Environment department urges minister to avoid distractions and regulate polluters

OTTAWA — Environment Minister Peter Kent is being urged by his department to avoid distractions and focus on “essential” regulations for oilsands companies and other large polluters, a newly released internal memorandum has revealed.

Kent received the memo after a widely-circulated scientific commentary downplayed the global warming footprint of oilsands production.

The memo warned him that the commentary was misinterpreted in the media and becoming a “distraction” from efforts to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gases in Canada.

“Addressing emissions from the oilsands — and all other major emitters — is essential to meeting Canada’s (climate change) target,” said the memo, sent from Kent’s former deputy minister Paul Boothe on Feb. 27.

The commentary, published in the Nature Climate Change journal by University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver and his doctoral student, Neil Swart, estimated that the planet’s coal reserves had significantly higher potential to warm the atmosphere than the existing bitumen deposits in Western Canada’s oilsands region.

But the memo, released to Postmedia News through access to information legislation, told Kent that the calculations were not relevant in Canada where the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions is coming from the oil and gas industry.

“The article is a distraction from the government’s climate change plan,” said the memo to Kent. “Relative to other countries, Canada has a clean electricity system, and the measures we are implementing to phase-out dirty coal-fired electricity will make it even cleaner.”

Boothe also noted that the calculations didn’t look at energy consumption patterns and the actual emissions anticipated from fossil fuels, based on projections from the International Energy Agency.

“The Weaver-Swart study is therefore of little practical value in shaping policy, particularly in Canada, and by its nature is prone to misinterpretation,” said the memo. “It has been quoted extensively in the debate on Canada’s oilsands, and the authors have complained that it has been misinterpreted as a defence of the oilsands.”

In an interview, Weaver agreed that the oil and gas sector must be regulated to reduce Canada’s emissions and he praised Environment Canada for pushing the Canadian government to stay on track.

But he explained that the commentary’s main findings still apply to jurisdictions such as the United States, where carbon dioxide emissions from electricity plants burning coal represent a larger threat to the atmospheric balance.

He said the calculations were also needed to counter other distractions caused by climate change scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen who suggested further oilsands expansion would be “game over” for the climate.

“The reason why we focused on the tarsands was specifically because of the ‘game over for planet earth’ statements that were everywhere at the time,” Weaver said. “That’s misleading because what happens is it distracts away from U.S. internal emissions reductions which would have to come from coal-fired electricity.”

Kent released estimates in early August suggesting that annual greenhouse gases are projected to rise about 20 per cent above a target agreed to by Prime Minister Stephen Harper under the Copenhagen climate change agreement.

But he said he didn’t have plans to set a specific target for the fast growing emissions from the oilsands industry, and would instead explore regulations to require the companies to adopt the best available technologies in order to protect jobs and the economy.

Kent also suggested he would finalize regulations to crack down on pollution from coal-fired power plants in the coming weeks.

Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Mike De Souza