understandably wants to stay off the pavement.
But the revolution’s reign of error appears to be crumbling as voters, taxpayers and investors everywhere catch on to the fact that they are being led down a garden path to poorer and more constrained lives. Carney freely admits all this in his book Values.
The good news is that the RBC report confirms that the wheels are coming off the tumbrel. European farmers are in revolt; the Chinese economy is faltering under a glut of electric vehicles; Canadians continue to have (well-justified) range anxiety about EVs, and on and on.
Thus it is time to “Double Down.” If at first you don’t succeed, find out what you’re doing wrong, then do twice, or three times, as much of it.
The grand new concept, which allegedly had everybody at the report’s launch “buzzing,” is “taxonomy.” Not feeling the buzz? Actually, it’s just another Orwellian term for controlling private investment. The press release spoke of the “green seal of approval.” More important is the scarlet letter of Carney-disapproval. RBC wants the Trudeau government to tighten the taxonomic noose.
The report trumpets that green investment is going up. But that’s entirely due to increasingly tight regulation and bountiful government subsidies. Still, Canada has displaced China as “the world’s best place to build a battery supply chain.” All it took was a commitment of $35 billion of taxpayers’ money, or an estimated $4 million a job. Take that, Bidenomics! Anything you can subsidize, we can subsidize dumber. The problem is that Trudeau’s feds have dug themselves into a financial hole, so it’s time for the provinces and the private sector to dig a little — nay, a lot —harder.
Meanwhile that still doesn’t solve the problem of the lack of locagrown roses. Perhaps substitute a basket of root vegetables, and tell your sweetheart that some things are more important than romance. Then prepare to spend the night in the spare room.
Peter Foster is the author of 10 books. His most recent is How Dare You!, a collection of his National Post columns. His previous book was Why We Bite the Invisible Hand: The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism.
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