It has been a while but this week climate change is back in the news cycle. The front page of today’s Globe reports on the latest climate impacts tally: The report … concluded 2000 to 2009 was the warmest decade ever, and the Earth has been growing warmer for 50 years. Each of the past [...]
Marc Lee’s Blog Posts
Marc Lee is the Senior Economist at the CCPA’s BC Office. In addition to tracking federal and provincial budgets and economic trends, Marc has published on a range of topics from poverty and inequality to globalization and international trade to public services and regulation. Marc is Co-Director of the Climate Justice Project, a research partnership with UBC's School of Community and Regional Planning that examines the links between climate change policies and social justice. Marc chairs the Progressive Economics Forum and contributes regularly to Relentlessly Progressive Economics (progressive-economics.ca/relentless).
Western Climate Initiative: another baby step
July 29th, 2010 · Marc Lee · No Comments · Climate change, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability
Tags:
Marc’s Summer Reading
July 22nd, 2010 · Marc Lee · No Comments · Agriculture, Climate change, Economy, Environment, resources & sustainability, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Recommended reading
With summer comes a lightening of my work load, so I’ve finally found some time to dive into a few interesting books. These are all related to my ongoing research interests (I do have some fiction sitting around waiting for a real holiday, with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna at the top of the pile): The [...]
Tags:
And now for the bill: the cost of the Olympics
July 12th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 2 Comments · Provincial budget & finance
The BC government has released its final estimates of the cost of staging the 2010 Winter Games, highlighting the problems this government has with telling the truth (other examples include the 2009 pre-election fudge-it budget, and the HST). The Tyee reports: British Columbia’s government spent $325 million more on the 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics [...]
Tags: Olympics
BC’s 2009 Super-Fudge-It Budget
July 12th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 4 Comments · BC Election 2009, Provincial budget & finance
Under the “we told you so” category, I am filing the BC public accounts for 2009/10. The province closed the year with a deficit of $1.8 billion. As Will McMartin comments in The Tyee: … B.C.’s public accounts for the fiscal year 2009/2010 conclusively prove that the pre-election fiscal plan foisted on British Columbians by [...]
Tags: deficit
Gas prices and consumption: BC vs Pacific Northwest
July 12th, 2010 · Marc Lee · No Comments · Climate change, Energy, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Taxes
On a weekend getaway to Washington state, I was alarmed at how much cheaper gas prices are south of the border. Typically, we paid $3 per gallon, whereas the price in Vancouver upon our return was $1.16 per litre, which is $4.39 per gallon (with the exchange rate roughly parity over the weekend). This is [...]
BC’s carbon tax turns two
July 5th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 3 Comments · Climate change, Taxes
With all of the attention focused on the HST implementation on July 1, most people seemed to miss the next increment of that other much-hated tax, BC’s carbon tax. As of July 1, the carbon tax is now $20 per tonne of CO2, or about 4.6 cents on a litre of gasoline. And like any [...]
Tags:
View from the Top: Income Inequality in BC
June 2nd, 2010 · Marc Lee · 1 Comment · Economy, Poverty, inequality & welfare
A fascinating, and shocking, literature on the incomes at the very top of the distribution has emerged in recent years. Typically, Statistics Canada only reports income distributions for quintiles, or 20% groupings, and occasionally deciles, or 10% groupings. But new research based on tax filing has shown that the real action has been at the [...]
Tags:
Keeping emissions underground
March 26th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 3 Comments · Climate change
I was intrigued by a quote in a recent Globe Foundation report on BC’s green economy that BC has 1000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, a “low carbon resource opportunity for both transportation and for export to other economies around the world.” Converting to metric, and using BC government emission factors for combusting [...]
Tags: GHG emissions·natural gas
Peddling GHGs: How much does BC export?
March 16th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 9 Comments · Climate change, Energy
Bill Rees, the father of the ecological footprint, likes to say that fossil fuels are a powerful hallucinogenic drug. We are all addicted to cheap and abundant fossil fuels, and so have reshaped our economy and society in fundamentally unsustainable ways. When emissions are reported for BC or Canada, there is an accounting convention that [...]
Tags:
Climate inaction and BC’s budget
March 3rd, 2010 · Marc Lee · 2 Comments · Climate change, Provincial budget & finance
The 2010 BC Budget was a disappointment on the climate action front. Even as Premier Campbell waxed poetic in the Globe about the impact of climate change on the 2010 Spring Games – with its sunny days, crocuses, daffodils and by the end, cherry blossoms making it fun for people on the street but a [...]
Tags:
