Canada’s climate change plans to fall short, new study says

OTTAWA—Federal and provincial programs to cut greenhouse gas emissions won’t even get Canada half of the way toward meeting the reduction targets that have been set for 2020.

But the fact that they will even go that far is being presented as a sign of progress in a new report. Such are the low expectations surrounding the policies to tackle global warming in the country.

The study, by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a respected, non-partisan environmental think-tank, suggests Canada is on track to cut out 103 megatonnes of greenhouse gases by 2020. That works out to 46 per cent of the emissions reduction goal that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has set for the country.

The gap is equal to 120 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, says the report by Dave Sawyer, the institute’s climate change director.

“While the emerging package of regulations won’t achieve the deep targets the government has aspired to, it does signal that Canada’s federal government is finally establishing the policy architecture to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

After the federal environment commissioner warned last month that Ottawa was unable to accurately measure the effects of its climate change programs, Environment Minister Peter Kent said the government was already one quarter of the way to its 2020 pledge.

“We will continue to implement our sector-by-sector plan until we reach our ambitious target of reducing our GHG emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020.”

During the last few years, climate change has been eclipsed on the Tory policy radar by the global economic crisis.

More aggressive strides to achieve that emissions goal in Canada had been planned in 2009, but they were essentially halted by a deadlocked U.S. Congress, which nixed President Barack Obama’s hopes of bringing forward a federal climate change plan before his re-election battle next year.

With any near-term hopes for a North American system to cap and trade emissions now dashed, Ottawa is pushing ahead with domestic regulations to put more efficient passenger vehicles on the road and to have companies build cleaner power plants.

But according to Sawyer’s economic modelling, those two measures will account for only 39 megatonnes of emissions by 2020.

The effects of phasing out coal-fired power plants in Ontario, introducing carbon taxes in British Columbia and Quebec and Alberta’s plan to pipe emissions from industry underground will cut another 31 megatonnes of emissions by 2020.

Still to come are the greenhouse gas cuts from a regional cap and trade system involving several Canadian provinces and American states (another possible 18 megatonnes of emissions cuts by 2020) and long-promised federal regulations for new or modified industrial emitters (good for another 15 megatonnes in 2020).

To cross the gulf between where Canada will be at the end of the decade and where it has promised to be, the report suggests extending federal emissions rules to force climate change upgrades on existing industrial polluters; developing a Canada-wide system that allows polluters to offset their emissions by investing in green projects; and allowing companies to purchase international offsets by investing in the developing world.

But even those steps will only get Canada three quarters of the way to its Copenhagen Accord pledge.

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Source: Toronto Star