Andrew Scheer is right when he says there are ways to fight climate change without imposing a carbon tax. Unfortunately, the Conservative leader hasn’t found them.

His climate change plan, released with much fanfare this week, is a mishmash of ideas — some good, some irrelevant, most ineffective.

Missing from the plan is any concrete notion of how Canada under a Conservative government would meet its Paris greenhouse-gas emission targets.

This is too bad, because in questioning the conventional wisdom around carbon taxes (or what its proponents call carbon pricing), Scheer was onto something.

Economists tend to love carbon pricing because it uses market forces. Conservative thinkers, such as Reform Party founder Preston Manning, support it for the same reason.

They like the fact carbon pricing bypasses the heavy hand of government. It does not require, for instance, a ban on gas-guzzling SUVs. It merely makes explicit the real social costs of using fossil fuels to power them.

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Once consumers are faced with the real cost of gassing up their vehicles, the theory goes, they will respond by driving less or by switching to some other form of transportation, such as electric cars.

Carbon pricing is neat, elegant and — in theory — the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Like other solutions beloved by economists, it assumes people have perfect information, act rationally and will adjust to the new price instantaneously and painlessly.

In the real world, however, people are not always so co-operative. They are suspicious of experts and resistant to new taxes, no matter what the purpose.

Even when government promises to rebate the proceeds of any carbon tax, they remain skeptical.

This is the anti-tax mood that Conservative politicians like Scheer and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have managed to exploit.

Yet opposition to carbon taxes need not mean giving up on the fight against global warming. As Mark Jaccard, a respected climate-change economist at Simon Fraser University, has pointed out, there are other tools available.

Writing in the Globe and Mail last year, Jaccard said that what he called flexible regulation would work just as well, if not better.

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He argued that in British Columbia, regulations requiring BC Hydro to close generating plants fuelled by coal and natural gas have proved to be three times more effective than the province’s famed carbon tax.

Similarly, he wrote, California regulations on electricity generation and automobile fuel account for the bulk of carbon-emission reductions in that state. Its cap-and-trade carbon pricing system accounts for only 15 per cent of reductions.

Had he wished, Scheer could have built on Jaccard’s critique to come up with a compelling alternative to the federal Liberal government’s carbon price strategy. Alas, he did not. The closest he comes to using regulations in the fight against climate change is his plan to impose a cap on emissions from what he calls major emitters.

But the only penalty for those that exceed the cap would be a requirement that they invest an unspecified amount of money in researching ways to improve their performance — which, presumably, they would do anyway.

There is also the usual array of goodies — including tax breaks for those who invent green technology and renovation grants for those who want to insulate their homes.

There’s nothing wrong with either. But Scheer doesn’t explain how far such measures would go to meet Canada’s Paris targets.

Indeed, he seems to be saying that a Conservative government would try to count as part of its Paris commitments any carbon-emission reductions anywhere in the world that can be connected in any way to Canada.

A decision in China, for instance, to replace coal with Canadian natural gas would, it seems, be counted as part of Canada’s commitment to fighting climate change.

It’s an interesting argument, but one that the rest of the world is unlikely to buy.

Finally, there are the commitments that have little or nothing to do with climate change — such as his promise to reestablish an advisory panel of anglers and hunters.

These merely underline Scheer’s core problem. He had a chance to come up with a realistic climate-change plan that does not rely on carbon pricing. He squandered it.

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