Economic pressure is fracturing the brittle diplomacies of climate remediation in Canada. While promising to force carbon pricing on provinces not meeting its standards of sacrifice, the Liberal government headed by Justin Trudeau has moderated its own ambition. In a television interview Sept. 18, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna reasserted targets set by the predecessor Conservative government for lowering emissions of carbon dioxide. When the former government set those goals in May 2015, Liberals howled. It wouldn't be enough, they complained, to cut CO2 emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and 30% by 2030. At the Paris climate summit late last year, McKenna even described those aspirations as merely a floor.
Settling for the floor now is no wobble, McKenna assured her interviewer, because her party, unlike the Conservatives, will actually implement policy. "It's mandatory that everyone will have to have a price on carbon," she declared. "If provinces don't do that, the federal government will provide a backstop."
Difficult 'equivalency'
Alberta and British Columbia have opted for carbon taxes, while Quebec and Ontario prefer cap-and-trade systems. But those programs might not satisfy Ottawa. Meanwhile, Saskatchewan's premier says the federal government should account for the costs of CO2 captured in his province and sold to oil producers for enhanced recovery. And the Nova Scotia premier thinks his province deserves credit for jumps in electricity prices caused by switching from coal to renewable generation fuels.
Achieving the "equivalency" McKenna extolled for nationwide carbon pricing thus will be difficult. Pursuing it will raise constitutional questions. But Trudeau wants a national plan to be ready when he attends a United Nations summit in Morocco early in November.
The Liberals fool no one. Their embrace of emission targets introduced by Conservatives is a huge concession. For making it, they deserve applause. They recognize economic reality when it bangs their skulls. Fanatics never come around.
The Canadian economy is struggling. Gross domestic product fell at an annualized rate of 1.6% in the second quarter. Economic performance of course took an extra beating from devastating fires that curtailed bitumen production in Alberta from late April through June. But that just aggravated a slump, related to oil-price weakness, in what had been Canada's main source of economic growth. According to Statistics Canada, business investment declined during April-June for the sixth straight quarter.
Trudeau nevertheless wants to punish carbon, which will raise the costs of producing and using fossil energy, which in turn will hurt oil and gas producers and energy consumers. Not raising goals for emission cuts will only moderate the pain.
No matter what national program emerges for carbon pricing, Canada won't meet even the Conservative targets that Liberals once disparaged but now accept. Toronto Sun columnist Lorrie Goldstein Harper did the arithmetic against government projections for greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 and 2030 and reached conclusions important to Canadians facing elevation of energy costs. Meeting the 2020 targets, Harper wrote on Sept. 20, requires the equivalent of shutting down Canada's entire electricity industry and most of the country's agriculture. Meeting the 2030 targets requires the equivalent of shutting down the oil and gas industry and more than half of Canadian transportation.
Deprivation will not reach these extremes. Propelled by real-world economics, politics will intervene before Canada surrenders much more prosperity to capricious goals for emissions and energy use. And the world will have another illustration of how not to formulate climate policy.
Creatures of politics
The current approach depends on numerical goals set during contests for diplomatic adulation among elites parroting hysteria scripted by extremists. The targets, creatures as they are of politics, crumble when they encounter reality. This is why the Kyoto Treaty unraveled. It's why the Paris accord will fail. It's why Canada is backpedaling.
Climate policy needs balanced incentives aligned with economic imperatives and rational assessments of the hazard. In any approach lacking stressful targets, extremists would see deficient seriousness. Others, finally, could see hope for success.
