Alberta and Ottawa must quit squabbling over the Kyoto accord and co-operate in encouraging research to cut greenhouse gas emissions, says the head of the province’s climate-change agency.
Support for research and development of new technologies is crucial if Alberta and the rest of Canada want to reduce the emissions blamed for global warming, said Allan Amey, president and chief executive of Climate Change Central.
“I think the provincial government and the federal government need to sit down at the table again and try to work around common elements of what we can do” to reduce emissions, Amey told Business Edge at a major conference on climate change and technology.
Several delegates at last week’s three-day conference in Calgary urged both governments to stop their political bickering over Kyoto and show leadership in reducing greenhouse gases.
Alberta Environment Minister Lorne Taylor appeared at the conference via a satellite linkup from a meeting in Charlottetown of the country’s energy and environment ministers.
At the meeting, Taylor unveiled the province’s “made-in-Alberta” plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But Ottawa and the rest of the provinces didn’t support presenting the plan to Canadians during consultations to occur in 14 cities in June.
After Alberta’s plan was snubbed, Taylor withdrew as co-chairman of a federal-provincial committee managing consultation on climate change.
“We tried to offer Canadians a choice, and the federal government doesn’t appear to want to have those choices available to the Canadian public,” he said.
Premier Ralph Klein said later that despite Ottawa’s refusal to consider Alberta’s alternative to the Kyoto accord, the province would continue to work on building a federal-provincial consensus on emission reductions in Canada. Klein said he’ll urge other western premiers to press Ottawa to include Alberta’s plan for discussion in next month’s public consultations.
The Alberta government and several industry associations argue that trying to meet Canada’s Kyoto target is impossible and would damage the economy. Under Kyoto, the country would have to make a 26-per-cent cut – 240 million tonnes – in industrial greenhouse gas emissions by 2012.
“Kyoto might work elsewhere in the world, but it won’t work in Canada, at least not without hurting Alberta’s economy and costing the province jobs, market and growth,” Klein said.
Alberta’s plan, like that of President George W. Bush in the U.S., focuses on reducing “emissions intensity,” rather than cutting the total volume of emissions as required under the Kyoto treaty.
Emissions intensity is the amount of greenhouse gases that it takes to produce a given amount of oil, natural gas or other energy or manufactured good.
Taylor pledged that Alberta would reduce its emissions intensity by 50 per cent by 2020.
This would also result in an actual reduction in the volume of emissions, down to five to 10 per cent below 1990 levels, he added.
In essence, Alberta is promising to meet the Kyoto target, but would take eight years longer to do it. During those eight years, Kyoto obligates signatory countries to negotiate even stricter subsequent emission-reduction targets.
A major part of Alberta’s plan is pursuing new technologies to reduce greenhouse gases, Taylor said. He noted that the province spent about $800 million over two decades to develop oilsands production technologies.
However, Alberta’s climate-change plan contains no cost figures, new funding or tax incentives to support research and development of technologies to reduce greenhouse gases.
Environmental groups say that U.S. initiatives to reduce greenhouse gases far outstrip Alberta’s and Canada’s efforts, despite the Bush administration’s rejection of Kyoto.
“Canada’s provincial and federal climate-change policies and programs are significantly weaker than (their) American counterparts,” said Matthew Bramley, climate change director at the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental policy research group.
While no province has set an emissions-reduction target or requires power plants to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, several U.S. states have taken these steps, Bramley said.
Thirteen U.S. states also have renewable energy portfolio standards requiring electricity companies to generate a portion of their supply from clean sources such as wind, according to a report by Pembina and the World Wildlife Fund.
But Alberta, which still generates more than 70 per cent of its electricity by burning coal, has no renewable energy standard.
Nevertheless, some oil and gas companies, such as EnCana, Conoco Canada, Syncrude and Suncor, are at the forefront of voluntary efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, said Vicky Sharpe, president and chief executive of the Foundation for Sustainable Development Technology in Canada.
“There’s clear and mounting evidence that sustainable development in the oilpatch can be cost effective,” she told the Calgary conference.
The conference, presented by the Petroleum Technology Alliance of Canada and Climate Change Central, heard about a range of existing and promising new technologies to reduce greenhouse gases.
They include:
* Collecting carbon dioxide (the main greenhouse gas) at coal-fired generation plants and other industrial facilities, then pumping it deep underground for permanent storage in depleted oil and gas reservoirs.
* Building “zero-emission” coal-fired generation plants.
* Continuing to reduce oilfield flaring and venting emissions.
* Accelerating development of hydrogen fuel cells.
* Capturing methane from garbage dumps and using the gas to generate electricity.
But Amey noted that for these and other technologies to really take off, “the private sector needs to step to the plate, as well as the provincial government and the federal government. It needs to be a partnership.”
