By Doug Matthews -- Things cost more in the North. Always have. Always will. It’s not nice, but it’s a fact and there doesn’t seem to be too much we can do about it.Long distances, cold weather, freight costs, high wages to attract and hold staff, lack of competition: You name it and the result is usually higher costs. But, bad as it’s been, it’s likely to get a whole lot worse in the years to come because we’re going to be paying not only for the stuff we bring into the North – the apples from California, the parkas and the televisions from China and the oil company executives from Houston – we’re going to have to start paying for the North itself.

Climate change is going to force two big expenditure items on us as we seek first to mitigate the impacts by reducing our local carbon emissions and then to adapt to the changes that will continue to occur because of past emissions and those that some countries will continue to produce – thanks in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, some of which may actually come from the North.

The mitigation stuff is fairly simple and direct. The use of fossil fuels produces greenhouse gases, and they, in turn, help to warm the planet. So, if you want to stop the latter, you increase the cost of using the former and a balance can perhaps be restored. By lowering the emissions we avoid the planetary catastrophe that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has long warned is waiting for us.

And even though the North’s emissions are pretty insignificant relative to the provinces, the states, and the countries of the world, we’ll do our bit, pay more for fossil fuels, and sleep soundly in the embrace of the environmentally righteous.

The adaptation business is a bit more complicated because we don’t really know what physical changes will occur in the North and what the costs of dealing with them will be. The best we can do is guess. But we’re likely to see roads sinking as the permafrost melts, houses shifting on their foundations, pipelines buckling as the ground subsides, and coastal communities losing more and more of their shoreline. It’s all big stuff needing big, big dollars to repair.

And that’s what happens when you’re on the receiving end of climate change. You suffer the impacts and you get to pay the bill. But what about those other guys, the ones that generated all those emissions in the first place: Surely they’ll be paying a big price, too? Well, not really.

Lots of people had lots of expectations when the Barack Obama administration took over the White House, and the Democrats took control of the U.S. Congress, particularly where the issue of climate change was concerned. At last there was someone paying attention to the issue.

And sure enough, a climate change bill did get through the House of Representatives this summer, with another expected later this year from the U.S. Senate. After that one clears, the two bodies will sit down in conference to generate a final bill. Things are looking good, until you read the House bill.

What started out as a serious attempt to set a cap on greenhouse gas emissions – and by auctioning off the appropriate allowances, impose a real cost on continuing to generate them – turned into a give-away for all manner of industries, interest groups, utilities and states. At the end of the day, under the House bill, 85 per cent of the emission allowances are to be distributed for free and, by the time the Senate gets its bill in order, the remaining 15 per cent could be free as well.

And, as if the costs were not low enough already, the House bill proposed to impose duties on carbon, such that any imports from countries with less stringent emissions controls than those of the U.S. would be subject to border charges to level the playing field.

What a scheme. Free emission allowances topped up with border duties to make sure there will be no ill effects from competitors. But wait, there has to be some cost, doesn’t there? Climate change is a big deal, affecting the entire planet. Surely the burden can’t be borne only by those who feel its effects. Surely if Northerners will be paying to address the impacts, Americans will be paying as the cause?

Nope. Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, laid out the cost for a typical American family of meeting the cap-and-trade program during her testimony before a Senate committee this July. “Fifty cents a day,” Jackson said, “about 50 cents a day.”

So, while Northerners will pay the millions needed to deal with the impacts of climate change, Americans will chip in with about half a buck a day to stop it. And you thought it was expensive in the North before.