The Alberta government has spurned a federal offer to sign a formal agreement on co-operating with Ottawa and other provinces and territories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.

But a senior provincial official says that Alberta still wants to work with the federal and other governments on cutting emissions, providing it fits within Alberta’s climate-change plan.

“We made it clear that we have an action plan,” said John Donner, Alberta Environment’s assistant deputy minister in charge of strategic directions.

“We want to co-operate on the actions that are consistent with our action plan. We look forward to working on that,” he told Business Edge at a climate-change conference organized by the Canadian Prairie and Northern Section of the Air & Waste Management Association last week.

Alberta has proposed its own climate-change legislation, Bill 37. It would reduce a lower amount of greenhouse gases over a longer period than the level and deadline required by the Kyoto accord, which Canada ratified in December.

Bill 37, which has gone through second reading, is scheduled to come up for third and final reading when the legislature resumes sitting this fall.

Donner said that with its own climate-change strategy and priorities, Alberta has no interest in signing a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) that Ottawa is negotiating with other provinces and territories.

David Oulton, head of the federal climate change secretariat, says Ottawa is currently in discussion with seven provinces and territories on the formal co-operation agreement.

Even without the MOU, the federal government – like the Alberta government – believes “there are a huge number of opportunities for us to work together, particularly on technology,” Oulton said.

Ottawa has circulated discussion papers to other governments as well as large industry sectors on a proposed national greenhouse gas emissions-trading system. The system will be crucial if Canada has any hope of reducing its emissions by 240 million tonnes by 2012, to meet its obligations under the Kyoto accord.

The market-based system would enable the private and public sectors to buy and sell credits for reducing emissions. Under Kyoto, Ottawa plans to link the domestic trading system to an international system, allowing Canadian companies to reduce emissions at home by buying credits from other countries with surplus credits, such as Russia.

But the Alberta government, which is drafting a separate emissions-trading system for use within the province, isn’t interested in reducing emissions by buying credits from other countries, Donner said.

Alberta prefers to invest in new technology within the province that will reduce “emissions intensity” (the amount of energy used to produce a barrel of oil or equivalent) while still enabling the provincial economy and its energy sector to grow, he said.

Alberta’s target is to reduce emissions intensity by 50 per cent by 2020, which should result in an actual reduction of 60 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

But Tom Marr-Laing, a director at the environmentalist Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development, calls the Alberta plan “absolutely incompatible with Kyoto.”

If Alberta continues to enjoy a strong economy and expand oilsands development, the province’s climate-change plan would actually result in a 39- to 66-per-cent increase in Alberta’s total greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, he told the conference.

Alberta’s long-term energy strategy “is on a collision course with international efforts to protect the climate,” Marr-Laing said.

Rick Hyndman, senior policy advisor to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), says Canada’s upstream oil and gas industry will have to reduce its emissions by 17 million tonnes by 2012 under Kyoto. The upstream industry explores and drills for and produces oil and gas.

Even by using less energy to produce the same barrel of oil, the only way oil and gas companies will be able to meet the Kyoto target is to buy credits from other industrial sectors or countries, Hyndman said.

This is essentially a tax on Canadian oil and gas producers, while the increase in GHGs in other countries that aren’t party to the Kyoto accord (such as the U.S., China and India) will negate any emissions reduction in Canada, Hyndman said.

Henry Hengeveld, senior science adviser on climate change to Environment Canada, told the conference that global warming is expected to raise Calgary’s average temperature by two to four degrees Celsius by 2050.

Even a 30-per-cent increase in precipitation – predicted by some computer models – wouldn’t be sufficient to offset the warmer climate and prolonged drought periods, he noted. “It’s almost certain that Calgary in summer will become drier, and it could become very dry.”

Based on the best scientific evidence available, said Hengeveld, “future changes in climate are expected to be unprecedented in human history.”