Let’s accept Premier Brad Wall’s presumption that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon pricing is not a solution to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
After all, Wall offers ample reasons for his argument.
As Wall noted in an op-ed piece recently published in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Trudeau’s climate-change solution proposal is “both simple and seductive.”
“A carbon tax is applied. Money is collected, money goes out. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions go down,” Wall wrote.
“The problem is that there is little evidence this works, and yet it risks jobs and competitiveness in carbon-intense sectors such as energy, manufacturing, mining and agriculture.
“In British Columbia, often touted as the example of carbon-tax efficacy, emissions have increased since 2010.”
Wall also rightly noted in the Globe and Mail piece that Saskatchewan “has a disproportionate share of Canada’s trade-exposed industrial sectors” plus “a significant portion of Saskatchewan’s GHG emissions relate directly to getting our products to the world market.”
But let us accept – as Wall did in his whitepaper on the economy released last week – that GHGs are a real problem contributing to global warming.
“There is no denying it. We have a problem; a problem that has to be solved for the sake of current and future generations,” said the executive summary of Wall’s white paper. “Climate change is real...
“In the last decade, global temperatures have been higher 75 per cent of the time when compared to the last 11,300 years.”
The problem is that what Wall is offering seems no more productive than what we now see with Trudeau.
Sure, Wall obviously has to make many considerations that go beyond the environment.
Carbon pricing would not only impact Saskatchewan’s oil and mining sectors but also our critical farming sector that would likely see its inputs.
Like those in the mining and oil sector, that would put Saskatchewan farmers at a distinct disadvantage in competition with those in other countries.
One of the more positive alternatives Wall proposed in his White Paper on Climate Change is carbon sinks that would recognize the many farming practices that actually address greenhouse gas emissions.
Practical things like zero till do need to be acknowledged, especially in relation to a national carbon tax being applied to critical industries like farming.
But if Wall is right in his white paper’s premise that adaptation and innovation are far more effective tools to fight climate change than taxation, one might have expected to see much more innovation and adaptation in his plan.
It wasn’t there.
His white paper emphasized that there are more than 2,400 new coal-fired power plants planned or under construction around the world that would pump out nearly nine times Canada’s annual GHG emissions.
But Wall’s solutions that call for a doubling of the funding for climate change adaptation research and partnering with the federal government through SaskPower to develop carbon capture of storage doesn’t really do much to reduce existing GHG emissions.
Nor does the paper offer any information on how much all this will cost and where we will get the money from … other than from the federal government.
Moreover, Wall’s white paper also calls for “redeploying its $2.65 billion, five-year commitment to developing countries to deal with climate change” and adding it to the existing Low Carbon Economy Trust.
If we are going to sell to developing nations like China and India where many of those 2,400-plus coal-fired plants are being built, does it make sense to cut off funding to them? Is that the best way to fight a global problem?
Wall’s white paper will be immensely popular with the business community and likely the province as a whole.
But it just doesn’t seem to be any better a solution than the one Trudeau has come up with.
