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climate change
Zero emissions?
Zero action
Andrew Leach
One person is to blame for the fact that Canada does
not have greenhouse gas policy for the oil sands: Prime
Minister Stephen Harper.
Une seule personne est à blâmer pour l’absence de
politique de réduction des gaz à effet de serre émis
par les sables bitumineux : Stephen Harper, premier
ministre du Canada.
S
ince 2007, when what was then known as Canada’s New
Government introduced the Regulatory Framework
for Air Emissions, the Conservative government has
had a fairly consistent approach to greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions policy: it’s relied on some regulations, sometimes
combined with carbon pricing, as part of a sector-by-sector
regulatory approach, with the ever-present promise of more
regulations to come.
Eight years after this initial plan, we seem no closer today to seeing federal policy cover the growing emissions of
the oil sands, the natural gas and refining industries, or the
large and growing source of GHGs known as the emissionsintensive and trade-exposed sectors. As the Prime Minister’s
former director of communications Andrew MacDougall
said, “If something is essential to the government’s agenda
and losing isn’t an option, the entire team puts its shoulder to the wheel until victory is achieved. If a policy isn’t
critical, it can be abandoned if the going gets too tough.”
Had greenhouse gas policy for the oil sands and other major
emitters been seen as essential to the government’s agenda,
it would be implemented today.
To understand how we got to this point, it’s worth looking back at where we’ve been. Imagine, if you will, a policy
that would, for oil sands plants starting operations in or after 2012, “effectively require putting into place new carbon
capture and storage technologies to prevent the release of
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.” Zero-emissions oil
sands.
This was not the policy of a fringe, left-wing party. This
was part of the Turning the Corner Plan, released in early
Andrew Leach is an energy and environmental economist at the
Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta.
2008 by the government of, well — you know who. But
that’s not all. The same policy would have also required a
33 percent reduction in GHG emissions intensity relative to
2006 levels by 2020. The proposed policy would have initially allowed firms to comply by paying into a fund, as is
now the case in Alberta, but this option would have been
removed after 2017. The Turning the Corner Plan would
have been the Alberta system, with teeth, and it would have
imposed compliance costs on oil sands producers far beyond
the realm of anything being talked about today. But those
were the times in 2007 and 2008.
Later in 2008, the Prime Minister gave a speech in London, UK. Read today, his words are almost shocking. Midway through the speech, he turned to the question of climate change. “Despite the commitments our predecessors
in government made under the Kyoto Protocol, Canada’s
greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise completely unrestrained from the early 1990s onward,” Harper noted. His
government would not “repeat our previous error.” Canada
would, he said, “set targets that are achievable.”
At the time of his London speech, the Prime Minister
was aware the road would not be easy. “Our targets are ambitious, but they are realistic,” he said, before committing to,
“in a relatively short period of time restrain and reverse the
growth of GHG emissions…lower Canada’s emissions 20 per
cent below 2006 levels by 2020 and aim for a reduction of
60 to 70 per cent by 2050.” The government backed down
a bit from these commitments years later, at Copenhagen,
in pledging to reduce emissions to 17 percent below 2005
levels by 2020, a target we are not on track to meet.
The government’s bold words and ambitions were
never matched with proportional actions. Despite a short
foray to examine a North American cap-and-trade system,
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ARTHUR HOOLE and Geoff Stiles
the C
onservatives have not strayed too
far from their earliest policies in their
efforts to bring greenhouse gas policies
to major industrial emissions. As promised, renewable fuel content standards
and vehicle emissions performance
standards harmonized with the US
have been imposed, and a ban on incandescent light bulbs, while delayed,
is slowly but surely removing these
bulbs from our shelves. The government also delivered promised regula22
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tions that have effectively made coalfired power plants financially infeasible
to build. All of these were elements of
the Turning the Corner Plan. The key
elements missing from that plan are a
framework for emissions for oil and gas,
as well as emissions regulations for the
emissions-intensive and trade-exposed
sectors, which together have emissions
larger than the oil sands today, without
new policies, these emissions are projected to grow.
In 2012 and 2013, the government
seemed poised to bring in regulations
on the oil sector that would likely
have included a pricing component
similar to that proposed in Turning the
Corner and to the regulations implemented in Alberta in 2007. (I worked
on these regulations at Environment
Canada in 2012-13.) While the federal
government never publicly released a
proposed framework, details obtained
through access to information requests
Climate Change
Zero-emissions oil sands was part of the
Turning the Corner Plan released in early
2008 by the government of — well, you
know who.
Shutterstock
show an Alberta proposal to require a
40 percent reduction in emissions intensity and a Canadian Association of
Petroleum Producers counterproposal
for a required 20 percent reduction —
approximately what would have been
required of these facilities under the
Turning the Corner Plan (ignoring the
part about carbon capture and storage).
Facilities that could not accomplish
these reductions would have the opportunity to pay a fee that would go to
support deployment of new technologies (the fee would have been $20 to
$40 per tonne in 2020) – again, similar to what would have been required
under the Turning the Corner Plan,
although this financial compliance option was to have expired by 2017 under
that original plan. It’s fair to say that
this new approach was weaker than,
although not particularly different in
design from, the Harper plan of 2007
(which was not really that different
from the Martin/Dion plan of 2005).
The plans for this new (or not-sonew) regulatory approach seem to have
died on the drawing board sometime
after I left Environment Canada in
2013. The clearest sign of its demise
was a purported letter from the Prime
Minister to the Barack Obama administration stating that Canada would not
act alone but would act together with
the US — a line that became the go-to
excuse for government inaction on oil
sands GHGs until oil prices crashed.
Now we’ve seen another excuse. According to the Prime Minister, low
prices make it “crazy” to impose regulations on our oil and gas sector without
US action.
Over the course of the Prime Minister’s time in office, oil prices have
gone from the $50s to the $140s,
down to the $30s, back above $100
and back to the $40s, and today they
sit at around $50. We’ve had proposals for regulations, cap-and-trade and
regulations again, but it seems that no
policy that would restrict GHG emissions from the oil sands can get to the
finish line. Why? It’s not prices, and it’s
not the oil and gas lobby. It is due to
one thing: a prime minister who, to
use MacDougall’s words, hasn’t seen fit
to instruct “the entire team [to put] its
shoulder to the wheel until victory is
achieved” and a policy is imposed.
Stephen Harper is happy to see
these difficult policy choices pushed to
a later date. In so doing he will have
us make exactly the mistake he said we
wouldn’t make again — promising aggressive action and not delivering it.
When the world meets in Paris in late
2015, Canada will likely still not have
policies imposed on its oil sands sector and, despite the oil price crash, we
will still expect emissions to increase
far beyond our Copenhagen commitment. Will the world again be willing
to take the word of a prime minister,
whoever it may be, who says we won’t
make the same mistake three times?
The good news is that the speech is already mostly written, and recycling is
always a good thing, right? n
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