Government is listening to polluters
Mar 24, 2008 04:30 AM
John Bennett
Federal Environment Minister John Baird claims new regulations announced this month for industry greenhouse gas emitters are "tough – tougher than any anywhere."
So why aren't environmentalists standing up and cheering?
Only a few years ago Stephen Harper called Kyoto "a socialist plot" – but now his government is calling for future oil-sands operations to capture and store the greenhouse gases they create. The Conservative government sure has come a long way, hasn't it? Well no, it hasn't.
The climate crisis, according to Canada's former environment commissioner, requires "massive scale-up of effort" by the federal government. The response by the Conservative government: fire the environment commissioner.
Global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels – primarily oil, gas and coal. The federal government's plan is designed to encourage the expansion of production of these fossil fuels. It does very little to actually help industry or individuals reduce the use of fossil fuels.
The centrepiece of this month's announcement is "carbon capture and storage," also known as CCS. This system, which has only been tested on a very small scale, involves removing some of the carbon dioxide from coal or other fossil fuels prior to burning and pumping it into the ground (hopefully for thousands of years). This sounds great – it conjures up an image of power plants without smokestacks.
But why is CCS being so heavily promoted as a solution to climate change?
Alberta's conventional oil wells are depleting. There is still oil remaining, but it can be recovered only by pumping large amounts of water into the wells. Global warming has already reduced the supply of water to Western Canada, and competition for it is fierce and growing (cities and farmers need water too). The alternative to water is CCS. Pumping carbon dioxide into oil wells also lets depleted wells produce more oil. The oil companies think it's great. They can clean up pollution and produce more oil. It would be great if burning oil wasn't the problem in the first place.
It gets worse. Under the so-called "tougher" new rules, Canadians will end up paying the multi-billion dollar bill for the CCS infrastructure through direct investment, tax breaks and rules that allow oil company investments in CCS to count the same as reducing emissions long before any carbon dioxide is stored.
This should be enough for us to reject the government plan, but there is more. The targets are based on "intensity," which means as production increases (which is the government's plan), so will emissions. Furthermore, the new regulations don't close any of the loopholes identified in the 2007 plan – in fact, it has created more loopholes for oil-sands operations and coal-fired plants.
The government announced last year that it would create a fuel economy regulation for cars "benchmarked against a dominant, stringent North American standard." The car companies didn't like it because the dominant and stringent standard is the California Clean Car Law. California, 19 other states and three provinces have adopted it. Canada's car fleet would average 6.7 litres per 100 kilometres in 2015 following California's lead. Unfortunately, the Conservative government listened to car companies and won't get us 6.7 cars till 2020, and the eco-rebate for buying an efficient car has been killed. This is a huge step backwards.
All of the changes announced this month support the long-standing positions of the polluting industries and continued reliance on fossil fuels. Here's an interesting statistic from the government's release: Between May and December 2007, Environment Canada held two consultations with environmental non-government organizations and 120 with industry.
This government is listening to the polluters, not the scientists, environmentalists or the public. Until it does, there won't be any cheering.
John Bennett is executive director of ClimateforChange.ca.
