There isn't any dispute between them over this. Every party agrees there's a problem, every party agrees on its cause, and every party agrees on its solution. And no party (or none with any chance of governing) has anything resembling a serious policy to achieve it.
More than two decades have passed since the Second World Climate Conference in 1990, at which Canada committed to stabilize its emissions of greenhouse gases at then-current levels within a decade. Since that time we have had a succession of different federal "strategies" and "processes" — Action Plan 2000, Project Green, Turning the Corner, on and on — with emissions reductions commitments to match. The current federal climate plan lists more than 20 different programs aimed explicitly at reducing GHG emissions, from the Pulp and Paper Green Transformation Program to the Marine Shore Power Program to the various ecoENERGY schemes.
And the result? Bupkis, or the next thing to it. According to the federal environment commissioner's recent audit, the effect of all of these programs put together, the cost of which he estimates at $9-billion, will be to reduce emissions by perhaps 27 million tonnes over the five years from 2008 to 2012 — the original reporting period, you'll recall, under the Kyoto Protocol, from which we have lately signalled our withdrawal. In 2007, when the federal government was still officially committed to Kyoto, Environment Canada projected its programs would achieve a reduction over the same time frame of 282 MT. So, only 90 per cent short of plan.
But even if the programs had worked as advertised, they still would have been nowhere near what was required. To meet the standard we agreed to at Kyoto, a 6 per cent reduction from 1990 levels, would require a further reduction, beyond what has been achieved to date, of 805 million MT. By the end of this year.
Oh, well, Kyoto. Wildly unrealistic. Everybody knows that. Plus the Liberals dragged their heels all the time they were in office. How could anyone have expected the Conservatives to meet those commitments in the short time available to them?
Okay. So let's look at the commitments the Tories agreed to. At the 2009 Copenhagen conference, Canada promised to reduce emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020. Three years on, eight years to go: are we on track? Not a chance. Not even close. By Environment Canada's own numbers, emissions in 2020 will be 7 per cent above 2005 levels, not 17 per cent below. The government's "sector-by-sector" approach so far applies to just one sector, transportation, for a total projected reduction by 2020 of 12 million MT. Wonderful. Only 178 MT to go.
The whole thing is just wildly farcical. As the commissioner's report documents, the various programs the feds have in the works are being developed without any co-ordination between them, still less with their provincial counterparts. Not only do they deliver nothing like the reductions required, or even projected, but Environment Canada can't even say what most of them will cost.
It is impossible not to conclude that this is deliberate: that the programs are designed to produce the impression of activity, without actually achieving anything, or nothing that would impose any real costs on anyone. That is not the unintended consequence of the various regulatory and subsidy schemes in the federal portfolio: it is their purpose.
It isn't as if their defects are unknown. Any environmental economist can tell you why they don't work. Regulations require long periods to develop, study and implement — at least five years, on average. They leave no room for business to innovate, nor give it any incentive to go beyond the minimum required. Subsidies as often as not reward people for doing things they would have done anyway, while ignoring all those other things they might have done that did not occur to the planners to subsidize.
More fundamentally, both serve to obscure, rather than reveal, the costs of greenhouse gas emissions. Rather than impose them, openly and directly, on those who produce or consume fossil fuels, they spread them across all taxpayers, or conceal them in regulation. That, as I say, is the point. The alternative — putting a price on carbon, a carbon tax, call it what you will — is both more effective and less costly, overall. But because it makes those costs visible, it is politically toxic — or is regarded as such, after the failure of the Liberals' 2008 campaign. So no party will touch it.
Oh, the NDP comes close. The party leader, Thomas Mulcair, as part of his campaign against the dreaded "Dutch disease" — rising energy exports pushing up the dollar and thus displacing manufacturing — often refers to the failure to "internalize the environmental costs" of the oilsands. It's a neat trick, allowing him to dress up the NDP's cultish preference for manufacturing over "mere" resource extraction as an objection to an implicit subsidy.
Except . . . if the failure to price carbon is a subsidy to Alberta oil companies, it surely is no less of one to, say, Ontario car makers. Strange how that never seems to come up.
Original Article
Source: the star phoenix
Author: Andrew Coyne
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