National Post (National Edition)
Ontario climate plan an antidote to eco-hysteria
The climate change plan Ontario Environment Minister Rod Phillips released Thursday is a pragmatic document, both politically and environmentally.
The federal and Ontario governments are engaged in a climate change chess game that has more to do with winning elections than with saving the planet. Premier Doug Ford was propelled into office partly because he opposed a carbon tax. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hopes to win next year’s federal election because he is a carbon tax champion.
Until this week, the chess board favoured Trudeau. He could legitimately say the Ontario government had no plan to help meet Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions targets. What else could he do but impose a carbon tax? The very future of the planet is at stake.
Now, the Ontario government can say “Check,” if not yet “Checkmate.” The PCS have a plan, it’s substantial, and it can plausibly meet Ontario’s reduction share. Trudeau can choose to say the new Ontario plan isn’t good enough and impose his tax anyway, but his grounds for doing so have been substantially weakened.
Phillips’s climate change plan certainly won’t thrill those who believe the planet is fast on its way to becoming uninhabitable, but that a relatively small carbon tax might fix it. That’s not Phillips’s target audience, although this plan does not dispute that climate change and its consequences are real and must be addressed. It even goes so far as to pick up the Liberals’ favourite term for carbon dioxide emissions, calling them “pollution.”
Phillips’s optimism about meeting Ontario’s share of Canada’s Paris Agreement carbon reduction commitment is based on the fact that the province is already more than two-thirds of the way there. The accord calls for reducing emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels. Ontario is now at 22 per cent and has a dozen years to achieve the rest of the target.
Ontario’s favourable situation is largely due to the previous Liberal government. Although costly and poorly managed, the Liberals’ shutdown of coal-fired power plants did produce real emissions reductions in Ontario, unlike their subsequent capand-trade plan, which relied on emissions cuts outside Ontario to meet its goals.
To get the rest of the way, Phillips proposes a range of actions, including some things that will happen with or without government involvement. For example, as electric cars become more common, vehicle emissions will go down. The biggest new thing in the plan is setting industry-specific emissions standards for the industrial sector and making those who don’t meet the standards pay. Those payments will bolster the Ontario Carbon Trust, which will use $400 million in public money to help support cost-effective carbon reduction technologies.
The Ontario plan also counts on reducing the carbon component of fuel by increasing ethanol percentages, natural gas conservation and reducing methaneproducing organic waste that ends up in landfills.
These are all relatively small, achievable, made-in-Ontario solutions of a sort that a rational person can easily endorse.
If there was ever an issue that could use a dose of rationality, it is the climate change debate. A new Lancet Countdown health study released this week says Canadians are experiencing post-traumatic stress and “ecological grief ” as a result of climate change. That’s perhaps not surprising when people one would like to take seriously are basically running around screaming “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!”
Not to say that there isn’t a problem, or that it isn’t significant, but focusing on achievable things is the best antidote to the hysteria. That’s one of the reasons the PC plan has some things to say about adapting to climate change. That’s the most practical thing we can do, although perhaps this wasn’t the place for tips on waterproofing your basement.
It’s important to remember that Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions are not constantly rising, as some would have us believe. Nationally, greenhouse gas emissions peaked in 2007 and have gone done by about 5.5 per cent since then, according to the federal government. In Ontario, the picture is even better, with the 22 per cent reduction since 2005.
For those still stuck on a carbon tax, please ask yourself why Trudeau’s 4.5 centper-litre tax would turn the tide when existing gasoline taxes of just over 20 cents a litre, plus HST, haven’t done so.
As has often been stated, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions make up only 1.6 per cent of the world’s total emissions. That tells us that nothing we do will be terribly consequential, but the counter-argument is that we must do our bit. If Phillips’s plan works as expected, Ontario will have done just that.