Moe’s Prairie Resilience plan comes up short

Province needs to offer real alternative to carbon tax, Mark Bigland-pritchard says.

Next week, the Government of Saskatchewan gets its time in court to challenge the federal government’s carbon pricing scheme. Premier Scott Moe has described it as “a tax on everything” and “ineffective.”

It is neither. By making carbon pollution more expensive to emit, carbon pricing incentivizes efficiency and clean energy options. That’s Economics 101, shown accurate in several jurisdictions. And most of us will gain more from the dividend than we lose in the fee.

Therefore a wide range of Saskatchewan civil society organizations — including my own group, Climate Justice Saskatoon — have joined together to intervene in opposition to Mr. Moe’s court challenge.

But we wouldn’t be so concerned about this one element of climate policy if successive Saskatchewan governments had been able to develop a credible approach to addressing the crisis without it.

Last October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a major report, written by the world’s leading experts on the subject, which made it clear that the world needs to stay below 1.5 degrees C of warming if it is to avoid human and ecological dislocation on an unprecedented scale. To achieve this, the authors found, global net carbon dioxide emissions need to drop by at least 45 per cent by 2030 and reach zero by mid-century. We should really be looking at more like a 60-per-cent reduction by 2030. The federal government’s target is a mere 30-per-cent reduction (compared to 2005 levels) — though with a realistic possibility that it will be ratcheted up through international negotiation. This is a target for the whole of Canada — and in the March 2016 Vancouver Declaration every province and territory agreed to play their part.

For Saskatchewan, that 30-per-cent target means a reduction of about 28 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. So how does Mr. Moe’s Prairie Resilience plan match up against this target?

There is a good chance that Saskpower will achieve its 2030 target of a six-milliontonne-per-year reduction, by phasing out conventional coal power and meeting increases in demand through renewables. A recent equivalency agreement with the federal government commits Saskatchewan to installation of between about 980 and 1,520 megawatts of new renewables capacity over 11 years.

The Saskatchewan government claims that its new regulatory regime for methane emissions from the oil industry will achieve a reduction of 4.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. But they ignore several major sources — pipeline leaks, compressors and many pneumatic devices, missing an opportunity to create jobs while fighting waste.

The provincial government’s output-based pricing scheme for heavy industry is actually very similar to the federal plan for that sector. The problem here is that it incentivizes only emissions reductions per unit of product, not total emissions reductions. The vast projected potash production increase is likely to swamp any efficiency savings achieved.

The measures which the government has announced for housing energy efficiency and for the transport sector, while welcome, will achieve minimal savings by 2030.

Other claims, especially in the agricultural sector, are based on faulty carbon accounting practices. Only year-on-year net increases in forest cover, increases in soil carbon sequestration and decreases in nitrous oxide emissions — achieved by reductions in synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use — can count toward net emissions reduction. Government policy shows little prospect of any of these being achieved.

Hence the Saskatchewan government’s Prairie Resilience plan will likely achieve only a 10-million-tonne-peryear reduction at best — far short of the 28 million tonnes per year required to do our share for the federation, and miserably inadequate when compared to the 49 million tonnes per year which would constitute something like a global fair share.

Politicians who reject carbon pricing need to present a credible alternative. We haven’t seen it yet.