Energy Probe

The Ontario government’s  plan to turn off coal and switch to biomass at the Atikokan Generation Station is a VERY expensive way to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions.

Implementing tariffs to discriminate against environmentally subsidized imports is a horrible—and very 1950s—idea.

A recent announcement that 50 members of Congress are opposed to growing imports from Canada’s “filthy” oil sands is a matter that can only be addressed by a federal, not provincial, government initiative—using data that Eddy Isaacs in the government of Alberta can provide. The problem appears to be, however, that our federal team does not know where and how they are supposed to be entering the US Congressional dialogue. 

British Columbians instinctively know what the Brits and other Europeans started to discover between 1999 and 2004. That is that value-added and carbon taxes are highly regressive and no government can cost-effectively administer the follow-up programmes whose stated objectives are to mitigate the highly regressive nature of the original income-to-tax shift.

Last week I had some rather enlightening conversations with a few very senior BC government officials. We talked about BC's evolving GHG offset system (I raised concerns about offset protocols that doubt and triple count reductions) and the developing BC cap and trade regime. 

Charles Lammam and Niels Veldhuis would have us believe that net tax cuts are in the future for most BC households. But Finance Minister Colin Hansen's 2010 Budget Fiscal Plan suggests otherwise. Who should we believe?

There is a conflict between British Columbia’s public revenue requirements as presented in the Province's official Fiscal Plan and the Premier's suggestion that BC will proceed with "cap and trade"-type regulation for industrial Greenhouse Gas emissions.

National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy staff appear to have selected a set of climate change policy options, and have now produced three reports that are works of advocacy for those policy options and that lack substantive or useful research findings. They start with solutions, and then set out to develop a methodology to ensure that any "research" results jibe with their proposed solutions.

If/when this existing practise—to date not challenged by any Canadian legislator—is incorporated in US GHG and renewable electricity/portfolio standard regulations, the US EPA will have completely bypassed Canadian legislators and made any major Canadian exporter of carbon-based products directly accountable to the US Congress and subject to US law.

The EU negotiators disguise the inadequacy of their 2020 reduction commitment by consistently referring to a 1990 baseline. The problem is that while EU27 GHG emissions crashed between 1990 and 1995, they have grown continuously since then.