Tories extend carbon-levy deadline
Move comes despite criticism from auditor general over climate policy
The Alberta government came under fire from critics Wednesday after it quietly extended the deadline to renew its carbon levy on the province’s heaviest greenhouse gas emitters.
The move comes one day after Auditor General Merwan Saher released a report slamming the government’s handling of its climate change strategy, a central component of which is the $15-per-tonne carbon levy.
The specified gas emitters regulation had been up for renewal Sept 1, but an order by Environment Minister Robin Campbell during a cabinet meeting this week extended the deadline to Dec. 31, 2014.
Premier Dave Hancock said the extension buys the province time to continue discussions on a North American climate-change strategy.
“It’s very difficult for Alberta to do anything more than we’re doing now, with respect to raising the costs for industry, without it being a continental approach,” Hancock said in an interview from Iqaluit, where he is attending the Western Premiers Conference.
Hancock said the province has heard concerns from industry about the impact the levy has on investment and cost margins, adding he is waiting to see whether the results of the November U.S. mid-term elections lead to a shift in policy from Washington.
The regulation places a levy on 12 per cent of a company’s emissions. The price on carbon is a central component of the province’s climate change strategy, which aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 megatonnes per year by 2020. The government admitted in 2012 it is on track to miss those targets, and Saher’s report castigated the government for failing to monitor and report on the strategy’s results.
Liberal environment critic Laurie Blakeman said the province’s climate-change strategy has achieved nothing and the extension only delays fixing that. “It’s a leaderless, rudderless mess,” Blakeman said. “I think our strategy’s been very weak and I think it’s because the government is trying to deliver what they think the oil and gas sector wants.”
The province’s renewed climate-change strategy will be released this fall, but a spokesman for Campbell wouldn’t say whether a carbon levy will still play a part in the policy.
Simon Dyer, with the Pembina Institute, said the province must increase the price on carbon if it wants to take greenhouse gas reduction seriously. “The government’s already invested a lot of work in this, as we understand, and we don’t see any reason to delay.”
Alberta Auditor General Merwan Saher thinks the province’s climate change strategy is “amazing.”
But he doesn’t mean that in a good way.
He says it’s amazing that six years after announcing a strategy, the government doesn’t seem to have a strategy.
Here’s Saher’s full quote: “There hasn’t been yet — and I think this is amazing — we’re in 2014 and there hasn’t yet been a public report on the success or otherwise of the 2008 strategy.”
Put another way, in 2008 the government announced with great fanfare a strategy to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions — and has failed to meet those targets ever since. Not only that, but it also failed to inform the public about how the strategy was working, or, more to the point, how it wasn’t working.
“For the government to essentially remain silent in that period is troubling,” said Saher.
Yes, “troubling” is one way to describe the government’s approach to climate change. Another is disingenuous. Or maybe even dishonest.
Saher wouldn’t go that far. In his latest annual report released Tuesday, he said he found no evidence to suggest the government was deliberately withholding bad news from the public.
However, he also didn’t find any evidence the government was properly monitoring the strategy to see if it was working.
This is not a new revelation. Both Saher and his predecessor, Fred Dunn, raised concerns about the government’s climate change strategy for years. Back to 2008, as a matter of fact. And Saher, like Dunn, appears to be getting more frustrated and outspoken the longer he is in the job.
Not only has the government failed to meet its targets so far, but it also won’t make its targets moving forward, according to Saher.
The problem? Carbon capture and storage.
CCS involves capturing carbon dioxide emissions from a large industrial source (such as a smokestack at a coal-fired power plant), compressing the gas into a fluid, transporting it by pipeline to a site and injecting it more than a kilometre underground.
The process is expensive, energy-intensive and nobody has managed to do it on the industrial scale necessary to make a dent in global emissions. The whole idea behind CCS is to allow us to keep on producing and burning fossil fuels while lowering our emissions. Think of it as an industrial vomitorium.
In 2008, the Alberta government had such high hopes for CCS that it committed to spend $2 billion over 15 years for an anticipated five experimental projects to refine the technology. The government even predicted that by 2050, the province would be capturing and storing 140 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year — 70 per cent of its 200-million-tonne-a-year goal.
Since then, project after project has been cancelled because of the costs involved. Right now, the government has just two proposed projects left. The $2-billion budget has been reduced to $1.3 billion. No carbon will be captured and stored until 2016 at the earliest.
Most troubling of all — CCS will not solve Alberta’s greenhouse gas problem. It won’t even come close.
“We’ve learned in this period between 2008 and now that carbon capture and storage isn’t going to produce anything like 70 per cent,” says Saher. “The best estimates of the moment I think are carbon capture and storage might produce 10 per cent of what was originally thought. So, Albertans deserve to know if this strategy continues to make sense what is it that’s going to be done to fill that gap?”
In other words, what’s the government’s Plan B to meet its emission reduction targets?
Environment Minister Robin Campbell says the government is working with industry to reduce emissions and he’s hopeful yet-to-be-discovered “new science” will find the answers.
It’s a vague “fingers-crossed” plan.
The government also hopes to unveil a new climate change strategy later this year. Yes, but what difference will that make if the government treats its new strategy with the apparent neglect it did the old strategy?
Energy Minister Diana McQueen, who is responsible for the CCS experiments and who, as environment minister, contributed to the neglect of the climate strategy, wasn’t available to comment on Wednesday.
So, we are left wondering how the government will meet its targets. Or even how its new strategy will be an improvement.
This is a crucial issue for Alberta if it wants to convince the world we take environmental protection seriously, particularly when it comes to climate change.
Right now, we are giving the world the impression we have no workable strategy at all.
That is not just amazing. It’s disturbing.