In a January 20th letter, Canada’s Environment Minister, Peter Kent, assured Canadians that the Canadian Government, despite having withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol, nonetheless has a plan on climate change. But reading the letter, it’s pretty clear that that there is no real plan, unless you count planning to do nothing.
There’s a target. Kent repeats the Canadian Government’s goal of reducing GHG emissions by 17% relative to 2005 levels by the year 2020. But, whatever one may think of this target (and we’ve been critical of it), a target is not a plan.
Few details are revealed. The Minister spends most of his letter defending Canada’s decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol – which only further highlights why Canada needs a “post-Kyoto” plan. Canada’s failure to implement Kyoto over successive Liberal and Conservative governments, culminating in Canada’s formal withdrawal last December, has been both disappointing and shocking.
Unfortunately, only in the last few paragraphs of his letter does Kent provide some hints about the direction Canada might now take. They include (to paraphrase):
- Taking a sector-by-sector approach towards developing regulations for emitting industries;
- Cooperating with the U.S. wherever possible (not a lot of detail here); and
- Signing a new international climate change treaty at some point in the future (even less detail provided, except that Kent doesn’t like treaties that ask the countries that emit the most GHGs per person to act first).
Can we expect this “plan”, such as it is, to remain on the table? Remember, this is the government that in 2008 promised a cap and trade system to regulate GHGs, then denied that it had done so, then clarified that it had, but now was moving to a sector-specific approach to regulating GHGs.
Will this “plan” achieve its targets?
But, equally importantly, will this “plan” – I include the quotation marks because that’s really not much of a plan – achieve the government’s target? Really the only piece of the plan that’s within the government’s control is its “sector-by-sector approach”.
But experts who have looked at the proposed regulations agree that they won’t come near to achieving the government’s target. Professor Andrew Leach, of the University of Calgary – who, unlike us, is a fan of the 17% reduction by 2020 target – discussed this at length in a Globe and Mail piece last May:
After all the actions taken to date by provincial and federal governments are combined, a 178 Mt/yr gap remains between our emissions trajectory and our 2020 target, according to Environment Canada reports. Mr. Kent needs new regulations which amount to the equivalent of taking every vehicle currently in use in Canada off the road -- permanently.
The challenge is daunting, as Mr. Kent has few places left to look for those reductions. Regulations already announced for the coal-fired power sector target only new facilities and facilities undergoing significant end-of-life renovations, so emissions reductions will occur slowly. New vehicle performance standards, announced in 2010, don’t improve the performance of vehicles already on the road, so the efficiency of the fleet improves only slowly over time. Retrofit programs do reduce emissions from the existing building stock, but the one-year extension to the ecoEnergy Retrofit program will only reduce emissions by, perhaps, 1Mt/yr. It‘s safe to assume that carbon taxes, which would incent further reductions from owners of existing buildings, cars, and industrial facilities, are off the table. The remaining opportunities are few, far between, and expensive. …
With these challenges in mind, Mr. Kent’s decisions will determine whether or not we are in a position to meet our Copenhagen commitments, and determine either the costs we incur to meet our targets or the costs we incur as a result of not meeting them. Meeting them will require the most aggressive GHG reduction efforts undertaken by any economy in the world, and the challenge gets tougher with every day we do not act. Not meeting them may limit access to markets for our exported products and access to capital for our investment projects. Inaction could also provide other nations with justification for the imposition of low carbon fuel standards or border adjustment tariffs on our products.
In a more recent blog post Professor Leach further develops some of these ideas, setting out what he believes a real climate change plan needs to be credible.
Modeling commissioned by the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute has found that meeting the government’s target of a 17% reduction relative to 2005 levels by 2020 will require a carbon price of $40/tonne in 2011, rising to $100/tonne by 2020, or regulations which require emissions cuts equivalent to the impact of that carbon price. By way of contrast, BC’s much-lauded carbon tax is currently set at $25/tonne, and is scheduled to rise to $30/tonne in 2012.
Can we have a “plan” that ignores the tarsands?
As North America’s leading greenhouse gas modeler, Marc Jaccard, has pointed out, the elephant in the room on the debate about tarsands and tarsands pipelines is climate change.
[N]o one is discussing the proverbial "elephant in the room." This is the connection between tarsands expansion and Prime Minister Stephen Harper's 2007 promise to Canadians to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions 65 per cent by 2050. …
[F]or his promise not to be a lie, Harper cannot allow expansion of tarsands and associated pipelines, and he must require a growing market share of near-zero-emission vehicles. He knows this because his analysts are privy to the work of the world's leading researchers. Canadians on all sides of the issue should read a 20-page report from MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change entitled Canada's Bitumen Industry Under CO2 Constraints ... The report shows how and why the Canadian tarsands must contract as part of a global effort to prevent a 4 degree increase in temperatures and catastrophic climate change.
A climate change plan that is not closely tied to a national energy plan is no climate plan at all. Other levels of government that have provided climate leadership have recognized this link, developing energy plans alongside their climate change plans. And, yet, the Prime Minister prefers to allow the “market” to determine Canada’s approach to energy. The result – Canada has no plan to transition our economy to green energy, or even to address Eastern Canada’s dependence on dwindling global oil reserves.
Here’s what real climate planning looks like
So a failing grade to Peter Kent’s “Post-Kyoto Climate Plan”. What does good climate planning look like, then?
Well, let’s look to the U.K., where successive Labour and Conservative governments have, unlike Canada’s governments, put in place real climate plans, and backed them up with laws and policies to achieve real results. These include:
- Legislated short- and medium- term Carbon Budgets, developed in consultation with an arms-length committee of scientific experts;
- A government-wide Carbon Plan, specifically aimed at achieving those budgets;
- A new Department of Energy and Climate Change to oversee the plan’s implementation; and
- Ongoing evaluations to make sure that those budgets are being met.
As a result, the United Kingdom (unlike Canada) has met its Kyoto targets, and is on track to achieve a 50% reduction in emissions, relative to 1990 levels, by the mid-2020s.
That, Minister Kent, is what a real climate change plan looks like.
By Andrew Gage, Staff Lawyer