UCP LEADERSHIP CANDIDATES ADOPT CLEAN-COAL MYTH
This environmental unicorn doesn’t exist, and politicians shouldn’t suggest it does
Want to know who won the first United Conservative Party leadership debate this week? So would I.
But choosing a “winner” in a relatively lacklustre event is always difficult.
No doubt with that in mind, the Jason Kenney team issued a news release literally the moment the debate ended Wednesday night to helpfully declare, “Jason Kenney wins first UCP debate. Strongest on the economy.”
Good, glad that’s settled.
But wait. A half-hour later, no doubt because they wanted to give it careful thought, officials on Team Brian Jean issued their own conclusion, “Brian Jean wins first UCP leadership debate.”
And then, to confuse the matter even further, the Jeff Callaway campaign announced, “Jeff Callaway comes out ahead in first UCP leadership debate.”
The only person who didn’t declare himself the winner was candidate Doug Schweitzer who, ironically enough, may have actually been the “winner.” I mean, Schweitzer is the least known person in the leadership race. The debate was his big public introduction and he performed well.
The debate was viewed by about 20,000 people online. That might not sound like a lot compared with Alberta’s population of four million people.
But it’s a lot for an online political debate involving an opposition party leadership race during a school night.
(If you were like me, you kept sneaking off to watch Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary on Vietnam.)
The one topic that caught my attention came at the end when the four candidates were asked about making Alberta a leader in sustainable energy development with “climate friendly technology.”
Not surprisingly, they all used it as a moment to attack the NDP’s carbon tax. Callaway also brought up his idea to burn more natural gas to produce electricity. But otherwise they were exceptionally vague on what “climate friendly technology” they’d use.
Jean said he’d scrap the NDP plan to phase out coal-burning power plants.
“What we should do instead is take the technology we already have here for clean coal and export that to the world.”
Kenney agreed. “Let us, as Brian said, export our clean-coal technology to the rest of the world.”
Wait a minute.
What clean-coal technology? Historically, in Alberta, when politicians referred to “clean coal” they were usually talking about carbon capture and storage (CCS) — the process of capturing carbon dioxide emissions from the smokestack of a coal-fired power plant, compressing them into a fluid and injecting them far underground.
We have one CCS experiment going on in Alberta, a survivor of the Progressive Conservative’s decade-old solution to greenhouse-gas emissions.
The idea was to perfect the process and then export the technology to the world. That never happened.
The one surviving experiment will eventually cost taxpayers more than $1 billion — but it’s not even at a coal-fired plant, it’s at Shell’s Scotford upgrader near Fort Saskatchewan.
So, what “clean-coal technology” are Jean and Kenney talking about?
According to Jean’s campaign, he meant CCS (without government subsidies) still has the potential to help reduce emissions from coal plants, and he also meant our plants have advanced technology for scrubbing pollutants before they’re released into the air.
Kenney’s campaign had a similar explanation: “Jason wasn’t speaking about any specific technology, but generally to the fact that modern Alberta coal plants maintain much higher standards than in certain parts of the world.”
Hmm. One government expert says our best plants might emit about 20 per cent fewer pollutants than less advanced plants.
We’d be better off transitioning to natural gas that emits about 50 per cent less carbon dioxide than burning coal. And that is pretty much what our power plants will be doing under the NDP plan.
The simple fact is, there is no “clean-coal technology.”
One politician who still talks about clean coal is U.S. President Donald Trump — and that should tell you something right there.
A decade ago, the Alberta government said it had a solution to our emissions problems by burning coal cleanly. It never happened.
Clean coal is an environmental unicorn.
Politicians should stop using the term — or spell out exactly what they mean when they say it.