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Rushing to catch up with unexpected competition from Alberta, Premier Kathleen Wynne revealed the skeleton of an Ontario climate-change policy in Toronto on Tuesday. At the Royal Ontario Museum, appropriately enough.
“This is a congratulatory and celebratory day,” Wynne said. Kind of. If you like celebrating beginnings, not successful conclusions.
The announcement was a rush job, more a preview of real measures to come sometime in 2016 than a presentation of a comprehensive plan. Wynne (surrounded by much of her cabinet) pledged a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, updated construction rules to make buildings more energy-efficient, and programs “promoting the uptake of zero-emission and plug-in hybrid vehicles.”
“The cap-and-trade system alone is not enough to get us to where we need to be,” Wynne said, which is why everything else is needed. Environment Minister Glen Murray called it nothing less than the transformation of Ontario’s economy over the next 20 to 30 years, as part of a national — indeed global — effort. Details? Well, those are TBA.
Canada isn’t a big global emitter in absolute terms. A decade of stubbornly refusing to take any useful part in international negotiations on the subject gave others a lot of cover, though. There’s a reason why Canada won all those “Fossil of the Year” anti-awards from environmental groups.
Canada gave other countries excuses to do nothing. Within Canada, Alberta gave other provinces and the federal government excuses to do nothing. Now that Alberta’s changed its philosophy, thanks to Premier Rachel Notley, the whole dynamic is different. The most retrograde province in the most retrograde country is suddenly going the way everyone else wants to go. Now other provinces are hurrying to catch up.
“This shift in the conversation has taken some time,” Wynne conceded Tuesday.
Take the most visible part of any serious climate-change policy: making people and businesses pay a price for carbon-dioxide emissions. Notley’s planning a tax of $30 a tonne, which is what British Columbia has been charging since 2012. Among other things, that means an extra tax on gasoline of about seven cents a litre.
Nicholas Stern, the British climate economist whose giant report in 2006 was a landmark in trying to figure out the right price for carbon, ran the numbers again in a paper published last year and proposed that the right price for carbon emissions in 2015 is between $32 and $103 a tonne. The numbers vary a lot depending on what assumptions you use about, say, coastal hurricane damage in 2050, but this range begins with hyper-conservative assumptions and goes only as far as moderately panicky. Also, those are U.S. dollars.
And again, that’s a starting point. By the middle of the century, to get emissions down to where they need to be for climate stability, the rough consensus estimate is that we should be paying $150 a tonne for carbon-dioxide emissions (though some credible work suggests it’ll have to be much higher). So figure a tax of 35 cents a litre on gas, and equivalent hikes on home heating oil and natural gas, plus higher prices on things that need to burn carbon to be manufactured and transported.
“This is a transition, right? So the idea is to not have your energy costs go up,” Murray, the environment minister, said. Which is funny, in a province where ditching coal-based electricity, though a good thing for the environment, has hiked hydro bills dramatically.
Of course, the idea is not just that everything will be more expensive and life will suck, but that we’ll find other ways to solve some of the problems we now solve by burning stuff. Electric vehicles charged by nuclear and hydro stations, for instance, should reduce our reliance on extra-expensive gasoline. Better home insulation should reduce our reliance on heating fuels. And so on.
We’ve survived without leaded gasoline and ozone-killing chemicals in spray cans, both of which we stopped using for environmental reasons, so there are successful historical examples. Only if you have a really good reason to burn gasoline will you pay the elevated price for it. Otherwise you’ll find a cheaper alternative. And, of course, there are costs to burning gasoline that haven’t been captured in the price at the pump, which Murray pointed out correctly are often just ignored. Those hurricanes, for instance.
This change is worth it. But it will not be free.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
“This is a congratulatory and celebratory day,” Wynne said. Kind of. If you like celebrating beginnings, not successful conclusions.
The announcement was a rush job, more a preview of real measures to come sometime in 2016 than a presentation of a comprehensive plan. Wynne (surrounded by much of her cabinet) pledged a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, updated construction rules to make buildings more energy-efficient, and programs “promoting the uptake of zero-emission and plug-in hybrid vehicles.”
“The cap-and-trade system alone is not enough to get us to where we need to be,” Wynne said, which is why everything else is needed. Environment Minister Glen Murray called it nothing less than the transformation of Ontario’s economy over the next 20 to 30 years, as part of a national — indeed global — effort. Details? Well, those are TBA.
Canada isn’t a big global emitter in absolute terms. A decade of stubbornly refusing to take any useful part in international negotiations on the subject gave others a lot of cover, though. There’s a reason why Canada won all those “Fossil of the Year” anti-awards from environmental groups.
Canada gave other countries excuses to do nothing. Within Canada, Alberta gave other provinces and the federal government excuses to do nothing. Now that Alberta’s changed its philosophy, thanks to Premier Rachel Notley, the whole dynamic is different. The most retrograde province in the most retrograde country is suddenly going the way everyone else wants to go. Now other provinces are hurrying to catch up.
“This shift in the conversation has taken some time,” Wynne conceded Tuesday.
Take the most visible part of any serious climate-change policy: making people and businesses pay a price for carbon-dioxide emissions. Notley’s planning a tax of $30 a tonne, which is what British Columbia has been charging since 2012. Among other things, that means an extra tax on gasoline of about seven cents a litre.
Nicholas Stern, the British climate economist whose giant report in 2006 was a landmark in trying to figure out the right price for carbon, ran the numbers again in a paper published last year and proposed that the right price for carbon emissions in 2015 is between $32 and $103 a tonne. The numbers vary a lot depending on what assumptions you use about, say, coastal hurricane damage in 2050, but this range begins with hyper-conservative assumptions and goes only as far as moderately panicky. Also, those are U.S. dollars.
And again, that’s a starting point. By the middle of the century, to get emissions down to where they need to be for climate stability, the rough consensus estimate is that we should be paying $150 a tonne for carbon-dioxide emissions (though some credible work suggests it’ll have to be much higher). So figure a tax of 35 cents a litre on gas, and equivalent hikes on home heating oil and natural gas, plus higher prices on things that need to burn carbon to be manufactured and transported.
“This is a transition, right? So the idea is to not have your energy costs go up,” Murray, the environment minister, said. Which is funny, in a province where ditching coal-based electricity, though a good thing for the environment, has hiked hydro bills dramatically.
Of course, the idea is not just that everything will be more expensive and life will suck, but that we’ll find other ways to solve some of the problems we now solve by burning stuff. Electric vehicles charged by nuclear and hydro stations, for instance, should reduce our reliance on extra-expensive gasoline. Better home insulation should reduce our reliance on heating fuels. And so on.
We’ve survived without leaded gasoline and ozone-killing chemicals in spray cans, both of which we stopped using for environmental reasons, so there are successful historical examples. Only if you have a really good reason to burn gasoline will you pay the elevated price for it. Otherwise you’ll find a cheaper alternative. And, of course, there are costs to burning gasoline that haven’t been captured in the price at the pump, which Murray pointed out correctly are often just ignored. Those hurricanes, for instance.
This change is worth it. But it will not be free.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
