Refinery Row | Emissions due to human activity could warm the world's climate by one to six degrees, according to report.
Economists, scientists, and environmentalists agree that an effective climate change plan must put a steep price on carbon.
Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggest that the world’s climate could warm by one to six degrees over the next century due in most part to human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Federal government studies suggest the warming could lead to more droughts, wilder weather, and more deaths from air pollution in Alberta.
Any effective climate change plan needs three elements, says Matthew Bramley, climate change analyst for the Pembina Institute: a reduction target, a carbon price, and policies to support them.
The target
The ideal target is obvious to Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in climate modeling and analysis at the University of Victoria.
“Every single policy option must lead to a 100 per cent emission reduction,” he says. In other words, we must produce no more emissions than the Earth can reabsorb if we want to permanently stop human-induced climate warming. “There’s no other way of dealing with it.”
At the very least, he and others say, the world will need to cut its total emissions to about half of what they were in 1990 by 2050 to limit climate warming to two degrees — the level beyond which the more dangerous effects of warming kick in.
There’s a rough international consensus that industrialized nations like Canada should agree to a bigger cut — say, 80 per cent — than developing ones. “We [industrialized nations] make up less than one-fifth of the world,” says Ian Bruce, climate change specialist with the David Suzuki Foundation, “yet we’re responsible for 75 per cent of the build-up.”
Nations like Canada also have the resources to deal with climate change. “It should be up to countries like Canada to take action first.”
The price
The only way to get those cuts, say Weaver, Bramley, and Bruce, is to put a price on carbon emissions. Voluntary measures and subsidies alone don’t work, according to studies by economists such as Mark Jaccard at Simon Fraser University, because they don’t deter emissions.
“We’ve had 20 years of subsidies and our emissions have skyrocketed,” Weaver says, citing Jaccard’s work.
The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy and other groups recommend creating a cap-and-trade or carbon-tax system to make pollution more costly. Both systems have the same effect, Weaver says, except a carbon tax sets the pollution cost directly (e.g., by raising gas prices) while cap-and-trade does it indirectly, through companies buying pollution permits. “The price of gas goes up in either case.”
A revenue-neutral carbon tax such as the one in B.C. shunts carbon charges back to consumers through tax cuts and programs, Weaver says. “If they choose to use that money to pursue less carbon-intensive fuels,” he says, “they get wealthier still.”
By making pollution more expensive, Bruce says, this carbon price should steer people towards lower-polluting technologies and actions. “It would encourage car manufacturers to develop more fuel efficient vehicles,” he says, and has pushed Norwegian oil companies to invest in carbon-capture systems.
The Green Budget Coalition has recommended a price of $30 per tonne of emissions now, Bramley says, rising to $75 by 2020. The National Roundtable has recommended charging $100 to $200 per tonne by 2050.
The policies
Governments should have supplementary policies to help people reduce emissions, Bramley says: stricter vehicle emission standards, for example, and funds to help people retrofit their homes to use less energy.
“Any move to make fossil fuels cheaper than they are at the moment is a step in the wrong direction,” he adds, with reference to a proposed two-cent cut to the diesel excise tax by the Conservatives.
This is a historic election, Bramley says, as it’s the first time the environment has ever played such a prominent role. He encouraged all political parties to compete with each other to put forth the best platform on the environment.
What The Parties Want
The Conservatives brought in their plan in 2007. It proposes to cut Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions to 20 per cent of 2006 levels by 2020 using a cap-and-trade system (or about five per cent above 1990 levels, according to the Pembina Institute), and to 60 to 70 per cent by 2050. It also features a $2-billion ecoENERGY fund to encourage home retrofits and investment in renewable power and a $1.5-billion trust fund for federal/provincial projects such as a carbon-capture network.
The Liberals propose to cut emissions by 20 per cent of 1990 levels by 2020 —25 if other nations take on comparable efforts. Their Green Shift plan proposes to do this through a carbon tax, one that would charge consumers $10 per tonne of emissions (rising to $40 after four years). The tax would work by raising the price of most fossil fuels except for gasoline, collecting about $15 billion a year and returning it through about $15 billion in income tax cuts and social programs. The Liberals recently added about $900 million in support for fuel-heavy jobs such as fishing, farming and trucking.
The NDP aims to meet Canada’s Kyoto Protocol target of six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, followed by 25 per cent by 2020 and 80 by 2050. It plans to do this through a cap-and-trade system, higher fuel economy standards, $1 billion for public transit and a moratorium on further oilsands development.
The Green Party proposes a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade system. Aiming for a 30 per cent cut below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 by 2040, its tax starts at $50 a tonne and does apply to gasoline, rising to $100 by 2020.
