The government was consulting the industry about European climate change legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation fuels, according to an email exchange between senior bureaucrats at Natural Resources Canada.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, an oil and gas industry lobby group, is opposed to the European Fuel Quality Directive legislation, because it believes it unfairly discriminates against bitumen, the heavy oil derived from the oilsands sector, which the government describes as the “fastest growing source of (greenhouse gas) emissions in Canada.”
“I talked to (CAPP president) David Collyer about the possible Canadian position on the FQD that we discussed — everyone in same basket, at same level, until they prove otherwise,” wrote Mark Corey, an assistant deputy minister at Natural Resources Canada, in an internal email sent on Oct. 14, 2011. “He said his initial impression was that he liked it, but would confer and call me back.”
Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver has championed the industry’s concerns, explaining that the oilsands are important to the Canadian economy as well as energy security, but only represent a fraction of global emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.
Corey wrote in the email, sent to his deputy minister, Serge Dupont, that Oliver’s position would be crafted with industry input, explaining that Collyer had also discussed the matter with the association’s vice-president of markets and oilsands, Greg Stringham.
“He said they liked the proposal a lot,” Corey wrote in the email, released through access to information legislation to Environmental Defence, a Toronto-based conservation group. “He termed it as an elegant solution that is worth pursuing.”
The email also said that Collyer would “quietly talk to a few more players,” and that another senior bureaucrat would then “write the position up so that it could be raised with the minister, if you are comfortable, as a possible position around which we could try to build support.”
Under pressure from Canadian lobbying, Europe recently agreed to perform an impact study, postponing its decision until 2013.
“Of course it’s regrettable that there’s a delay, we want to have this legislation in place as soon as possible,” the European Union’s ambassador to Canada, Matthias Brinkmann told reporters last week.
Brinkmann that the legislation was designed with a “science-based” approach to assess the climate footprint of fuels used for transportation and their feedstocks. Bitumen from the oilsands, which requires large amounts of energy, water and land in its production, ranked among the most polluting sources of fuel, based on a life-cycle analysis of its emissions.
But the European assessment ranked oil shale and coal converted to liquid fuel as more polluting sources of energy in its proposed legislation.
Travis Davies, a spokesman for CAPP, said it was normal for bureaucrats to consult with industry about information, and that this doesn’t “sugarcoat’ the fact that there is an environmental component to oil and gas production. He also said CAPP supports policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as long as they are science-based and reward transparency.
“We don’t think it’s effective policy to reward oil suppliers that are not transparent,” he said, noting that some Canadian companies, such as Cenovus, produce heavy oil from the oilsands with less greenhouse gases than some suppliers in Europe.
Although the government was warned by bureaucrats not to become “cheerleaders” for the oilpatch, three years ago, when it launched a lobbying and marketing strategy to defend the Canadian industry, federal officials have since allowed its efforts to evolve into a sophisticated campaign, funded by taxpayers, that has included special training on lobbying for diplomats, regular meetings with industry representatives, and outreach to “select” foreign media outlets.
“The federal government is supposed to represent the interests of Canadian citizens abroad, but it’s clear that the oil industry is now in the driver’s seat when it comes to our role on the world stage,” said Gillian McEachern, deputy campaign director at Environmental Defence. “This is another example of the erosion of Canada’s democracy at the hands of the tarsands lobby, which not only threatens Canada’s air, water and land but is actively trying to prevent good climate actions in other countries.”
Climate scientists and governments around the world have agreed that humans must rapidly slash greenhouse gas emissions, mainly produced through consumption of fossil fuels and deforestation, to avoid irreversible damage to life on Earth.
In December, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government announced that Canada would withdraw from the world’s only legally binding treaty on global warming, the Kyoto Protocol, to focus on negotiating a new binding treaty by 2015 that would come into force several years down the road.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Mike De Souza
No comments:
Post a Comment