OTTAWA HASTENS END OF COAL, FP1; A POLICY WITHOUT COHERENCE,

Liberals tout clean growth but achieve neither

In announcing a national coal phase-out Monday, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna claimed to have “a vision of a cleangrowth economy.” Unfortunately, it’s a vision unaccompanied by a clear grasp of how to achieve a clean and growing economy. Instead, the move shows a government in the thrall of green activists wielding dubious statistics on the health benefits of eliminating coal, and a government that seems to think it can change the world.

The Liberal climate policy muddle runs deep. Start with the blatant contradictions over the use of carbon pricing, a hard economic concept its eco-fiscal proponents said would let the market solve the carbon emission problem. Tax it and they will stop.

That’s now a national farce, since McKenna announced that the government will instead regulate coal out of existence in most of Canada by 2030 rather than let carbon pricing do the job. To speed the transition, the government will apply another non-market scheme and direct the new Canadian Infrastructure Bank to finance gas-fired electricity plants to replace coal. Is gas so uneconomic it needs government-backed bankers to fund it?

And then, to further undermine the carbon price mechanism, the government will amend the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to regulate the emissions of the new gas-fired plants that will replace Canada’s 34 coal-generating stations. Maybe the new bank is needed to cover the risk created by the carbon tax and new regulations?

Whatever. Canada now has a coal policy that aims to reduce the use of a cheap and efficient source of power, fully funded and installed, and replace it with new plants that will be costly to build. That the costs are significant is indicated by the fact that Nova Scotia will be exempted from the 2030 deadline.

The alleged objective is to help Canada meet its commitments under the Paris climate agreement. That agreement, however, is on life-support following global climate talks in Marrakech that last week produced little momentum as the world’s green activists and bureaucrats reacted to the election of Donald Trump. Canada apparently plans to stick with the Paris deal to the bitter end.

Further making Canada’s boy scout coal policy look absurd is the fact that coal will continue to be used by many of the world’s major economies well into the future. In the United States, Trump claims he will lift regulations that punish coal, although it is unclear that coal can be competitive with natural gas.

India is on a coal expansion binge and China announced earlier this month that it could increase its use of coal-fired electricity by 20 per cent over the next five years from 900 gigawatts to 1,100 by 2020. The fouryear 200-gigawatt increase in China’s capacity would be greater than Canada’s current total electricity capacity. But coal only accounts for about 10 per cent of Canada’s electricity needs, which means that Canada’s coal reduction plan will eliminate five megatonnes of carbon emissions over the next 15 years while China adds hundreds of megatonnes over the same period.

China says it aims to reduce coal’s share of national electricity production to 55 per cent by 2040, down from 84 per cent in 2014. But since China’s electricity consumption is expected to increase nearly five per cent per year, the country’s coal emissions will continue to rise.

Canada’s role as a carbon reducer can only be minuscule as a share of global carbon emissions. Most Canadian will be quick to realize — as have the electricity ratepayers of Ontario — that phasing out coal is a costly business with zero national benefits. That obvious fact is the main reason governments and activists keep claiming that phasing out coal will save lives and billions in health-care spending.

Leading this health-care claim is the Alberta-based Pembina Institute, which claimed in a report also issued Monday that “a national phase-out of coal-fired power by 2030 would avoid 1,008 premature deaths, 871 emergency room visits and save nearly $5-billion in health outcomes between 2015 and 2035.”

Such claims are at best dubious. At worse, they are inaccurate statistical manipulations with no substance. Experts in Ontario say such claims about Ontario’s coal plants were exaggerated and/or unfounded. Recent studies in Alberta found that the pollution levels in Edmonton, which is only 60 kilometres from Alberta’s coal plants, are no greater than most other Canadian cities and lower than many of the world’s leading cities in Europe and the United States.

Warren Kindzierski, associate professor of public health at the University of Alberta, says the level of overall air pollution in Edmonton has been unchanged in 17 years and is not a threat to citizens. “The levels are not very high” and only a “very small” proportion of pollution could be traced back to the coal plants located in Edmonton’s backyard.

In a paper posted this month in the science journal Environmental Pollution, Kindzierski and his associate concluded the levels of a key pollutant — fine particulate matter (PM2.5) — in Edmonton were below U.S. regulatory levels and “were well below acceptable and safe levels of risk recommended by regulatory agencies.”

In an interview Monday, Kindzierski said “The long and the short of it is that shutting down coal plants will not make one bit of change regarding particulate matter.” But phasing out coal will make a big economic difference, the costs of which now loom before Canadians as the Trudeau government chases its climate tail around in search of a policy that has no coherence.