TORONTO

Here’s my first prediction for 2015.

It’s the year Premier Kathleen Wynne will put a price on industrial carbon dioxide emissions in Ontario, either through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, which is another name for a carbon tax.

A perfect storm of factors favours such a move.

First, Wynne needs the money, given that the Liberals’ reckless spending since taking power in 2003 has left the Ontario government mired in debt.

As Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk recently noted, even if Wynne fulfills her promise to balance the budget by 2017-2018, Ontario will at that point be $325 billion in debt -- more than double what the Liberals inherited in 2003 -- or $23,000 for every man, woman and child in the province.

Pricing industrial carbon dioxide emissions -- thus raising the price of almost everything -- will enable Wynne to portray this latest Liberal cash grab as an environmental move designed to help save the planet, when it is demonstrably nothing of the sort.

After all, somebody has to pay for all those sweetheart labour deals the Liberals made with the province’s public sector unions to stay in power, to say nothing of the billions of dollars they wasted giving sweetheart deals to Ontario’s wind and solar power developers, to produce expensive, unreliable electricity we don’t need, because we have an energy surplus.

Second, politically, 2015 will be the ideal year to tax emissions, given that 2014 is on track to be the “warmest” year globally in the 130-year record of comparable temperature data.

That means we’re in for a year of international political hysteria about climate change -- even though one year of temperature data is meaningless.

This will culminate in a United Nations’ climate meeting in Paris next December to resurrect and expand the costly, punitive, unfair and ineffective Kyoto accord, which expired at the end of 2012 and which former Liberal PM Jean Chretien idiotically signed in 1997 and ratified in 2004.

This means we’re in for a year of politicians around the globe telling us with a straight face that the only way to save the planet from the existential threat of global warming (even though global warming isn’t an existential threat) is to take more of our money.

This either directly through a carbon tax (Statistics Norway concluded in 2002 that Norway’s long-time carbon tax, imposed in 1991, hasn’t significantly lowered emissions) or indirectly through cap-and-trade, a government-created stock market in emissions, which is rife with fraud and has failed to lower emissions in Europe.

Third, the collapse of the international oil market will give Wynne political cover to raise the price of gasoline, one of the most immediate and visible impacts of all carbon pricing schemes.

Consumers who would have revolted over, say, a seven-cent-a-litre tax hike on gasoline when it was $1.40 a litre, will be far more accepting of it -- not happy, but accepting -- now that gas is below $1 a litre.

Of course when gas prices rise again -- as they inevitably will -- the tax hike will stay in place.

Fourth, Wynne and Environment and Climate Change Minister Glen Murray -- have been dropping broad hints since last month that Ontario is actively considering a carbon pricing scheme, likely cap and trade, but anything is possible.

When Wynne does decide on whatever it is she plans to do, it will be accompanied by the usual political rhetoric about “making polluters pay” (translation, making us pay) to save the future for our children and grandchildren.

It will all be utter nonsense, of course.

The Liberals, for example, could have eliminated the use of coal to generate electricity in Ontario without getting us involved in their multi-billion-dollar wind and solar power fiasco/scandal.

But they didn’t because everything they touch in the so-called “green” energy field -- from smart meters to feed-in-tariff (FIT) pricing for wind and solar power -- inevitably turns into a financial disaster.

That’s because they have no idea of what they’re doing, as two devastating reports from the Auditor General of Ontario have now conclusively demonstrated.

But being wrong, wasteful, incompetent and politically corrupt (see the gas plant cancellations, also part of their “green” energy file), has never stopped the Liberals before and it won’t now.

Not with their majority government and four more years in power.