[R-G] A licence to pollute dressed up in rhetorical petticoats

[Richard Menec]

http://tinyurl.com/2hv9rt

A licence to pollute dressed up in rhetorical petticoats

by JEFFREY SIMPSON

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

January 26, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST

Canada's conventional oil supplies are running down. They are being replaced 
with oil from Alberta's tar sands.

Each barrel of tar-sands oil produces two to three times more greenhouse-gas 
emissions than a barrel of conventional oil. The result is obvious: 
Greenhouse-gas emissions from Alberta oil have been rising.

Alberta's attitude toward its "large final emitters," including the tar 
sands, has been a licence to pollute dressed up in rhetorical petticoats. It 
so remains following Premier Ed Stelmach's scandalously weak update this 
week of the province's climate change "strategy."

Oil company spokesmen hailed the Premier's announcement, and why not? It's 
the most weak-kneed climate-change effort anywhere in the advanced 
industrialized world.

Nonetheless, it's 20 per cent by 2020 for Canada, with some provinces 
anxious to go further. U.S. politicians are almost all agreed on this 
target. Europeans want to move further faster, but they, too, will accept 
the 20 by 2020 formula.

What's the Alberta target outlined by Mr. Stelmach this week? A 14- per-cent 
reduction from 2005 levels by - wait for it - 2050! By then, almost every 
industrialized country (including fossil fuel producers such as Britain, 
Norway, Australia and the United States) are looking at 50-. to 80-per-cent 
reductions.

The Alberta rhetorical hokum goes further. The headline on the Stelmach 
press release reads: "Alberta to cut projected emissions by 50 per cent 
under new climate change plan."

Chances are, the government will underline the 50-per-cent bit. But the key 
word is "projected." Why? Because projected emissions were going to soar. 
Cutting them in half still means more emissions by 2020 and only a 
14-per-cent pullback by 2050.

Tar sands account for 19 per cent of Alberta's emissions; power plants, many 
driven by coal, 47 per cent. But investments in the tar sands, both 
committed and anticipated, are so huge that the emissions from tar sands 
will rise fast.

Alberta's response to this challenge has been a reduction in "intensity" of 
emissions. Under regulations that entered into force July 1, 2007, large 
final emitters have to reduce their intensity by 12 per cent yearly. By 
definition - and the Alberta government's documents state this clearly - 
such intensity targets, when output is soaring, only mean a slowing down of 
the increase of overall emissions.

In another bow to industry, companies can avoid even these intensity- 
reduction levels by paying $15 a tonne into a "technology" fund or buying 
credits from other companies.

Given the profits to be made with oil at $90 to $100 a barrel (check 
Suncor's recent results), companies will be in no hurry to meet those 
intensity targets. With this policy, the Alberta government has literally 
put itself over the barrel.

Mr. Stelmach mentioned carbon capture and storage, about which people have 
been talking for years. In Alberta, they've also been talking for years 
about a carbon pipeline. They've also been talking for years about clean 
coal technology. In short, the Alberta governments of Ralph Klein and now Ed 
Stelmach have been very, very good at talking and very, very slow at acting.

Large final emitters, including the expanding tar sands, account for 70 per 
cent of Alberta's emissions. You can cajole, bribe and encourage consumers 
and other sectors to reduce, but unless emissions decline from the 
industrial sector, not much will happen. You can even increase wind power 
sources, as Alberta has done, and the result will be useful but marginal if 
industrial emissions keep rising.

This climate change gap between flimsy rhetoric and real action is such a 
tragedy for a province that with vigorous leadership could literally lead 
the world in marrying resource exploitation to sustainable development, 
including reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.

The world could be beating a path to Alberta's door, if only the province 
had better political leadership and a business class that had seen 
opportunities instead of spending so many years obstructing, naysaying, 
threatening.

Alberta has 12 per cent of Canada's population and about a third of its 
emissions. The Stelmach government has now confirmed that Alberta's 
emissions will keep rising for many years, which means arithmetically that 
as other provinces pull down their emissions, Alberta's share of national 
emissions will rise in absolute and per capita terms.

This is leadership - from the perpetual governing party of Alberta that is 
set to extend its reign from 37 to 41 years? This is leadership in a 
province where the mountain pine beetle has crossed the Rockies from British 
Columbia and is attacking Alberta forests, where the mountain ice packs are 
melting with long-term and dire consequences for the soil and grasslands of 
Alberta, where water supplies are imperilled over the long term?

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