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In assessing “investment changes in key economic sectors” resulting from carbon pricing, the roundtable bluntly projected that spending in the mineral and freight transport sector would virtually dry up due to “reduced output” (refining, too, although that’s meant as a feature, not a bug). Investment would also shrink in those “value-added” industries that provincial governments love — from cars and paper mills, to chemicals, metals, and building construction. Meanwhile, investment would come pouring instead into electricity and biofuels, largely because NRTEE estimated carbon taxes in the neighbourhood of $500 to $775 a tonne by 2026 — just a decade from now. That’s 15 to 25 times the highest carbon tax in Canada today.

As energy analyst Aldyen Donnelly points out, there are echoes of the decades-long Scandinavian climate experiments in Ontario’s effort to shift to geothermal power by banning natural gas (although Murray took issue Monday with calling it a ban, given that natural gas would still play some “role in the energy mix”). In Sweden and Norway, governments facing the prospect of shrivelling business investment ended up shifting the rising costs of their new, “green” electricity to consumers, who paid more, while businesses saw rates decrease to prevent relocations to less-expensive jurisdictions.

In Denmark, the government has mandated a shared “district heating” network since the 1980s, beginning with carbon taxes to incentivize choices, before it resorted to outright banning new furnaces and water heaters, and eventually forcing people to pay for a “mandatory connection” to the network. Danish ratepayers now pay five times as much in electrical taxes and levies than for their actual energy use. Meanwhile, reductions in the average Dane’s household carbon footprint over 20 years has been less than one-third. Ontario somehow thinks it will beat that, with 37 per cent reductions by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050 — despite having among Canada’s weakest geothermal energy resources.