Sask. Party’s climate change plan fails badly
Instead of limiting the carbon pollution we spew..., the Wall government wants to focus on the ‘unrealized value’ of whatever natural phenomena we haven’t yet destroyed.
It’s long been inevitable that Saskatchewan would have to take steps to rein in climate change. And the federal government’s intention to apply a carbon tax to provinces that don’t have a credible greenhouse gas emission plan should have spurred the provincial government to get its act together.
This week, the Saskatchewan Party released its climate change strategy. But beyond repackaging past pitiful excuses for emission reductions, Brad Wall’s main message is to thumb his nose at the international consensus that climate change is worth fighting at all.
As a province, we own an embarrassing track record of climate inaction. Saskatchewan has long generated more carbon pollution per capita than any other province, and has been falling even farther behind as Alberta reins in its own emissions.
From that starting point, the Saskatchewan Party has somehow concluded that all we really need is increased self-promotion to paper over our ongoing failings. Instead of limiting the carbon pollution we spew into the air, the Wall government wants to focus on the “unrealized value” of whatever natural phenomena we haven’t yet destroyed.
Never mind limiting how much we emit. The Saskatchewan Party’s new strategy is to declare that somebody can fabricate a credit for every tree that isn’t cut down, or every acre of land which isn’t put to its most damaging possible use. And that credit can then be exchanged to allow somebody else to keep polluting.
This should sound similar to the cap-andtrade schemes which have been attacked by Wall in the past — because that’s exactly what it is. (The only caveat is that the Saskatchewan Party’s version doesn’t involve any true cap on emissions.)
And that sleight-of-hand leads to another key part of the Saskatchewan Party’s strategy: Sowing confusion by abandoning accepted terms in favour of new buzzwords.
A cap-and-trade system is thus labelled with a combination of offsets, best performance credits, internationally transferred mitigation outcomes and a technology fund. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been relabelled as “CCUS” in the apparent hope that we’ll will forget how much money we’ve wasted at Boundary Dam.
And most importantly, greenhouse gas emission reductions have been discarded as an overarching goal, giving way to the deliberately vague term “resilience.” It’s there that the Saskatchewan Party most conspicuously attacks the international scientific consensus on climate change.
Most of the world recognizes the need to discuss adaptation to climate change — but as a consequence of our failure to limit it in the past, not a justification to keep polluting in the future.
But the Wall government is trying to treat adaptation as an excuse for continued carbon pollution. It plans to abandon a primary focus on the emissions which are at the core of existing agreements and policies, instead making up new and largely unrelated self-assessment criteria with no scientific basis. And it plans to declare that our job is done if we limit our own losses from climate change, with no regard for how our continued pollution affects the rest of the planet.
Apparently this is the Saskatchewan Party’s idea of long-term planning. While the rest of the world shifts rapidly to affordable clean energy, our province’s economic future is supposed to be based on alchemy, gaslighting and creative accounting.
Neither the federal government nor the rest of the world figures to be impressed. And if we go along with Wall’s climate obstruction in the name of squeezing marginal profits out of dying industries, the imposition of a carbon tax looks to be the least of our problems.