The Narwhal | News on Climate Change, Environmental Issues in Canada

B.C.’s First LNG Plant Gets Investment Green Light

ictinus — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 21:16:53 +0000

This article originally appeared on The Climate Examiner at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.

British Columbia’s first major liquefied natural gas project is set to go ahead with Woodfibre LNG’s announcement last week of funding to build a $1.6 billion processing and export plant in Squamish.

The project, which promises some 650 construction jobs and 100 permanent operating jobs to the small town with a population of 17,000, aims to begin exporting some 2.1 million tonnes of LNG annually to Asia from 2020.

The plant is much smaller than the highly controversial $11 billion Pacific NorthWest (PNW) LNG terminal planned near Prince Rupert that received conditional approval from the federal Liberal government in September and which would ship some ten times the amount of the Woodfibre project each year.

It is however the first of 20 proposed LNG export projects in British Columbia to be given company approval — a development that will bring much cheer to the provincial government which is facing an election next May and for whom a flourishing LNG industry is the centerpiece of its economic development plans.

The infant sector has been beset with a raft of bad news in the last year. In July Shell announced it was indefinitely postponing its LNG Canada project. And Petronas, the Malaysia-based developer of the PNW project, has delayed its final investment decision.

Atop the raft of negative business development announcements, globally the sector faces a supply glut that has driven prices down below levels sufficient to cover the cost of production in B.C.

B.C.’s natural gas development minister Rich Coleman has said that it is unlikely that another LNG project will enjoy final investment decisions from companies prior to next year’s provincial election, meaning Woodfibre is the provincial Liberals’ last bit of LNG good news before they move into campaign mode.

The company decision is also not very reflective of the mood amongst potential provincial LNG developers, as the decision was largely based on the need of Woodfibre’s Singapore-based parent company, Pacific Oil & Gas Limited, to supply its own gas-fired power plants rather than to sell to other purchasers on the open market.

B.C.'s First LNG Plant Gets Investment Green Light https://t.co/45AngTuhui #bcpoli #WoodfibreLNG #BCLNG

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 14, 2016

Noticeable for their absence at the announcement were representatives of the Squamish First Nation. While they are not opposed to the project, it still has yet to clear their own independent environmental assessment, Chief Ian Campbell told the local press.

“We set out 25 conditions that must be met before we sign anything,” he said.

The provincial government is touting the environmental credentials of the project as processing will be powered by clean electricity instead of natural gas. The announcement was welcomed by private-sector clean energy power producers hopeful that they will be able to supply Woodfibre with their wares.

The Pembina Institute, an environmental think-tank, criticised the development, pointing out that while the Woodfibre project is smaller than other LNG schemes and even with electrification, it will still represent six percent of B.C.’s legislated 2050 emissions target, making the province’s mitigation goals that much harder to achieve.

Image: Christy Clark at the Woodfibre LNG announcement. Photo: Province of B.C. via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

On LNG, B.C. Manages to Out-Trump Even Donald Trump

ictinus — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 21:46:55 +0000

By Andrew Nikiforuk for The Tyee.

Every day, methane promoters in British Columbia’s government manage to out-trump Donald Trump.

The hoopla over the $1.6-billion Woodfibre LNG terminal, which will industrialize Howe Sound and the city of Squamish, illustrates just how far the Christy Clark-led BC Liberal government will go to subvert the truth.

The government billed the event as maker of economic prosperity and the beginning of a winning fight against climate change.

Both claims read like Trump balderdash with no basis in reality.

In fact, every B.C. citizen should be alarmed by the Woodfibre LNG deal because it will fleece every taxpayer.

Let’s start with the subsidies and a little context.

Back in 2013 Premier Christy Clark promised that LNG would make the province rich, create a $100-billion savings fund, erase all debt and employ tens of thousands of people.

None of the hype materialized, nor will it for the long foreseeable future. Thanks to a global methane glut and a collapse in methane prices by 75 per cent, the LNG industry faces “an extremely challenging business environment.”

According to Forbes, Australia’s LNG industry is now bleeding billions of dollars of cash and earning nothing for the owners of the resource: Australians. It is also noteworthy that Asian markets have contracted four per cent despite the fall in LNG prices.

As a consequence, no company has made a final investment decision on 20 LNG proposals in B.C. — with the single exception of Woodfibre, a company owned by a Singapore tycoon, Sukanto Tanoto.

It is telling that one of Tanoto’s companies, Asian Agri, has been found guilty of tax evasion. (But that hasn’t caused Clark to rethink who she invites to do business in B.C.)

Taxpayers Subsidize Slim Odds LNG Gamble

Meanwhile, methane from British Columbia — due to the high-cost fracking of shales and their frontier remoteness, is among the world’s most expensive gas. Global markets now offer prices of $7 per million British Thermal Unit (Btu) but B.C. needs at least $10 per million Btu to make a dollar.

To save face on her outrageous LNG promises, Clark has now offered some significant giveaways to Tanoto that every British Columbian will pay for.

The first is a major electrical subsidy. Clark promised Woodfibre and any other LNG developer this month a reduced electrical rate or what’s known as an “eDrive rate.”

Two years ago, the government promised energy-intensive LNG projects electrical rates at $83.02 per megawatt hour.

Now Clark has offered LNG developers a stunning give-it-away “eDrive rate” of $53.60. That is less $30 below the original quote and about half the expected $100-plus cost of a megawatt-hour from the $9-billion Site C dam. That dam will raise electricity prices so Clark can give away money to tax evaders and LNG developers.

According to Eoin Finn, a former high-level consultant for KPMG, the electrical subsidy borders on larceny. “For Woodfibre’s power-hungry 140 Megawatt plant, the annual subsidy represented by the eDrive rate will total some $34 million per annum, or $860 million over its 25-year lifespan.”

But that’s not the only subsidy.

The government has halved the LNG tax rate to 3.5 per cent — among the lowest in the world and locked it in for 25 years. It granted Woodfibre and other LNG projects an 18-month holiday on carbon taxes. It accelerated capital cost write-offs. It lowered natural gas royalties to next to nothing and offers the industry nearly $200 million in drilling credits every year. And there will be no sales tax on methane purchases.

In addition, the province encouraged Woodfibre on Oct. 25 to pitch the District of Squamish a reduced property tax rate of $2 million instead of the normal mill rate of $8 million to $10 million.

‘The hoopla over #WoodfibreLNG illustrates how far the @ChristyClarkBC gov’t will go to subvert the truth’ https://t.co/FpWo9QJj0i #bcpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 11, 2016

Bearing Great Risk for Puny Reward

B.C.’s LNG advocates may argue that it took such incentives in order to jumpstart an industry that will produce revenue for the province and jobs for citizens.

But with so few jobs (just 100 permanent jobs for the Woodfibre plant) and no guarantee of revenue given all the subsidies, and a global LNG glut, the B.C. government has ignored the marketplace and embraced a Soviet model of LNG development.

In this special Clark model, taxpayers pay for everything: from the water given to shale gas frackers for free to the electricity provided to energy-gobbling terminals.

Even $100 million placed into a so-called LNG prosperity fund came out of taxpayers’ wallets via the Medical Services Plan.

Not even Trump has been that brazen in his outrageous business dealings.

Fraudulent Claims that LNG Fixes Climate Change

But there is more unreality.

Clark claimed that the Woodfibre approval “marks the beginning of a tremendous opportunity for British Columbia to play a significant role in the global fight against climate change, using the world’s cleanest LNG to help countries transition away from coal and oil.”

Incredibly, Clark has also claimed that LNG exports will help stop climate change from igniting and feeding wildfires across the west and burning up places like Fort McMurray.

But that’s a pipeline full of falseness.

Last spring, more than 90 scientists wrote a letter to the federal government, which the Trudeau government ignored. It outlined why LNG makes the climate more unstable, and it’s all due to methane leakage.

The scientists explained how the Petronas LNG terminal in particular “would be one of the single largest point source emitters in Canada” at five million tonnes a year and account for nearly 25 per cent of the province’s GHG emissions.

The scientists underscored a host of problems in provincial GHG accounting. Most specifically, the province has never told the truth about methane leakage from fracking, transport, turning the gas into liquid and converting it back into gas.

The B.C. government pretends that methane infrastructure only has a 0.28 percentage leakage rate, but that figure hasn’t been verified by field studies.

In contrast, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an organization that President Elect Donald Trump has proposed to shutter, uses a methane leakage rate of 1.33 per cent. Other research has found some methane shale fields leak as much as nine per cent, which makes the product three times dirtier than coal.

In other words the government has underestimated leakage rates in order to pretend its LNG is “clean.” (There is, for the record, no such thing as clean energy: every form has an environmental cost.)

The scientists also noted that there is no guarantee that LNG from any terminal in B.C. will be used to replace coal-burning plants in Asia. Clark hasn’t signed that non-existent trade deal. (By one rough estimate Woodfibre will emit nearly 22 mega-tonnes of climate changing gases over a 25-year period.)

Secondly, methane just can’t serve as a climate saver or clean bridge fuel due to rising methane emissions from shale gas fracking and mining. Cornell researchers add that methane “is more than 100-times more powerful (than carbon dioxide) for the first decade after emission, 86-times over a 20-year period, and 34-times over 100 years.”

David Hughes, one of the nation’s foremost energy experts, calculates that B.C.’s LNG — if delivered to China — would be actually 27 per cent worse than coal over a 20-year timeframe.

He starkly concludes: “On a full-cycle emissions basis, the planet would be better off if China built state-of-the-art coal plants rather than burning B.C. LNG for at least the next 50 years.” It is true that at the burner tip, gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of coal.

More Wounds to B.C.’s Land and Water

In addition to failing to truly account for methane leakage, the government of B.C. has never assessed the cumulative impacts of LNG on land disturbance, water consumption, groundwater contamination or earthquake hazards, which fracking has greatly aggravated in the province.

But that doesn’t seem to worry the government at all.

Years ago the great conservationist Roderick Haig-Brown lamented the province’s adolescent politics and its abusive obsession with resource booms. He called B.C. a “profligate province.”

The province’s ruinous resource booms left behind crackerbox towns, derelict forests, ravaged acres and scars upon the hillsides.

In the process, lamented Haig-Brown, the province became “a playground for economic imperialists with the spoils going unfailingly to the strong.”

And that’s exactly what Clark has done with her Trump-like promotion of LNG.

She has decimated the truth while making grandiose promises impossible to deliver. She has given away the farm to tax evaders with a Trump-like flourish.

Image: Christy Clark at the annoucement of a final investment decision for Woodfibre LNG. Photo: Province of B.C. via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Hydro Reservoirs Produce Way More Emissions Than We Thought: Study

Judith Lavoie — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 16:29:00 +0000

Hydropower is usually touted as clean energy, but a new study has found man-made reservoirs are producing far more greenhouse gases than previously believed, with most of those emissions in the form of methane, a potent climate-warming gas.

Researchers found that reservoirs are producing 1.3 per cent of all greenhouse gases produced by humans, or, to put the figure in context, more than all greenhouse gases produced in Canada annually.

“We weren’t super-surprised at the magnitude of the emissions, but one thing we were surprised to see is the per area rate of methane emissions. They are 25 per cent higher than previously thought,” Washington State University researcher Bridget Deemer, lead author of the study, published Wednesday in the journal BioScience, told DeSmog Canada.

“(Methane emissions) contribute about 80 per cent of the total global warming impact of the gases from reservoirs.” The remaining emissions are carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.

Methane is 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide and emissions have previously been difficult to measure, but new research is using tools such as bubble-tracking sonar to measure methane bubbles.

Researchers from the Washington State University along with colleagues from around the world looked at the results of more than 100 studies of emissions from 250 reservoirs around the world.

The startling results are leading to calls for reservoir emissions to be included in calculations made by countries and organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when gauging greenhouse gas emissions.

The emissions from reservoir water surfaces are comparable to those from rice paddies or biomass burning, both of which are incorporated in carbon budgeting, the study says.

The new information also points to the need for countries to look carefully at where they build dams.

The emissions, including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, come from decomposing plant material under the water and methane is produced by microbes devouring rotting material, such as algae, in sediment that builds up behind dams. The emissions are then boosted by nutrients that come from human activities such as agriculture or septic systems.

Natural lakes produce less greenhouse gases as there is not so much rotting material beneath the water and because reservoirs have more fluctuations in water levels than natural lakes — something which enhances methane production.

Ideally, to reduce emissions, dams should be built in areas with minimal vegetation and human activity as biologically productive reservoirs, with more algae and nutrient-rich systems, produce more methane, Deemer said.

More than one-million dams exist around the world and thousands of hydroelectric dams are in the planning or building stages, including the controversial Site C dam in B.C.’s Peace River Valley, which will create an 83-kilometre long reservoir in an agriculturally rich region of the province.

Deemer said Site C was not part of the study and she could not immediately estimate the emissions from a reservoir of that size.

The study did not look at how emissions from reservoirs compared to power generated by natural gas or coal, but a 2013 study by Edgar G. Hertwich of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that carbon dioxide emissions from hydropower, per unit of electricity delivered, were 10 per cent higher than emissions from natural gas-fired plants.

One of the B.C. government’s major arguments in favour of construction of the $9-billion Site C dam is that it would provide clean energy to British Columbians for more than a century, but this latest study brings into question whether hydropower from reservoirs can be described as green.

The project will flood 5,500 hectares of prime agricultural land and, as former farmland and forests disappear beneath the water, the reservoir will meet all criteria, pinpointed in the research paper for producing large quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases.

Site C critic Ken Boon, who is being forced off his third-generation family farm by BC Hydro to allow for highway re-alignment away from the Site C flood zone, said the study provides some interesting revelations.

“Going through the environmental assessment process, BC Hydro really diminished the greenhouse gases that would result from Site C, so it really wasn’t a big issue going through the review hearings,” he said. A June 2016 report released by the University of British Columbia found the greenhouse gas impacts of the Site C dam eliminate any possibility of the project’s advantage over alternative forms of power production like wind and solar.

“Now, again, the landscape changes and it’s one more strike against building large hydroelectric dams,” he said.

Boon hopes that Premier Christy Clark will take notice of the new information, but he is not optimistic.

“She seems to have a whole hypocritical, twisted view of climate change,” Boon said.

Helen Knott, a member of the Prophet River First Nation and active Site C opponent, pointed out that the provincial government’s reason in 2010 for exempting Site C from a B.C. Utilities Commission review was that it was a green project.

“Actually it is not a green project and this is just one more reason why it should not be built,” said Knott, pointing to myriad other problems with Site C such as questionable economics, opposition by First Nations and loss of agricultural land and food security.

“And now there is this. It’s just a project that doesn’t make sense,” Knott said.

BC Hydro and Environment Ministry spokespeople did not respond to questions about the study by time of publication.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

B.C. Climate Change Audit Won’t Be Released Until After Election: Auditor General

Judith Lavoie — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 16:46:30 +0000

British Columbians will not find out before next spring’s provincial election if the province has adequate programs in place to adapt to climate change.

Earlier this month Auditor General Carol Bellringer released a list of projects her office intends to investigate in the next three years and, among the hot button issues — ranging from grizzly bear management to the Site C dam — is whether government is adequately managing risks posed by climate change.

In the wake of heavy criticism of Premier Christy Clark’s August release of the province’s “Climate Leadership Plan” — which does not include carbon tax increases or set emission targets for 2030 — some were hoping that Bellringer would release the report early next year.

“It is a question I am being asked, but the timing is not going to work,” Bellringer said in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

“We are probably going to have finished our field work by spring, but we won’t be able to issue it before the election,” she said.

It is likely the report will be completed by fall of 2017 and will then be tabled in the Legislature, Bellringer said.

Audits of provincial management of climate change risks are being conducted simultaneously across the country and individual reports will then be wrapped into Canada’s first comprehensive national audit of climate policies.

It is the first time provincial and federal auditors have worked together to compile a common audit on any issue, indicating the importance of the issue, Bellringer said.

The federal report, likely to be completed late 2017, will look at how provinces are coping with climate change, both through restricting emissions and adapting to the new reality.

Some provinces will take a look at both mitigation and adaptation while others will delve deeper into one of the areas. The B.C. report will take an in-depth look at adaptation, Bellringer said.

“There’s quite a bit of information about mitigation. It’s easier to find out what emission targets are. It’s harder to pull together the various programs that may be in place around adaptation, so we decided it was going to be a more useful thing for us to work on,” said Bellringer, who, until the report is tabled, cannot discuss information collected or speculate on how B.C. measures up against other provinces.

Sybil Seitzinger, executive director of the B.C.-based Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, applauded the decision to look at adaptation.

“Many areas of B.C. are already being impacted by the changing climate. A comprehensive adaptation plan will be important in the next phase of the B.C climate leadership plan,” she said.

“Attention to B.C.’s communities and businesses in the coastal and northern regions will be particularly important.”

The auditor general’s office is not given access to confidential cabinet documents, but uses analyses, experts and government documents to come up with base information, so B.C.’s Climate Leadership Plan will be one of the documents under scrutiny.

B.C. Climate Change Audit Won’t Be Released Until After Election: Auditor General https://t.co/2u9xzXv0XI #bcpoli #BCelxn2017

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 27, 2016

Lack of substance in the misnamed plan should give the auditor general’s office plenty of food for thought, according to George Heyman, NDP environment critic.

“I would like to see the auditor general look at the reality of the B.C. government’s and Christy Clark’s inaction on the climate file since she took office. . . .I think the auditor general should assess the premier’s rhetoric against the facts, ” Heyman told DeSmog Canada.

“Her climate procrastination plan skips over the 2020 targets and ignores the 2030 targets. . . The premier claims to be on track to reduce emissions, but people can see that emissions have been rising steadily since she took office.”

After the plan was launched, Seitzinger said in a speech that it would not take B.C. even halfway towards its legislated 13-million tonne 2050 emissions target.

Environment Minister Mary Polak did not respond to interview requests from DeSmog, but told the CBC that a more comprehensive plan will be developed after meeting with the federal and other provincial governments.

B.C. is missing out on the opportunity to grow the economy through green jobs and, instead, provincial policies are geared to supporting the fossil fuel industry, Heyman said.

New Democrats are holding consultations and will probably be ready to release their climate action plan this fall, said Heyman, who would not speculate on whether an NDP government would increase the carbon tax but said the tax should be restructured to support green initiatives and transit, rather than subsidizing tax cuts for rich British Columbians.

B.C., Alberta, Ontario and Quebec have either carbon taxes or cap-and-trade laws to limit emissions, but federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said during an interview on CTV’s Question Period that the federal government is ready to impose a carbon price regime on provinces that don’t adequately regulate their own emissions.

Photo: Province of British Columbia

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Rejecting B.C.’s Carbon Pollution Subsidy Plan: Martyn Brown

Martyn Brown — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 21:51:49 +0000

This very long piece is the last of a four-part series on B.C.’s climate action plan. Part One addressed B.C.’s GHG reduction targets. Part Two addressed how that plan is at risk of being co-opted by Big Oil. Part Three took a closer look at the B.C. Climate Leadership Team’s recommendations for the carbon tax. This analysis explores how the oil and gas industry, and especially the LNG industry, might financially benefit from hidden subsidies recommended by that advisory body.

Like so many other governments around the world, British Columbia’s Liberal government led by Premier Christy Clark has been duped by the barons of Big Oil.

Beguiled by the petroleum industry’s promises of new investment and jobs, the Clark government has repeatedly proved itself a patsy in acceding to the LNG industry’s every demand.

In the process, it has subjugated B.C.’s global-leading 2008 climate action plan to its misguided vision for the unchecked exploitation of non-renewable natural gas.

It has broken its own law, in failing to meet B.C.’s legislated targets for provincial greenhouse gas reductions.

And it has tugged its forelock, at every turn, to meet each new industry demand for special treatment and locked-in subsidies and tax concessions that are fully underwritten by B.C. taxpayers.

This analysis explores how that taxpayer-subsidized boon to Big Oil stands to be further entrenched under the recommendations for updating B.C.’s climate action plan last fall by the government’s handpicked Climate Leadership Team (CLT).

The Ludicrous Foundation of B.C.’s Climate Avoidance Plan

As I have explained in previous installments, B.C.’s greenhouse gas reduction plan is woefully off-track. The CLT has suggested a plan to help remedy that situation, mainly through a long-term commitment to a 12-fold increase in B.C.’s carbon tax.

Several other recommended measures that I address below are largely aimed at subsidizing B.C.’s worst carbon polluters, to help them offset the added carbon emissions they hope to impose upon B.C. in the name of economic development.

Underlying that project is the Clark government’s abiding obsession with LNG as B.C.’s principal driver of new resource development.

It intends to further aggravate B.C.’s GHG emissions challenges with a forthcoming climate “action” plan — more accurately, a climate action avoidance plan — that is sure to be tailor-made for the province’s largest industrial polluters.

Whenever that plan is released, it will be grounded in a vision for a massive expansion in fossil fuel development.

More drilling rigs and roads. More scars on our land base. More fracking and seismic instability. More water waste and groundwater poisoning. More pipelines. More energy burned in B.C. to produce still more non-renewable energy destined to be burned in far-flung places. And many, many times more greenhouse gas emissions.

All to “liberate” the “dream” of building plants on B.C.’s Pacific coast that will liquefy natural gas by chilling it to -160°C and ship it halfway around the world to China and other countries.

All in a rush to profit from that product that other countries are now struggling to sell because there is already far too much of it on the market.

It is to be a climate action plan aimed at largely undoing the anticipated damage from a new LNG industry that may never ultimately materialize in British Columbia, ironically, because it is so demonstrably unnecessary — a victim of its own global rapacity and redundancy.

It is an industry that is struggling to cope with the falling price of a product it wants to wish upon our choking world.

A product that has been devalued by the global glut of LNG that it has created from overproduction and from the world’s suddenly serious attempts to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels.

A product that at least one study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows will be devastating for B.C.’s environment and may well increase global GHG emissions over at least the next fifty years, compared to even building state-of-the-art coal plants.

Indeed, it is an industry that should have no future in B.C. if we are truly concerned about shifting to a low-carbon economy, about mitigating avoidable greenhouse gas emissions, and about seriously combating global warming.

That should be the central, unwavering message from British Columbia’s environmental community and from all those who should know better.

Which makes it all the harder to fathom why the environmentalists and academics who served on the CLT ever agreed to embrace a climate action plan that is innately dedicated to advancing the Premier’s LNG vision and to offsetting its negative impacts largely at taxpayers’ expense.

Accepting that vision for increased carbon emissions as the starting point for renewed climate action plan will make it even more challenging and more costly to meet British Columbia’s legislated GHG reduction targets.

This is the fundamental point that compromised the CLT’s mandate and mission, which it failed to articulate and which must be soundly rejected.

The most rational response to any problem is to first address it by doing less of the thing that is the problem, not the opposite.

You wouldn’t council a drug addict to take even more drugs as a way to kick their habit.

You wouldn’t advise a person mired in debt to max out their credit cards and to apply for new ones as a path to reducing their spending.

You wouldn’t urge someone who is drowning to keep gulping the stuff that is sinking them as they dog paddle their way back to safety.

So why on Earth would anyone think that the way to solve our global warming crisis is to intensify fossil fuel developments in Canada that we can readily live without and that will only compound the problem they are creating?

How crazy must we be to think that the best way to lower greenhouse gas emissions that are threatening our planet’s very existence is to launch a new carbon-intensive industry in B.C. that we don’t have, don’t need and can’t afford?

Nuttier still is planning to do that when the bottom has fallen out of the global LNG market, leaving exporting countries like Australia holding the bag for that industry’s environmental and social costs, with virtually nothing of worth for taxpayers to show for it.

Carbon emissions are the problem we want to solve.

It makes no sense to invite more of them, only to have to offset them, as we also try to eliminate the ones we are already producing at a rate that exceeds our efforts to reduce them.

Yet that is precisely what the CLT plan struggles to achieve, largely by transferring the risks and costs of the most onerous climate actions that would be required to follow that nonsensical course, from the largest industrial polluters, to B.C. taxpayers and families.

We need to reject that plan to further subsidize B.C.’s worst carbon polluters, and instead, make them more accountable for the actions and costs that will flow from eliminating their unwanted emissions.

This much is evident.

The well-meaning members of the CLT who care deeply about reducing British Columbia’s greenhouse gas emissions got outplayed by their government and industry colleagues.

The LNG representatives and advocates who sat on the CLT well understood that its “consensus” recommendations to increase and expand the carbon tax would never be adopted by the B.C. Liberal government.

They signed onto that package not for what it purports to demand in terms of right-pricing carbon; but rather, for what it might help to legitimize in further subsidizing their industries’ obligations to reduce their emission intensity levels, if not their actual emission outputs.

They signed onto it knowing that it would be “cherry-picked” by the Clark government, notwithstanding the CLT’s contention that its recommendations must be accepted a total indivisible package.

They signed onto it hoping that at least some of the hidden subsidies, regulatory concessions, risk avoidance measures and tax relief policies that stand to benefit their industries would be embraced by the government.

In short, they signed onto to that CLT “consensus package” because of what it does not demand. And also because of the enormous “wriggle room” for climate action avoidance that it provides, through its lack of specificity and through its lip service to future policy reviews and business relief measures in the interests of “global competitiveness.”

The Clark government will not support all of the measures that the CLT has recommended to most benefit B.C.’s largest carbon polluters. Yet the CLT’s report provides it with plenty of new ammunition to double down on its failing LNG vision with new mitigation measures that will principally mitigate industries’ costs of paying for their own carbon pollution.

Revisiting the B.C. Liberals’ LNG Subsidy Plan

The CLT suggested several actions that would especially benefit the LNG industry, the oil and gas industry, and more broadly, carbon intensive industries.

To appreciate the scope of those suggested hidden subsidies for LNG in particular, it helps to know a little about the incredibly generous tax arrangements that the Clark government has already extended to those huge firms, in furtherance of its LNG strategy.

Key among those is the infrastructure royalty credit program, which was introduced in 2004 by the Campbell administration to encourage natural gas exploration and development.

For a great analysis of the true hidden cost of that program, check out this piece from blogger Norman Farrell, who has written extensively on the subject.

The royalty credit program grants companies deductions from the royalties they would otherwise have to pay on the natural gas they extract. It is a well-hidden subsidy that is really a tax expenditure and that has poured billions into the pockets of the oil and gas industry over the last 12 years.

It was arguably a defensible trade-off for government back in the days when that royalty credit was at least partially offset by the billions of dollars in natural gas revenues that that industry returned to the provincial treasury from its investments.

But today, it is harder than ever to justify.

The Clark government recently approved yet another $120-million in tax breaks to 10 energy companies under that program, ostensibly, to “buy” ongoing industry investment in British Columbia’s northeastern region.

Yet the province is only expecting to collect $128 million in natural gas royalties this year — almost a dollar-for-dollar subsidy.

It was exactly a year ago, in the dead of summer that the Clark government pushed through its Liquefied Natural Gas Act Projects Agreement Act over the objections of the opposition.

That Act paved the way for the government to enter into the Petronas precedent, a 25-year, ironclad sweetheart deal aimed at landing the proposed Pacific NorthWest LNG project in Prince Rupert. (See my critiques in the Georgia Straight here.)

It also allowed the government to enter into similar project agreements with other LNG consortiums, without the requirement for legislative debate and approval.

The Petronas precedent set the floor for LNG subsidies in B.C. It guaranteed Pacific Northwest LNG ridiculously low corporate income tax rates, ongoing LNG tax credits and taxpayer-backed indemnities that would all be locked-in until for 25 years.

Initially the government planned to set the LNG industry’s tax on net income at seven per cent. When the industry balked, the government caved like a cheap campstool. It cut that rate in half, to 3.5 per cent, until at least 2037, when it may rise to five per cent.

To further sweeten the pot, the tax on net operating income from liquefaction activities, which is applicable for companies that technically don’t have a net income, was set at a mere 1.5 per cent.

That tax is not even payable until there is a zero balance in any LNG plant’s net operating loss account and its capital investment account.

Plus, any tax that the companies pay at the 1.5 per cent rate on their net operating income is only notionally payable in the short run. Their supposed tax “contributions” are actually set aside and accrued in a tax pool that can be later used to reduce the amount of income tax payable at the 3.5 per cent rate, after an LNG facility’s net operating loss account and its capital investment account are reduced to zero.

On top of that sweetheart deal, the Petronas precedent guaranteed that the current Natural Gas Tax Credit will also be locked-in for 25 years.

That tax credit, which reduces the amount of corporate income tax that LNG plants would otherwise have to pay from 11 per cent to as little as eight percent, will be increased next January.

The amount they will be able to deduct for the cost of any natural gas delivered to their facilities will rise from 0.5 per cent to three percent. And that tax credit can also be carried forward from previous years to reduce those companies’ corporate income taxes in future years.

Think of that.

Those oil and gas behemoths have now been guaranteed a special 25-year tax freeze, at rock-bottom tax rates, and a 25-year tax credit that will be six times higher next January than it is today.

It is an outrageous sell-out to the world’s richest oil companies that provides them a 25-year contractual tax benefit and tax certainty that no other industry or individual enjoys.

And it doesn’t stop there.

As I explained in my last analysis on the carbon tax, the gas industry is now also benefiting from the Clark government’s repeal of its predecessor’s Cap-and-Trade Act.

Instead of being obliged to reduce its carbon emissions under annually declining hard caps on emissions levels, the LNG industry is now subject to a new Greenhouse Gas Industrial Reporting and Control Act that only obliges it to meet prescribed carbon intensity levels.

Under the new regime, B.C.’s LNG companies can pollute without limit.

They are allowed to emit 0.16 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of LNG exported, without penalty. Beyond that threshold, theoretically, the companies must either purchase market-based emissions offsets or pay into a technology fund at the rate of $25 per tonne.

But the government will actually subsidize that penalty by as much 100 per cent for LNG plants that barely exceed the new intensity benchmark. That subsidy declines to “only” 50 per cent of the penalty that would otherwise be applicable for those who emit 0.23 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

Given that almost all of the proposed LNG plants plan to produce C02 emissions that vastly exceed the allowable emissions intensity benchmark, it is yet another whopping gift to polluters. It makes a mockery of the government’s claim that B.C. will have the “cleanest LNG industry in the world.”

And here’s the capper.

The Petronas precedent also gave those Asian state-oil monopolies a special 25-year indemnity that is underwritten by B.C. taxpayers.

That indemnity will save them harmless from any so-called “discriminatory events.”

It assured the LNG industry that any companies covered under such project agreements would not have to face any industry-specific carbon taxes or any new industry-specific GHG reduction initiatives for at least 25 years.

If any future government changes those locked-in tax rates and benefits at a cost to those companies that is greater than $25 million in any year, or more than $50 million over five years, they will be entitled to full compensation, courtesy of B.C. taxpayers.

Similarly, any changes in government policy that impose new rules or tougher standards specific to the LNG industry, which entail higher costs relating to carbon taxes or to greenhouse gas emissions and reporting requirements, will be fully compensable above that threshold.

And the Petronas precedent further stipulated that if any other LNG project got an even sweeter deal from the government, the Pacific Northwest LNG project would get that too.

In essence, the Clark government was so desperate to land a major LNG deal, it contractually signed away British Columbia’s ability to control its own tax regime, carbon pricing and climate action strategies in specific regard to that industry.

All of it amounts to a new license to profit from uncapped carbon pollution, as it also essentially prevents governments and taxpayers from properly taxing the natural gas industry for their profits and for their pollution.

To my knowledge, the Pacific Northwest LNG project is the only project thus far formally covered by an agreement authorized under the new Act.

But the concessions granted in the Petronas precedent and by the new emissions intensity regime are potentially a major additional problem for rebalancing B.C.’s climate action plan.

They will make it that much more difficult and potentially costly for taxpayers to make the LNG industry fully pay for its carbon emissions and for its incremental emission reduction measures under any serious climate action plan.

The last thing we should be doing is tying government’s hands in how it can use its available policy measures to put more onus on industrial carbon polluters to clean up their act and to pay disproportionately more for their disproportionately high carbon emissions.

If anything, we should be revisiting the carbon tax to create differential carbon tax rates that escalate with the type and usage of fossil fuels covered by its carbon tax, similar to Norway.

We should be putting more financial pressure, not less, on B.C.’s most carbon-intensive industries to expedite the mitigation measures necessary to dramatically cut their emissions that represent such a huge proportion of B.C.’s emissions inventory.

As I suggested in my last installment, a cap-and-trade system should also be embraced to do that at the lowest possible cost, as was originally envisioned in the 2008 climate action plan.

It should be implemented in tandem with a revised carbon tax that is gradually increased over time, in a politically sensitive way that will achieve the CLT’s end goal in that regard.

And the carbon tax should also differentially adjusted to oblige B.C.’s largest polluters to pay for their process emissions and for any other emissions that are not adequately captured within a globally integrated cap-and-trade system.

We should not be exempting the LNG sector or other carbon-intensive industries from any industry-specific carbon taxes or mandatory emissions reductions requirements. Rather, we should be requiring them to bear the full brunt of the cost of their carbon pollution as we also put new standards in place to drive them more quickly to adopt cleaner technologies.

In doing that, we must remain vigilant not to devise climate action strategies that would actually further subsidize those major polluters at taxpayers’ expense.

Unfortunately, many of the CLT’s recommendations would move us in the opposite direction.

Let me now turn to some of the uncosted hidden subsidies that would be effectively extended to the LNG sector and to other carbon-intensive industries under the CLT’s recommendations.

Hidden Subsidy #1: A Potentially Lower Carbon Tax for “Trade-Exposed” Sectors

The heart of the CLT’s plan is to increase B.C.’s carbon tax by $10 per year, from 2018 to at least 2050. That would raise the cost of the carbon tax from $30 a tonne to $360 a tonne.

But here’s the catch. The largest industrial polluters — that is, the “emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors” — might not have to pay that under the CLT’s recommendations.

The following quotes from its report are instructive:

“Establish targeted and transparent mechanisms for emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors that mitigate the competitiveness issues created for those sectors if B.C.’s carbon pricing is materially greater than jurisdictions with which they compete, provided that such mechanisms are structured in a manner that does not adversely impact the price signal to reduce emissions. These adjustments should remain in place until such time that carbon pricing and regulatory policy equivalency with other jurisdictions is achieved.”

“The scheduled annual increases in the carbon tax and the competitiveness adjustments for emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors should be reviewed by the Province, with the support of a Climate Leadership Team, every five years, or more often where warranted, taking into consideration GHG reductions, economic competitiveness, carbon pricing and regulatory policy in other jurisdictions, and impacts on vulnerable communities.”

In other words, the CLT has thrown open the door to exempting B.C.’s worst carbon polluters from some or all of the carbon tax increases that would apply to all other British Columbians.

Its vision for carbon tax hikes is an open question for the “emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors,” subject to future review and competitiveness considerations that are sure to mean those industries will enjoy breaks on their carbon taxes, while everyone else has to pay ever higher carbon taxes whether they like it or not.

For the LNG industry, it means that not only will it not be subject to a specifically targeted carbon tax to properly price its inordinately high carbon emissions. But it might not even have to pay the level of carbon tax this is generally applicable to individuals, families and small businesses.

Hidden Subsidy #2: A Lower Sales Tax That Will Disproportionately Benefit Large Emitters

As the CLT noted, “natural gas production accounts for 16 per cent of the province’s greenhouse gas emissions and is the largest industrial sector.” If the LNG vision ever comes to fruition, that proportion will grow by leaps and bounds, potentially doubling B.C.’s overall emission levels.

The CLT recommends many measures to address that fact, including new targets for reducing process and fugitive emissions and lots of lip service to adopting “best practices” and unspecified new regulatory standards and policies.

Its most specific recommendations are all hidden subsidies to that sector and to other industrial polluters that would cost B.C. taxpayers an unquantified bundle.

The CLT wants to lower the provincial sales tax from seven per cent to six per cent.

The biggest beneficiaries of that initiative, by far, would be B.C.’s largest corporations, typically in the natural resource sector.

They would get millions of dollars in annual tax relief, whereas most middle class families would receive a few hundred dollars a year in benefits.

The sales tax is a regressive tax that imposes the same dollar-for-dollar burden on anything subject to it, regardless of buyers’ different incomes.

A cut in the sales tax rate would most benefit those who buy the most, be they high-income wage earners or large corporations.

A middle income earner who spends even $40,000 a year on items that are subject to the sales tax — a fairly high amount — would save $400 a year on a one per cent sales tax cut.

A wealthy individual who makes ten times that amount would save ten times that amount. A large natural resource company that spends exponentially more would save exponentially more.

The CLT explained its rationale as follows:

“B.C. is competing with a number of new suppliers for a limited market. Our recommendations to reduce the PST (generally by one basis point and entirely on electricity rates) and make available transitional support for emissions-intensive, trade-exposed sectors are intended to address this reality — particularly if B.C.’s climate policy materially exceeds the stringency of our competitors.”

I noted in my last installment how the recycled money from the revenue-neutral carbon tax is already disproportionately benefiting business rather than individuals.

This recommendation from the CLT would further exacerbate that disparity, with the biggest benefits — by far — going to B.C.’s largest companies: the large natural resource companies that are B.C.’s biggest carbon polluters.

Hidden Subsidy #3: The Elimination of Sales Tax on Electricity for Industry

The CLT also recommended eliminating the PST on electricity rates for industry, noting that it does not apply to electricity purchased by individuals.

It did not quantify how much that gift to industry would cost, but suffice it to say, it would be massive — at least tens of millions of dollars annually, if not more.

That would represent an enormous gift to B.C.’s largest industrial polluters — the oil and gas industry, the forest industry, the mining industry, the cement industry and others.

It would substantially reduce the amount of revenue that would otherwise be available for crucial services, like health care, education, child protection, public safety and other social services.

Like the proposed sales tax cut, which would be financed from incremental carbon tax revenues, that measure would represent a whopping tax subsidy to big business and to B.C.’s largest energy users, at the expense of the individuals and families who depend on the services funded by those tax dollars.

It is only fair and sensible to retain that sales tax on industrial electricity, given the inordinate pressure those energy-intensive sectors put on British Columbia’s electrical system.

Even without LNG the industrial sector is expected to account for the most growth of all key sectors in the next 10 years, mostly for mining, forestry, and oil and gas activity.

As the B.C. government gradually weans itself off of the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual “dividends” it obliges B.C. Hydro to contribute (including through deferred debt), it will need every penny of its existing sales tax revenue to offset those revenue losses.

Carbon intensive industries that are already buying electricity and paying sales tax on that energy will not produce one less molecule of carbon dioxide if that sales tax is eliminated. They will only make more profit at the expense of all other carbon taxpayers.

Hidden Subsidy #4: Risk-free, Cost-free Electrification for LNG Plants

Of all the suggestions made by the CLT, perhaps none would be so costly to taxpayers as its proposal to oblige B.C. Hydro to electrify the LNG industry.

Its recommendation on that point reads as follows:

“Instruct BC Hydro to develop a strategy (generation and transmission) to supply in a competitive, timely manner the clean electricity required to facilitate electrification of upstream natural gas, LNG, and associated infrastructure. Amongst other things, the strategy should enable BC Hydro to commit to supplying new industrial projects with clean electricity by project start up, if necessary through the use of temporary natural gas generation until transmission infrastructure is available.”

The CLT rightly points out that “LNG plants … can rely on clean electricity instead of natural gas for both the liquefaction process and their auxiliary demands” to reduce their emissions.

True enough. If we are to be saddled with an LNG industry that exponentially ramps up B.C.’s carbon emissions, it makes sense to minimize those additional GHGs by requiring LNG plants to adopt e-drives or other zero emission technologies.

But the ones who should bear the cost for that should be that industry and those companies — not B.C. taxpayers.

Instead, the CLT wants BC Hydro to bear the brunt of that cost.

It wants to transfer those incremental costs and risks associated with electrifying those proposed LNG plants to the rest of us. That’s wrong.

The CLT also wants BC Hydro to incur the added costs of generating the additional electricity capacity and the untold billions of dollars in new costs that would be required to build new transmission lines and to service the added debt of that infrastructure.

It wants to guarantee those LNG companies expedited construction schedules that would transfer the risks of building those transmission lines and of supplying them with the electricity they need in accordance with their project timelines to B.C. Hydro. And it further wants to guarantee them they will be able to buy their new power at “internationally comparable” rates.

The CLT’s report put it this way:

“If a proponent wants to use clean electricity instead of gas, they need to be confident that the electricity transmission and supply will be available on the timelines they are advancing their project…One aspect of providing electricity in a competitive, timely manner is ensuring that BC Hydro is able to commit to supply contracts that provide, on reasonable commercial terms used in other jurisdictions in similar circumstances, for damages in the event of failure to deliver new supply within agreed upon time frames and, in the case of LNG, for liquidated damages in the event of interrupted supply. In the event of any damages being payable by BC Hydro, the ratepayers should not bear the burden.” [Emphases added.]

That last line sounds reassuring on the surface. But if ratepayers “should not bear the burden,” and the LNG companies are not expected to bear those costs, it can only mean that the government will — meaning B.C. taxpayers.

Essentially, what the CLT is recommending is that all future LNG plants in B.C. should use so-called “outside the fence” power sourced from outside the plant, instead of the on-site “inside the fence” gas-fired power that is now typically contemplated for most projects.

The Northwest Institute for Bioregional Research rightly observed, “If ‘outside the fence’ power is sourced for LNG production, large upgrades to B.C.’s transmission and generating capacity will be needed. This could cost tens of billions of dollars, but could also generate significant income to First Nations, or crown corporations.”

I repeat, it could cost “tens of billions of dollars” that someone would have to pay, ostensibly, ratepayers, or taxpayers, if not the LNG companies.

Even without the added electrification requirements suggested by the Climate Leadership Team to power LNG plants with e-drive systems, BC Hydro anticipates that its load forecast from oil and gas will climb by almost five-fold over the next 10 years, if the Clark government’s LNG vision comes to pass.

As it stands, BC Hydro’s most recent integrated resource plan only contemplates having sufficient supply to meet an initial expected LNG load of 3,000 gigawatt hours per year, before applying its demand-side management measures.

It anticipates that demand from the LNG industry could be as much as 6,600 GWh/year, even without powering all of its proposed plants with e-drive systems.

BC Hydro also projects a mid load forecast for LNG peak demand at 360 megawatts — an amount equivalent to roughly one-third of the 1,100 MW that the $8.8 billion Site C project would create.

But that vastly underestimates the amount of power that would actually be required to power even a handful of LNG plants with e-drive systems.

For example, the proposed the Grassy Point LNG Project would alone require 1,000 MW of power. The now indefinitely delayed LNG Canada Project would require 1200 MW and a new 500 kV line from Prince George to Terrace. And the Pacific Northwest LNG Project would require at least another 700 MW of electrical energy

And those are just three of the 20 proposed LNG projects that are at least theoretically on the drawing board in British Columbia. Many of those other projects — like the proposed Kitsault Energy Project, the Canada Stewart Energy Project and the Nisga’a LNG Project — are in very remote areas that would be incredibly expensive to power via the BC Hydro grid.

If the LNG “dream” ever comes true, even without the added pressure from e-drive plants and their associated transmission, BC Hydro estimated that the oil and gas sector will consume almost double the electricity consumed by the pulp and paper sector, and much more than even the energy-intensive mining industry.

The cheapest form of energy savings is conservation. The biggest projected driver for new electricity demand is natural gas development, including LNG.

The CLT’s proposal would serve the goal of reducing emissions from LNG plants. But it would place untold new power demands on BC Hydro that would put upward pressure on Hydro rates that would otherwise be avoidable.

Bear in mind, the new Northwest Transmission Line (NWTL) along Highway 37 alone cost $716 million, up from an original budget of $395 million, when Premier Clark came to power.

A major reason for its budget increases related to expedited construction schedules, to meet timelines mandated to supply power from the new Forrest Kerr run-of-river power project and other smaller energy projects to the new Red Chris mine and other new mines in that wild and remote area of B.C.

The much shorter Iskut Extension that extended that 287 kV transmission line from Bob Quinn Substation to the mine, was also over budget. Its cost increased from $180 million to $209 million, because building new transmission lines in that part of northern B.C. are no small feat.

As Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer recently pointed out, the budgets for four recent transmission projects, including the NWTL rose from a combined $1.4 billion to over $1.9 billion, for a collective over-run of $516 million or 36 per cent.

On top of all of those cost considerations, the requirements for consulting and accommodating First Nations’ constitutionally protected rights is a further cost challenge. Especially if commitments are made to deliver fully compensable power rights to LNG companies within their projects’ designated timelines.

In the interest of providing clean, cheap, reliable electricity to power LNG plants that would reduce their GHG pollution, the costs of properly respecting Aboriginal rights and title could be astronomical.

No one really knows how high they might be, but the CLT was altogether silent on that point, which represents another aspect of the hidden subsidy for power its industry representatives succeeded in advancing in its recommendations.

The fact is, the CLT’s recommendations for powering LNG plants could have dramatically adverse unintended consequences for taxpayers and the environment alike.

Mostly, however, they would stick taxpayers and BC Hydro with the lion’s share of costs and risks for making e-drive LNG plants more economical for the large oil companies that stand to profit from them.

If those costs and risks were properly factored into the government’s LNG vision, it would significantly alter its cost-benefit bottom line.

Yet in the absence of e-drive LNG plants, British Columbians will be left holding the bag for much of the cost and sacrifice needed to offset the added emissions those gas-fired plants will entail.

Either way, most B.C. taxpayers and most B.C. families will lose.

Hidden Subsidy #5: A Five-year Minimal Carbon Tax Holiday for Process Emissions

The CLT recommended expanding “coverage of the current carbon tax to apply to all greenhouse gas emission sources in B.C. after five years, starting with measurable GHG emissions covered by the current reporting regulation.”

Essentially it is proposing to let the oil and gas industry off the hook for paying carbon taxes on their methane process and fugitive emissions for at least five more years, until 2021 at the earliest. While it also envisions that the carbon tax will also go up for everyone else by another $40/tonne over that period.

In the meantime, it hopes the natural gas industry will voluntarily act to cut its process emissions by some 40 per cent, assisted by further subsidies from the forthcoming green infrastructure tax credit.

But there is no guarantee that will happen. And the only hard action recommended by the CLT to address fugitive and vented methane emissions to require “industry through regulation to implement leak detection and repair programs in line with best practices in North America.”

Why that has not already been required is beyond me.

Ditto for the CLT’s suggestion that the industry “develop best practices for methane reduction, including transparent reporting, through a collaborative initiative involving the provincial government, industry, and other stakeholders with expertise in this area…and seek alignment with Canada and other provincial jurisdictions in this regard.”

The Pembina Institute and others are right to maintain that we should not wait until 2021 to act on reducing deadly methane emissions with an earlier imposition of the carbon tax and other measures.

Yet the CLT’s most important recommendation in respect of addressing fugitive and vented emissions is this one:

“Providing that at the time of the first five year review of the Climate Leadership Plan, a new reduction goal for fugitive and vented methane emissions should be established and a determination made whether future reductions in fugitive and venting methane emissions are best achieved through expanding the coverage of the carbon tax to such emissions…[or through] a continuation on a voluntary basis of the best practices developed above for methane reduction (provided the industry has reached the 40 per cent methane reduction goal within five years), or such best practices developed for methane being mandated by regulation at that time (with such regulations to be reviewed every five years thereafter).”

In other words, under that recommendation, even after another five years’ carbon tax holiday on those emissions, it might well be that the industry will continue to be exempt from paying carbon taxes on those uncaptured process emissions.

Stunning.

Once again, the environmentalists and academics on the CLT got completely snookered by the industry representatives and the government mouthpieces that succeeded in rendering its carbon tax commitment almost meaningless for B.C.’s largest carbon polluters.

No wonder the oil industry representatives on the CLT signed onto that almost meaningless “commitment.”

Conclusion

All of these are only a handful of the effective subsidies to carbon emitters that were tacitly recommended by the CLT, mostly for the benefit of Big Oil.

It is unfortunate that the CLT offered so little in the way of specific “bullet-proof” recommendations for reducing B.C.’s carbon emissions.

British Columbians must now await the government’s Climate Action 2.0 to ascertain what more it will actually do to meet its legislated GHG reduction targets, besides buying itself more time, as suggested by the CLT, which failed to prescribe new provincial interim targets before 2030.

Hopefully it will be as detailed and progressive as Ontario’s truly excellent new climate action plan.

Just as that province’s first climate action plan largely borrowed from many of the measures adopted in B.C.’s 2008 plan, British Columbia would now be well advised to use Ontario’s new blueprint as the key resource it is for advancing climate action.

In a future article I will suggest a number of hard measures that B.C. could take to help meet its targets in the oil and gas sector and in other sectors I did not address in this analysis.

The fact is, the CLT’s recommendations for emissions reductions from buildings, forestry, agriculture, transportation and other sectors are pretty much all as vague as they are aspirational.

The good news is that, by and large, they do not overtly suggest anywhere near the level of hidden subsidies that I have highlighted above in regard to the LNG and natural gas sector. It’s just that they say so little of substance to advance the mission that the CLT was given.

The bottom line is this: the only sensible way to responsibly address British Columbia’s growing greenhouse gas emissions is to stop unecessarily adding to them in the first place.

Instead of digging ourselves ever deeper in the hole by inviting an LNG industry that British Columbians will also be expected to subsidize in addressing its added emissions, we should just say, “enough.”

We do not need that industry and do not want its added carbon pollution.

Enough. It is time to develop a serious climate action plan that embraces a low-carbon economy and that duly ensures its largest carbon polluters pay their full share of the cost of reducing those emissions.

Martyn Brown was former B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff and a key architect of B.C.’s climate action plan and clean energy plan. He was the top strategic advisor to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment in British Columbia. A frequent contributor to the Georgia Straight, Brown is also the author of the eBook Towards a New Government in British Columbia. Contact Brown at towardsanewgovernment@gmail.com.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

An In-depth Look at Improving B.C.’s Carbon Tax: Martyn Brown

Martyn Brown — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 20:35:09 +0000

This is the third of a four-part series on B.C.’s climate action plan. Be advised, it is a very long read, more like a short book of six chapters. Part One of this series addresses B.C.’s GHG reduction targets. Part Two addresses how that plan is at risk of being co-opted by Big Oil. Part Three takes a closer look at the B.C. Climate Leadership Team’s recommendations for the carbon tax. And Part Four focuses on how the oil and gas industry stands to profit from that advisory team’s proposed climate action plan.

British Columbia’s Climate Leadership Team (CLT) has offered a strategy aimed at achieving several new emissions reduction targets.

It proposes to do that by “right pricing” carbon with an ever-increasing and expanded carbon tax; by mitigating some of that tax’s competitive and consumer impacts; by supplementing that rising tax with additional (mostly unspecified) measures to further reduce emissions; and by regularly reviewing those three elements.

As such, its roadmap to carbon reductions is largely an updated carbon tax plan.

Six of its 32 recommendations (#4-8, 29, 31) relate to raising, extending, reallocating and reviewing the carbon tax over the next 32 years, and to integrating B.C.’s carbon tax with other province’s approaches to carbon pricing.

The importance of carbon pricing in any credible climate action plan cannot be overstated.

Equally important is getting the politics right and ensuring that however we act to price carbon, including through the carbon tax, those measures work as intended and are fair to everyone.

That is the subject of this analysis.

A Brief History of the Carbon Tax

At least as far back as the late eighties, governments have known that a carbon price signal is the single most important action they can take to influence investment, production and consumption decisions that will fundamentally drive the needed shift to a low-carbon economy.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has long stressed the value and importance of carbon pricing, as it has also led the world’s efforts to quantify, stem and lower global greenhouse gas emissions.

Canada’s National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy reinforced that point in its 2007 report, Getting to 2050: Canada’s Transition to a Low-emission Future.

It stressed, “the policy package required to achieve deep long-term reductions must place a price on carbon emissions, and needs to be complemented by other policies, such as regulations for certain sectors that may not respond to a pricing mechanism.”

It also explained the options for carbon pricing.

“The choice of the preferred emission price policy involves considering either a tax on emissions, a cap-and-trade system or a combination of the two. A GHG emissions tax imposes a price on each unit of CO2e [carbon dioxide equivalent] emitted by a source, whereas a cap-and-trade system is a regulatory program under which government sets a limit on the volume of GHG emissions, distributes permits for allowable emissions and enables firms to buy and sell the permits after the initial distribution. Both options are market-based in that they transfer abatement decisions to emitters, and both will signal that GHG emissions have a monetary value, stimulating actions that will lead to emission reductions.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former Conservative government was not enamoured with its own advisors’ position, or with other urgings for climate action.

So it basically killed the Round Table altogether in 2013. Yet its arguments for carbon pricing are even more critical today than they were a decade ago, including in British Columbia.

Despite all of the actions taken over the last nine years since B.C.’s 2007 Throne Speech commitment to fight climate change, with bold targets and a comprehensive plan, the province’s net greenhouse gas emissions are once again on the rise.

And those GHG emissions are going to escalate exponentially under the government’s vision for carbon-intensive growth, fueled by natural gas development and LNG exports.

As the principal author of that 2007 Speech from the Throne, and of all of the Campbell administration’s 12 throne speeches from 2001 through 2010, I had more than a minor hand in shaping B.C.’s climate action commitments.

These words I wrote in the 2008 Throne Speech further laid that imperative on the line:

“Waiting for others to act is not a solution –— it compounds the problem. Taking refuge in the status quo because others refuse to change is not an answer. It’s avoiding responsibility and being generationally selfish. The argument that British Columbia’s mitigation efforts are, in global terms, too miniscule to matter misses the point.

Every molecule of carbon dioxide released into our atmosphere by human activities matters. It hangs there for decades or even centuries, and adds to the accumulated burden of global warming on our planet. The benefit of our actions is not negated by the actions of others who add to the problem. They are cumulatively beneficial, globally significant and scientifically discernible. They contribute to the efforts being taken by growing legions of people around the world who are acting today to prevent the problem from becoming even worse.

We cannot be paralyzed into inaction by the scale of the task at hand. Rather, we will act now to make a real difference, and to encourage behavioural changes that will drive sustainable growth as a global imperative. Market forces can play a positive role in this regard.”

B.C.’s carbon tax was introduced by premier Gordon Campbell’s B.C. Liberal government, in the 2008 provincial budget. It was to be guided by the following three basic principles:

All carbon tax revenue would be recycled through tax reductions and not used to fund government programs, a principle assured in legislation that would also require annual reporting of how that funding is allocated.
The tax rate would start low and increase gradually, to provide individuals and businesses time to adjust, to respect decisions made prior to the announcement of the tax, and to provide rate certainty for at least the first five years.
Low income individuals and families would be protected via a refundable Climate Action Tax Credit that would ensure that those with lower incomes are compensated for the tax, and that most are financially better off.

This piece from the David Suzuki Foundation provides a good primer on B.C.’s carbon tax and a bit more about its history.

The carbon tax was always intended to work in tandem with a cap-and-trade system, to make B.C. a global leader on climate action.

It was phased-in over five years, with annual increases of $5 per tonne, which raised its initial rate of $10 per tonne to $30 per tonne as of 2012.

That rate has been frozen ever since by B.C. Premier Christy Clark, who came to power in 2011. Her government has made it clear that it will not lift that freeze until at least 2018, a year after the next provincial election.

As the government said following its last review of the carbon tax, in the 2013 post-election Budget Update, “When other jurisdictions, especially those within North America, introduce similar carbon taxes or carbon pricing, government may again review and consider changes to the carbon tax.”

Perhaps Canada’s First Ministers will shock us all by coming to some sort of common agreement on that front, following the forthcoming report from their Working Group on Carbon Pricing Mechanisms and their commitments, in furtherance of their Vancouver Declaration.

The danger of the government’s politically expedient decision to freeze the carbon tax for at least six years has been noted by Clark’s own Environment Minister.

Her ministry’s 2014 Climate Action Report stated the obvious: “Some policies lose effectiveness over time if they are not updated. For example, the carbon tax impact effectively diminishes if the rate remains unchanged, as inflation dampens the price signal.”

The carbon tax drives down greenhouse gas emissions by raising the cost of carbon pollution, which makes renewable energy and energy efficiency options increasingly more affordable relative to fossil fuels.

That drives innovations in technologies, production, heating and transportation and anything dependent on the combustion of carbon-intensive, non-renewable fossil fuels.

It drives behavioural changes that rightly encourage people and companies to reduce their carbon footprints through increased energy conservation, efficiency, fuel-switching and carbon neutral choices.

The problem with the carbon tax is that it does not necessarily lead to a decrease in emissions if its rate increases can also be profitably accommodated through higher consumer prices for the end products that contain those embedded emissions.

If any industry can simply incorporate its carbon tax costs into the products it produces, and still sell them for a profit, they may not feel too pressured to use less energy, cleaner sources of energy, or cleaner technologies that lower emissions.

Same for consumers. If we don’t feel the cost of our carbon emissions, the financial incentive to change our lifestyles and to make cleaner choices will not motivate us to action.

Which is why the price of the carbon tax has to continually go up over time to be most effective.

Because even with a carbon tax, if it is not high enough to drive new low-carbon behavioural shifts and cleaner production processes, emissions will not go down; they will go up.

The carbon tax does not directly limit or reduce emissions, as cap-and-trade systems do. It only provides a price signal aimed at indirectly encouraging a low-carbon economy in individual’s and industry’s financial self-interest.

That problem is further aggravated by the fact that the current carbon tax does not even apply to industrial process emissions, including so-called “fugitive” emissions from non-combustion sources. It only covers about 66 per cent of industrial emissions in British Columbia.

The Climate Leadership Team does not propose to extend the carbon tax to those emissions for another five years, opting instead for a number of mostly voluntary measures to somehow achieve a 40 per cent reduction in methane emissions by 2021.

The Pembina Institute rightly argues that is too long to wait. Too bad its representative on the CLT was not successful in convincing his colleagues on that point.

Leaving any sector or any such huge source of carbon emissions exempt from the carbon tax does nothing to help its perceived fairness or its GHG reduction mission.

The oil and gas industry has already had eight years to make a serious commitment to reducing its untaxed emissions. Ditto for landfills, the cement industry and other key sources for those types of emissions.

The original climate action plan vowed to eliminate all routine flaring at oil and gas producing wells and production facilities by 2016 with an interim goal to reduce flaring by half (50 per cent) by 2011.

We are not there yet.

It also sought to “facilitate and foster innovation in sequestration …[including] market oriented requirements with a graduated schedule. In consultation with stakeholders, a timetable will be developed along with increasing requirements for sequestration.”

We are not there yet.

We need to get there, fast, as we also need to dramatically reduce fugitive emissions from oil and gas pipelines.

These sorts of glaring flaws in the current carbon tax pose a significant challenge for B.C.’s updated climate action plan.

It is folly to rely on shaky carbon modeling, aimed at quantifying how the carbon tax will actually perform over the next several decades, to reassure us that we will actually meet our GHG reduction objectives.

We need to supplement the carbon tax with other strategies that impose hard, measurable, incrementally lower caps on carbon emissions.

So as not to bet our last dollar — or the health of our planet — on any one government’s vision for an escalating carbon tax that only indirectly lowers emissions.

We surely should commit ourselves to fully using the tool that the carbon tax provides to help achieve its intended purpose, which means gradually raising its price.

Indeed, we must use every available tool at our disposal to have any credible hope of achieving B.C.’s target of an 80 per cent reduction in GHGs by 2050.

And we can’t afford to pretend that politics won’t play a critical part in the success of that endeavour. It already has and it always will.

In the final analysis, any climate action plan will only succeed if it is also a politically astute economic plan that is sustainable in every respect — environmentally, fiscally, socially, economically and politically.

The Politics of Carbon Pricing

Most British Columbians support the carbon tax because they know it is a responsible tax shift.

They understand that is intended to tax something that we don’t want — carbon pollution — to generate revenue for things we do want — be it other tax cuts or new public investments in public infrastructure, critically important public services, or environmentally sustainable technologies.

In short, the carbon tax is a very good policy tool to “do the right thing.”

Still, it’s a tax. And increased taxes are always a hard sell.

Any proposal to increase them, each and every year, for as far as the eye can see, is not bound to be very politically popular, to put it charitably.

Even if those tax hikes are supposedly “revenue-neutral.” Or if the politicians who want to impose them also suggest that those revenues will fund other tax cuts or new investments that people might want.

The imagined pain of tax hikes is always more palpable than its promised relief.

Particularly if the latter demands trusting politicians to keep their word. Especially if they are in no position to make promises on behalf of their successors.

The Climate Leadership Team wants to increase carbon tax by $10 per year until 2050, starting in 2018.

Count me among the decided minority of taxpayers who would support that plan. Indeed, I do.

But I sure wouldn’t want to bank on that as the pivotal feature of a politically viable plan to cut B.C.’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent. Even though I agree that the only way we will ever reach that goal is by dramatically increasing the price of carbon pollution, as the CLT suggests.

As eminently sensible as its proposal surely is, on so many levels, I would be utterly shocked if either the B.C. Liberals or the NDP will ever embrace it.

The Green Party, maybe. It doesn’t really hope to form the next provincial government, even if it succeeds in its quest to hold the balance of power in a minority government. But the two legitimate contenders for power? I think the CLT is dreaming in Technicolor.

To make such a far-reaching commitment on the carbon tax would be tantamount to political suicide. If either party unilaterally supported such an increase, its opponent would have a field day at their expense.

And that would very likely do more harm than good to the vital goal of carbon pricing, to the crucial role of the carbon tax in particular, and to the ultimate success of the urgently needed plan to dramatically reduce B.C.’s carbon emissions.

Any plan to raise the carbon tax must be politically sensitive and realistic.

It is hard to imagine any government that would be willing to hitch its political wagon to a carbon tax that would increase from today’s level of $30 per tonne to $360 per tonne over for the next three-and-a-half decades.

Not unless they have a death wish.

Moreover, it is probably not even constitutionally viable for any government to so bind its successors.

The most that any government could therefore really do is propose that those future governments follow its lead, by sticking to a plan for such annual carbon tax increases over the next 34 years.

A laudable vision, I agree, but not one that is likely to succeed as articulated, in political reality.

The only thing we can predict with certainty is that future governments will have very different plans.

Some might want to freeze, lower or (heaven forbid) even repeal the carbon tax. Others might want to increase it by more or less than $10 a tonne in any given year, or add to the list of exemptions that the Clark government has created and invited.

In fact, as much as it makes sense to price carbon with such predictable annual increments that steadily ratchet up the cost of unwanted greenhouse gas emissions, making that bold commitment would probably backfire.

There are simply too many voters and vested interests that would be easily mobilized by any party that promised to stop a proposed 12-fold increase in the carbon tax, dead in its tracks.

Those of us who are deeply supportive of a gradually escalating carbon tax that will succeed in its central role in driving B.C. ever closer to a low-carbon economy need to be politically smart.

We would be shooting our own mission in the foot if we inadvertently provoke a broad backlash that could irreparably harm today’s widely-supported carbon tax. It could wind up killing that mode of carbon pricing altogether.

Just ask Australia, where a similar taxpayers’ revolt resulted in the repeal of its nascent carbon pricing system. And it was only even applicable to large emitters, not to individuals or families.

There is a fine line between what is environmentally and/or socially desirable and what is politically prudent and possible.

In any case, in the most likely event that neither the B.C. Liberals nor the NDP dares to publicly support the CLT’s carbon tax plan, a fallback plan is essential for climate action.

This poses a significant problem for any government that only relies on a carbon tax as it chosen means for carbon pricing.

What About Cap-and-Trade?

Tax hikes always need social license for their long-term success, which is hard to achieve decades in advance, no matter how much the politicians might try to convince their constituents that they will be “revenue-neutral.”

It is why the chief alternative to a carbon tax — a cap-and-trade system — is so much more politically palatable.

That is the means for carbon pricing that Ontario, Quebec and California have embraced, which British Columbia had also intended to adopt in combination with its carbon tax.

In fact, B.C. was the first Canadian jurisdiction to join the Western Climate Initiative, in partnership with seven U.S. states, back in 2007.

In that same year it also joined the International Carbon Action Partnership, together with 14 other national and subnational governments from North America and Europe.

Both of those partnership initiatives were — and still are — aimed at creating a truly global emissions trading network that is integrated with the European Union Emissions Trading System, which is far the world’s largest cap-and-trade system.

The Campbell government was also the first government in Canada to pass a Cap-and-trade Act that authorized hard caps on emissions levels. It provided a legislative basis for B.C. to supplement its carbon tax with a cap-and-trade system.

Essentially, the Clark government walked away from all of those initiatives aimed at putting hard caps on carbon emissions and at partnering with others in cap-and-trade systems.

Its Greenhouse Gas Industrial Reporting and Control Act repealed the Cap-and-trade Act, to mimic the previous Alberta government’s approach, which was properly assailed in this article published by DeSmog Canada.

The NDP government that replaced that Conservative administration over a year ago has now embraced a carbon tax, similar to British Columbia’s, in force and design. Its initial rate of $20/tonne, to be imposed next January, will be increased to $30/tonne in 2018, making it the same as B.C.’s rate.

That move by the Clark government to do away with hard caps on regulated emissions that might have lowered overall absolute emissions, year over year, was a huge step backwards for B.C. climate reduction plan.

Instead, in its zeal to appease the LNG industry, the Clark government adopted “emission intensity” benchmarks, which it brags are the “cleanest in the world.”

Under its new policy, B.C.’s liquefaction terminals would be permitted to emit 0.16 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of LNG exported, without penalty.

Theoretically, companies that emit above that level would be subject to a penalty. They might pay $25 per tonne that would be paid into a technology fund, which will ultimately go back to their industry. Or they would have to buy offsets.

Here’s the catch.

The government has also announced plans to subsidize that penalty by as much 100 per cent, for any plants that have emission levels just above the new intensity benchmark.

That subsidy from taxpayers to the LNG companies drops on a sliding scale to 50 per cent of the penalty that would otherwise be applicable at 0.23 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

And that’s not even the half of it, as I will explain in my next installment. The Clark government has extended unprecedented tax concessions to the LNG industry that will be locked-in for 25 years and underwritten by B.C. taxpayers.

Any changes in those guaranteed tax rates, tax credits or to the carbon tax that is specifically applicable to the LNG sector will be fully compensable by B.C. taxpayers for at least the next 25 years.

If any subsequent LNG plant gets a more favourable tax deal than the Pacific Northwest LNG proposal, headed by Malaysian state-oil giant Petronas, that project will get it too.

Bottom line of that sweetheart scheme is that B.C. taxpayers will be obliged to shell out potentially tens of millions of dollars to subsidize LNG companies’ rightful penalties on their uncapped emissions. And they get to make billions in profits.

At the same time, the government has exempted those LNG plants from having to account for their upstream natural gas production emissions from fracking, processing and pipelines.

The emissions from those LNG plants, as defined, only account for 30 per cent of the natural gas industry’s GHG emissions in British Columbia.

To make matters worse, the Clark government has simply redefined any gas-fired energy used to drive those LNG plants as “clean power.”

That flatly contradicts the Campbell government’s definition of clean, renewable power, which underpinned its clean energy plan and laws. It is anathema to the CLT’s vision for 100 per cent renewable power, as opposed to the 93 per cent renewable power portfolio requirement that exists today, as a result of the 2008 climate action and clean energy plans.

As Clean Energy Canada has rightly argued, the government has a long, long way to go before it can credibly claim that B.C.’s LNG industry will be even close to the “cleanest in the word.”

Those standards for regulating the amount of carbon that is allowable per unit of LNG only deal with the intensity of those carbon emissions.

Reducing emissions intensities is a necessary step to reducing the overall volume of emissions produced. But in itself, it does nothing to stop that total volume of carbon pollution from increasing along with higher production levels.

The government’s approach will allow carbon emissions to dramatically increase, despite those efficiency gains in the emissions intensity levels.

It is yet another sop to Big Oil that has co-opted B.C.’s climate action plan for the sake of liberating new investments in fossil fuel developments and higher profits for those companies.

By comparison, a cap-and-trade system works very differently, most importantly, by ensuring that overall net carbon emissions go down, not up.

That system purports to let the market decide how much the price of carbon should be, as regulated emitters buy, sell or bank their needed or unused emissions allowances, to meet the hard caps that governments impose upon them for their allowable emission levels.

A huge downside of such cap-and-trade systems is that they only cover a portion of any jurisdictions’ carbon emissions. Mostly those from large, regulated industrial sectors. So it is not a total solution and should be employed with a carbon tax to capture those emissions from the rest of the economy.

Those cap-and-trade systems don’t much affect individual behaviour or the vast amount of carbon emissions that are created by individuals, families and small businesses that are not subject to those emission caps.

Plus, those cap-and-trade systems do not provide much certainty or predictability to the industries and sectors they regulate about the costs of those carbon prices, as emissions caps go down and as the cost of meeting those ever lower emission thresholds goes up.

The environmental upside of that system is that it provides more certainty in regulating and reducing absolute emissions levels in each regulated sector.

The political upside of that system is that no government has to quantify its escalating price of carbon, let alone decades into the future.

The politicians don’t have to set the price for carbon, or even impose a carbon price on the voters, per se.

Instead, they can simply tell their constituents that the “free market will decide” the price on carbon that is necessary to achieve the absolute reductions in emissions levels that are mandated by government for each regulated sector.

Whether such emissions trading systems actually work as intended is another question. Especially if they are embraced without also having some type of carbon tax in place.

The European experience in that regard is not very encouraging, to say the least, as Greenpeace has highlighted in its excellent prescription for putting the EU’s Emission Trading System back on track.

It has been open to all sorts of abuses that have allowed large emitters to meet their legal obligations without yet adopting the types of measures that are essential for ensuring that they actually reduce their own emissions.

The very elements of cap-and-trade that are intended to give those emitters flexibility in meeting their emissions caps are in some cases legally used as license for them to pollute.

Emissions allowances are typically initially allocated either by grants from government to industrial emitters, by auctions that sell those allowances to the highest bidders, or a combination of both.

Too many allowances have been granted for free or for next to nothing, which has reduced the price of their associated carbon emissions, as it has also subsidized corporate polluters.

Those allowances are also usually “bankable,” to be sold or used by those who hold them as they see fit, when most opportune. It’s not unlike trading stocks. The price impacts of how and when those allowances are offered for sale are wildly unpredictable.

Large polluters can meet their declining caps on emissions by buying allowances from others who don’t need them, because they acted to cut their own emissions.

In essence, the price of carbon was not in itself sufficient to force them to cut their emissions as envisioned, to the extent that they could achieve those reductions and still have so many surplus emissions allowances left over, to sell or use at a later date.

The Slippery Slope of Carbon Offsets

Emissions trading systems allow polluters to claim credit for reducing their own emissions, even when they have not. That is equally true of the Clark government’s new emission intensity benchmarks for LNG plants, which can be met through most of the same mechanisms.

To meet their legislated emissions caps or intensity standards, the regulated sectors can buy others’ unused emissions allowances or they can buy carbon “off-sets.”

Such offsets provide emissions credits for theoretically offsetting an equivalent amount of emissions through new green investments.

Typically they are investments in energy efficiency, carbon sequestration, fuel switching or GHG destruction that facilitate net new reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that would not otherwise occur.

Indeed, that was what the now defunct Pacific Carbon Trust was set up to facilitate, to help B.C.’s public sector entities meet their new legal obligations to be “carbon neutral” — which they have been since 2010. Another first in North America.

That commitment to carbon neutrality has also been supported by 96 per cent of all local governments in B.C.

At least 182 of those local government signed onto the B.C. Climate Action Charter that was initiated in 2007, as yet another part of the initial climate action plan, which among other things, obliged those institutions to be carbon neutral in respect of their operations by 2012.

They, too, use offsets to help them meet that self-imposed requirement.

Those offsets are only potentially credible if they are additional, verifiable and conform to stringent international standards and jurisdictional regulations.

But the reality is, they are very much open to abuse, and they are extremely hard to confirm, especially in countries that specialize in creating offset projects that look great on paper, but are essentially fraudulent upon closer inspection.

Even in B.C., the history with offset purchases is sketchy at best.

Many of those reinvestments in British Columbia effectively amounted to gifts to industries — the forest industry and the alternative power industry especially — that gave them money for projects that many believe they would undertaken anyway.

As well, public-sector organizations that were obliged to buy offsets from the Pacific Carbon Trust at a rate of $25 per tonne to meet their legal obligations for carbon-neutrality sometimes paid over twice what the Trust has been charged for those carbon credits.

Still, offsets are an integral part of any emissions trading system and with the right safeguards, they certainly can and do serve to reduce the planet’s overall greenhouse gas pressures.

As with so many debatable climate action areas, the CLT plan calls for “a review of the current offset policy to determine if changes are required to support the new Climate Leadership Plan.”

How bold. Not.

The prelude to that almost meaningless recommendation points to its real purpose: “The province could expand the use of offsets beyond the Carbon Neutral Government Program to specific industrial sectors, or use them to help meet provincial carbon reduction targets.”

It is further aimed at allowing greater provincial use of offsets, including from investments in jurisdictions outside of B.C., which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and is common in cap-and-trade systems.

But as the CLC also noted, “given concerns about the credibility of offsets from some jurisdictions outside of B.C. and their ability to ensure greenhouse gas reductions, any external offsets considered should meet or exceed the standards set in B.C.”

Good luck with enforcing that.

Although to be fair, B.C. has a lot of home-grown expertise in that area, including some great companies that are helping the B.C. government to develop and assert its leadership role in shaping North American offset policies and standards.

Virtually everyone accepts that the only way that we will hope to meet our GHG reduction targets is if we “properly price” carbon by continually raising the tax penalty on greenhouse gas emissions, as we also act to mitigate those emissions in every other conceivable way.

Carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems have different strengths and benefits that should be fully utilized, if only to help offset their respective weaknesses.

Towards a Fairer and More Effective Form of Carbon Pricing

To my mind, there is no point in getting bogged down in a political argument about how much the price of carbon will be obliged to rise over the next 34 years. Whether it is through a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade system, or a combination of both, as I would advocate.

Such a debate would only most hurt the party that most wants to responsibly fight and adapt to climate change. It would help to re-elect the Clark government, which I submit, has shown it does not care a fig about that imperative.

In that sense, it would be counterproductive to its cause.

In any case, as the Climate Leadership Team basically also acknowledged, British Columbia’s carbon prices cannot be too far out of synch with the price that other jurisdictions are imposing on carbon through other systems, like cap-and-trade.

The key is to keep B.C. on the leading edge, slightly ahead of its competitors on carbon pricing, attuned to the global free market realities and to the domestic political realities of the capacity to sustain carbon tax increases.

To that end, B.C.’s Opposition parties would be wise to focus on ‘right pricing’ carbon with firm commitments for the next four-year term in government, instead of prescribing annual increases to the carbon tax over the next 34 years that they are beyond their ability to control.

They should commit to raising the carbon tax by $10 a year — or maybe even by $15 per year — over each of the next four years, starting in 2017, a year earlier than the CLT called for.

And they should commit to integrating the carbon tax with a cap-and-trade system that also imposes hard emissions caps on large industrial polluters, to ensure they cannot simply pay to pollute for profit without restriction, as the current carbon pricing regime allows.

We must remain vigilant not to allow B.C.’s heaviest carbon polluters to transfer their risks and costs to other taxpayers, especially to individuals and families.

That is what is now happening and it is a key weakness in the CLT’s plan, as I argued in the second installment of this series. I will have much more to say about that problem in the next and final installment.

Having said that, it is important to put the CLT’s recommendation on the carbon tax in perspective, especially for voters who might be too easily swayed by those who promise to freeze the carbon tax or minimize its increases in the near term.

It is equally important to obtain voters’ buy-in for the ways in which any incremental carbon tax revenue will be recycled, either through additional tax cuts, as is now legally required, or through new public investments.

To that end, we would be wise to take our cue from what has politically worked in other jurisdictions.

At least 15 jurisdictions have introduced some form of direct carbon tax, as this short publication from the World Bank points out.

In Canadian-equivalent dollars, Denmark’s carbon tax is about $45 a tonne and Finland’s carbon tax is over $50 a tonne.

Switzerland’s carbon tax is almost $89 per tonne. Norway charges up to $90 per tonne, depending on the type and usage of fossil fuels covered by its carbon tax.

Like that country, Sweden has had a carbon tax since 1991 that has increased over time and now stands at about $219 CAD a tonne.

You can bet that it will easily exceed the CLT’s target of $360 a tonne in 34 years’ time, even with the exemptions that are creeping in, under the European Union Emissions Trading System.

The world hasn’t ended for any of those countries, many of which are large energy producers. Their economies have not collapsed.

Sweden’s example, in particular, shows that the CLT’s vision for a carbon tax is completely doable, if it is not derailed by politics born of its zeal for “proving” the unprovable and of a debate about timelines and long-distant tax hikes that undermines its own purpose.

Just last year Sweden announced that it is also intent on being one of the first nations in the world to become fossil-fuel free.

So it can be done, if we are smart about how we “right price” carbon in British Columbia.

The CLT’s plan for an annual $10/tonne increase in the carbon tax from 2018 to 2050 would mean that it would rise from today’s level of $30 per tonne, to $360 per tonne by 2050 — a 12-fold increase.

Simple multiplication suggests that that increased carbon tax would mean that the price of gasoline would rise from the 6.67 cents per litre now charged for that tax, to about 80 cents per litre over those 33 years.

That should not be too hard to absorb over those next three-plus decades.

After all, in joining the International Zero-Emission Vehicle Alliance last December,

the Clark government also signed onto to a pledge “to make all passenger vehicle sales in our jurisdictions Zero Emission Vehicles as fast as possible, and no later than 2050.” (Emphasis added.)

If we achieved that goal, through fully electric vehicles, the carbon tax basically would not even apply to most people’s cars or trucks, or even to many buses and other public transit vehicles.

The CLT plan offers some suggestions to help encourage electric vehicles, but much more needs to be done.

As well, the incremental demand that those electric vehicles will impose on British Columbia’s electrical system has not been properly quantified by anyone.

That plan also makes recommendations to encourage fuel switching, to help buses, large and medium-duty trucks convert to less carbon intensive fuels, like compressed natural gas.

While that might make sense as a bridging strategy, we should not be investing a lot of money in infrastructure aimed at perpetuating fossil fuel dependency, even from non-renewable natural gas.

Which brings me to home heating.

Under the CLC’s plan, the carbon tax on that energy would go up from the current rate of about $1.49 per gigajoule to about $17.88 per gigajoule in 2050.

Considering a typical home in Vancouver uses about 60-90 gigajoules of natural gas, that cost would be considerable. That annual carbon tax bill would rise from around $89-$134 currently, to about $1,072-$1,609 by 2050 — just for the carbon tax, not including the price of the natural gas itself.

You can see how that escalating tax might motivate most families to seek lower carbon transportation and heating alternatives.

The CLT vision calls for all sorts of targets and unspecified best practices to make buildings more energy efficient and to reduce “built sector” emissions by 50 per cent.

Those are all great goals to pursue, but the CLT plan says little about how to achieve them.

Suffice it to say, there are many ways we can rebalance that carbon price burden, to lay more of it where it properly belongs: at the feet of the heavy industrial emitters who should be obliged to pay the full freight of their carbon pollution.

Rethinking the “Revenue-Neutral” Carbon Tax

Most British Columbians do not really believe the current carbon tax is actually revenue-neutral, even though the government’s annual accounting treatments purport to prove otherwise.

Nevertheless, it’s all there on page 58 of the 2016 Budget and Fiscal Plan, for anyone who cares to look.

This year, the government expects to collect $1.2 billion in carbon tax and it plans to return $1.7 billion in tax relief. In other words, it is budgeting to return $500 million more in tax breaks than it projects it will collect in carbon tax revenue.

As such, the carbon tax scheme is not just revenue-neutral, it’s revenue-negative.

The law requires the province to at least pay back in tax cuts an amount equivalent to what it receives from the carbon tax.

Because it cannot be sure what either that amount of carbon tax revenue will be, or what the cost of its associated tax relief measures will be, the province always budgets to return more than it takes in.

Plus, the cost of that tax relief attributed to offsetting the carbon tax has tended to outpace the growth of that revenue over time. Hence the widening gap between carbon tax revenues and carbon tax relief expenditures.

The problem is, precious few taxpayers feel that they are breaking even on the carbon tax that they pay.

That is partly due to the fact that most people tend to vastly overestimate what the carbon tax is costing them.

But it is mostly due to the reality that most taxpayers and businesses actually do pay more in carbon taxes than they get back in discernible tax breaks.

Then again, some families more than break even on the exchange — typically, those on lower incomes and those who live in rural and Northern areas, as counterintuitive as that may seem.

In fact, of the $601 million in total tax relief for individual and families that will be funded this year from carbon tax revenues, almost half — $278 million — will be dedicated to those beneficiaries.

That includes $195 million for the low income climate action tax credit of $115.50 per adult, plus $34.50 per child. And it includes $83 million for the Northern and rural home owner benefit of up to $200, which is only available to people living outside of the Capital, Greater Vancouver and Fraser Valley Regional Districts.

Most of the balance of that $601 million in personal carbon tax-related relief goes towards funding the five per cent reduction in personal income tax rates that was extended when the carbon tax was launched, eight years ago.

Few people remember that tax cut or perhaps even notice it, especially those with modest incomes.

When you look at how the carbon tax revenues are reallocated back into taxpayers’ pockets, the benefits they provide are not as material to most individuals and businesses as the highly visible costs that confront them at every turn.

This is one reason why the CLT recommended using some of the incremental revenue from a higher carbon tax to lower the provincial sales tax from 7 per cent to 6 per cent.

I think that would be a big mistake. Sales tax cuts are regressive, insofar as they most benefit those who spend the most — namely, people with large incomes.

Cutting that tax by a point won’t do much to help those with lower incomes, many of whom are already receiving a low income carbon tax credit.

As the David Suzuki Foundation has said, that should be increased and indexed to the rate of any future carbon tax hikes, to maintain its effective support for those on low incomes.

Given the heavy weighting in favour of tax relief for businesses, the last thing we should be doing is devoting an even larger share of an ever-larger amount of carbon tax revenue back to businesses.

Especially not the oil and gas industry.

Yet that, too, is something the CLT recommends to help those emissions hogs remain globally “competitive” and to help them offset their costs of reducing their emissions.

It proposes to eliminate the sales tax on electricity for industry, just as it was previously eliminated for households.

That would represent a massive tax transfer to industry, especially to B.C.’s heaviest carbon emitters, in the hope of encouraging them to switch from fossil fuels to renewable electricity.

I will address that issue a greater length in my next piece, but for now it is enough to note that whatever its intended benefits, that recommendation would be yet one more needless subsidy to business that will make public acceptance of any future carbon tax increases that much harder to swallow.

It would represent another hidden subsidy to some of B.C.’s worst carbon polluters that is only contemplated to help attract more carbon-intensive investment. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

If anything, as carbon taxes go up, as they should and must, proportionately more of that revenue should be reinvested to mitigate cost pressures on families.

At least some of it should be used to invest in carbon reducing social “goods,” such as public transit, LiveSmart BC programs, targeted tax relief, affordable “green” housing, and more.

The CLT plan acknowledges those needs, but it also proposes all sorts of new measures that are mostly aimed at further subsidizing businesses, including the oil and gas industry.

As it is, the Clark government has already badly distorted the very notion of a revenue-neutral carbon tax by using that revenue for so many tax cuts and subsidies that should properly be funded from General Revenue, if at all.

In fact, of the $1.7 billion in tax relief attributable to the revenue-neutral carbon tax scheme, over $1.1 billion is dedicated to business — almost twice the amount going to individuals.

And that gap is projected to grow wider, not smaller, over the next three years.

Fully one-third of the $1.2 billion generated in carbon tax revenue this year will go towards subsidizing the film industry — $400 million for film incentive and production services tax credits.

Another $150 million of that carbon tax revenue is also now ostensibly funding the scientific research and experimental development tax credit. And a further $45 million is going towards the interactive digital media tax credit.

All of those tax credits have increased under the Clark government. They all used to be funded from General Revenue, not from the carbon tax.

The five per cent reduction in their personal income taxes that was extended with carbon tax revenue way back in 2008 has not been increased in all that time.

Before any cuts are made to the sales tax from carbon tax revenue, it would be much fairer to reduce income taxes for middle-income earners, adding a high-income surtax to offset those benefits for B.C. wealthiest individuals.

Truth is, the initial five per cent income tax is barely discernible in most middle class families’ take-home pay. They only see it once a year, at tax filing time, which is perhaps one of the reasons that the CLT is suggesting a more highly and constantly visible sales tax cut at some point down the road.

The low income climate action tax credit and the Northern and rural home owner benefit have also not changed in years, and they only apply to a relatively small subset of individual taxpayers. Most taxpayers don’t receive or feel those tax relief benefits.

Other tiny tax credits funded from the carbon tax were mostly cheap political ploys introduced by the Clark government to curry favour with their targeted constituencies.

They include a children’s fitness tax credit, a children’s arts credit, a training tax credit, a B.C. seniors’ home renovation tax credit and even a small business venture capital tax credit.

All arguably enough worthy measures, and all ones that were or should otherwise be funded from General Revenue, or from the LiveSmart BC program — not from the carbon tax.

Again, their reach and their actual tax benefits are so small, almost no one knows they even exist.

So it is not surprising that most taxpayers do not see the connection between the carbon taxes they pay and the tax relief or other social benefits they receive.

That needs to change — dramatically — as part of any plan to raise the carbon tax.

The government should end the carbon tax exemption it put in place two years ago for coloured gasoline and coloured diesel fuel that is used for farm purposes, including for on-farm equipment and for eligible farm trucks on the highway.

It should end the Greenhouse Carbon Tax Program that provides greenhouse growers a grant equal to 80 per cent of the carbon tax paid on their purchases of natural gas and propane burned for heating and CO2 production within their greenhouses.

The Clark government opened the door to the slippery slope of carbon tax exemptions that arbitrarily exempt some sources of carbon emissions from that tax on pollution that only works if its charged on all measurable emissions, across the board.

Tax exemptions are always a mug’s game that is politically manipulated for mostly political gain. We should avoid them like the plague in respect of the carbon tax, which is all about taxing all carbon pollution as if it matters.

In future, we should be rethinking the revenue-neutral carbon tax to use some of that money, as the CLT suggests, for public investments in carbon-reducing infrastructure, technology, facilities and behavioural incentives.

This is the approach that Alberta has chosen for its new carbon tax. It makes sense to more dedicate carbon tax revenue to the thing it is supposed to encourage — lower GHGs.

If governments hope to maintain and build broad public support for any carbon tax, they would be well-advised to clearly demonstrate that linkage with every penny it collect from that tax on carbon emissions.

People very much want and need major improvements in public and rapid transit. They want more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly communities. They want more green spaces, with more trees that clean the air as they sequester carbon.

They want much more help in making their personal transitions to more energy efficient homes, to electric and hybrid vehicles, and to cleaner, more sustainable consumer products that contain less packaging.

They want to make smart choices that will help to heat their homes and run their appliances using truly renewable sources of electricity and renewable biogas that helps to eliminate methane emissions.

Those are only a fraction of the most obvious targets for needed public investment that might be supported by using at least some of B.C.’s carbon tax for carbon-reducing priorities that taxpayers want.

They offer the types of benefits that more people would actually see and feel, which might make them more amenable to paying gradually higher carbon tax rates.

They are the types of investments that can really make a difference in helping taxpayers to make smarter choices that can truly save them money, net of the carbon tax.

Finally, we should consider imposing differential carbon tax rates, as Norway has done, that impose a heavier proportional carbon tax burden on carbon-intensive industries and activities that demand a distinctly more onerous price signal to achieve the carbon tax’s intended purposes.

Far from charging the oil and gas industry less, we should be charging it more, especially in the absence of cap-and-trade, which might achieve the same end at a lower cost, by dint of absolutely limiting and decreasing those related carbon emissions.

Martyn Brown was former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff and a key architect of B.C.’s climate action plan and clean energy plan. He was the top strategic advisor to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment in British Columbia. A frequent contributor to the Georgia Straight, Brown is also the author of the ebook Towards a New Government in British Columbia. Contact Brown at towardsanewgovernment@gmail.com.

Image: Province of B.C./Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

How B.C.’s Climate Plan is Being Co-opted by Big Oil: Martyn Brown

Martyn Brown — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 19:26:33 +0000

This is the second of a four-part series on B.C.’s climate action plan. Part One addresses B.C.’s GHG reduction targets. Part Two addresses how that plan is at risk of being co-opted by Big Oil. Part Three takes a closer look at the B.C. Climate Leadership Team’s recommendations for the carbon tax. And Part Four focuses on how the oil and gas industry stands to profit from that advisory team’s proposed climate action plan.

In accepting its mission as defined by the government, the Climate Leadership Team (CLT) also implicitly accepted the government’s plan for increased emissions from LNG and from other carbon-intensive development.

As laudable as the CLT’s climate action plan is in most respects, it is wrongly predicated on accommodating the oil industry’s vision for increased fossil fuel extraction.

Which is to say, it is innately co-opted by its mandate, which is wedded to the acceptance of an overriding economic plan for carbon-fuelled growth.

That is not to suggest that all, or even a majority, of the CLT members support that economic vision. Far from it.

But in accepting their mandate, they were all obliged to respect the Clark government’s four Cornerstone Objectives as their starting point for climate action.

Those objectives basically obliged the CLT to recommend measures for meeting B.C.’s 2050 GHG reduction target, while also allowing for the added emissions that will flow from the government’s LNG Strategy and from its carbon-intensive B.C. Jobs Plan.

As the CLT noted, if that (or any) Cornerstone Objective “were to be deemed not a priority, the substance of the recommendations of the Climate Leadership Team may well be different.”

Therein lies the fatal flaw of the proposed plan.

Mission Impossible

It rests on an economic foundation that purports to dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions that, in turn, will make the task of reducing those and all provincial emissions by some 80 per cent below 2007 levels vastly more difficult and more costly to achieve.

Accepting that foundation as our starting point for climate action turns B.C.’s “mission improbable” into “mission impossible,” regardless of any theoretical assurances offered to the contrary from any private consulting firm specializing in climate and energy modeling.

I have had enough experience with such environmental and econometric modeling to know how readily compliant with their client’s wishes their statistical outputs tend to be. I am certainly not suggesting they fudge the figures or in any way act unprofessionally; but they are always mindful of the unspoken “truths” their clients hope to prove.

In my experience, it was never too challenging for the government to obtain “proof” that its policies, plans and “business cases” made sense, typically from thoroughly respected and utterly professional firms.

Only history typically makes of an ass of those econometrically-sound leaps of science, faith and mathematically-inspired feats of assumption.

From the economic benefits of the Olympics, to the rosy picture painted by the properly qualified findings of the quantitative analysis of British Columbia’s initial climate action plan, history tends to discredit even the most credible economists’ “crystal-balling.”

Their seemingly “firm” findings are always carefully qualified in the fine print that their clients usually are not so keen to talk about.

They are always based on the quicksand of often-dubious reference scenarios, economic and other assumptions, and interpretations of loosely worded policy statements, strategic directions and unspecified actions.

Push on any of those analyses hard enough and you will be happy enough to bury them, lest someone else shows how magically they rest upon their mucky postulations and presumptions.

With few exceptions, there is simply nowhere near enough detail or specificity in the Climate Leadership Team’s plan to make any credible forecasts about its potential GHG reduction impacts.

The truth is, it is fundamentally impossible to quantify the impacts of so many open-ended and interacting variables. It is a qualitative art, in the first instance, to try to interpret the mostly aspirational strategies to develop strategies, “best practices” and actual mitigation measures that are suggested in the CLT’s plan.

Nor can any such modeling account for the political will — or lack of it — in interpreting and actioning the CLT’s suggested strategies over some 34 years.

All of which is to flag the obvious: we should take any modeling that says we can meet our 2050 GHG reduction targets by exponentially adding to our emissions pressures with a grain of salt.

At a minimum, that can only make the challenge more difficult and more costly to achieve.

That incremental emissions pressure from incremental fossil fuel extraction, shipping and processing can only make their attendant environmental risks, financial costs and behavioural burdens more onerous, especially for individuals, families and those who can least afford them.

The best chance we have at meeting B.C.’s 2050 GHG targets is to minimize its emissions baseline, instead of the opposite.

The last thing we should be doing is planning for a future that is intentionally predicated on potentially doubling our emissions pressures, in pursuit of the economic lure being dangled out by the LNG consortiums and large oil companies.

Rush to Increase Oil and Gas Development

As B.C.’s chief cheerleader for LNG, and as the oil industry’s passive accomplice in “getting to green” in moving Alberta’s bitumen to Pacific tidewater, our premier is both a friend in deed and a friend in need to the barons of Big Oil who so generously fund her party.

Indeed, her government has been thoroughly co-opted by those who want us to stake our economic future on their increased exploitation of fossil fuels for their profit, global warming be damned.

It is content to suck and blow at the same time on climate action by dramatically expanding oil and gas development while simultaneously trying to eradicate its unwanted and entirely avoidable incremental emissions.

That wrong-headed approach will oblige us all to pay a much heavier price to reduce the added emissions that will result from the government’s rush to yield export-driven profits for the mostly foreign multinationals that want to increase Canada’s oil and gas development.

The largely state-owned oil companies from China, Malaysia, India, Brunei and elsewhere that are driving B.C.’s slavish devotion to LNG development couldn’t be happier.

Whether or not they eventually move forward with their potential investment plans in B.C., they are thrilled with the B.C. Liberals’ penchant for prostrating themselves to their industry’s “competitive demands.”

Ditto for the mega-rich private oil companies from the USA, the UK, Japan and Canada.

After all, they have already successfully suckered the Clark government into granting them unbelievably irresponsible tax breaks, subsidies and taxpayer-backed giveaways, through the ill-conceived Petronas precedent. (See related stories in the Georgia Straight, here, here, here and here.)

If nothing else, the premier’s unqualified support for their projects, through long-term tax concessions, tax credits and environmental risk transfers, increases their leverage with other governments that are equally starry-eyed about the zero sum global game of LNG development.

Now they stand to gain from an updated provincial climate action plan that they hope and expect will be anything but that.

It will amount to a contradiction in terms, if the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline project, the Pacific Northwest LNG project, and the premier’s broader vision for export-driven fossil fuel development is allowed to proceed.

A Defeatist Strategy

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency’s Pacific NorthWest LNG Draft Environmental Assessment Report found that that project’s liquefaction plant alone would increase provincial greenhouse gas emissions by 8.5 per cent.

Upstream greenhouse gas emissions associated with the project would represent 10-14 per cent of provincial emissions, based on 2013 levels.

And that is only one of 20 proposed LNG projects on the drawing board in British Columbia, including 18 that have already been granted export licenses by the National Energy Board (NEB).

If only a handful of them ever come to fruition, it will not be long until B.C.’s LNG-related emissions are vying with Alberta’s oil sands emissions for the dubious title of being Canada’s worst king of carbon pollution.

As for the so-called Kinder Morgan project, the NEB did not even consider either the upstream (e.g. oil production) or downstream emissions (e.g. end use of the oil) associated with Trans Mountain’s plan to pipe oilsands bitumen from northern Alberta to Burnaby, for shipping to Asia and elsewhere from Metro Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet.

We have no idea what the added impact of those unquantified extra greenhouse gas emissions will be from the associated increased oilsands extraction and processing activities.

We haven’t a clue what the emissions impact will be from the seven-fold increase in supertanker traffic that that project will impose upon the Salish Sea; or from the shipping of that “liberated” dirty cargo across the world; or from the refining of that bitumen into useable energy in China, America or elsewhere; or from the reshipping of that refined oil to wherever it gets burned; or from the combustion and other end use of that product.

Some might call that progress. I say it’s insanity.

The NEB’s requirement that Trans Mountain must offset the direct GHG emissions generated from the project’s construction, without any consideration of the emission increases that will actually result from what will flow through that new pipeline, is hardly cause to celebrate.

It is rather a bad joke that makes us the punch line: Knock, knock. Who’s there? Kinder. Kinder who? Kinder surprise! We get to pollute, you get to pay, and we get to profit.

Who says the NEB doesn’t have a sense of humour?

Founding a new climate action plan on a prevailing vision to exponentially increase the very thing that we ostensibly hope to decrease — carbon emissions — is patently absurd.

It is tantamount to trying to bail ourselves out of a leaky life raft while poking new holes in its rapidly deflating life support system, and pretending it doesn’t matter.

It is a defeatist “strategy” that essentially assumes we are probably already sunk anyway, so we might as well drink ourselves drunk on the stuff that’s in the barrels and enjoy the ride while it lasts.

We can and must do better.

The High Cost of Low Standards

Those oil companies and consortiums essentially want us to abandon our climate action imperatives in exchange for the benefits they promise from the increased extraction, processing and shipping of natural gas and heavy oil across our precious, pristine and sensitive ecosystems.

Never mind that the main argument for exporting those non-renewable resources is supposedly to increase their value — meaning the oil industries’ profits — in ways that it must be admitted will also make those products more expensive for Canadian consumers.

They want us to further lower their taxes, cut their costs and reduce our environmental standards, to help them compete with their own companies and with each other, in other parts of the world that place no price on carbon and that see no problem with carbon pollution.

They want us to do all that, so that they can sell more Canadian fossil fuel to China and to other less developed countries, which are already literally choking to death on the combustion of those dirty energy resources.

Such is the “gift” to humanity being held out as a fleeting “opportunity” by the only dinosaurs left on Earth.

Their idea of “responsible” and “sustainable” development is Orwellian newspeak of the worst order.

They are trying to persuade us that the “responsible” choice is to act irresponsibly. That “sustainable” development is its opposite.

In what world is it either “responsible” or “sustainable” to blast the earth apart with chemically polluted water, sand and steam, to “free” its geologically trapped hydrocarbons, so that they can be burned at the expense of our warming planet, and by extension, the life it supports?

If that is our idea of “adding value,” we are indeed morally bankrupt.

In what perverse “sustainable” and “responsible” society could it ever make sense to intentionally so debase the environment?

And worse, to fuel its dependency on non-renewable, climate-polluting energy that also threatens its aquifers, aquatic life and human drinking water?

Least of all, when the world is already awash in those petrochemicals. When it is slowly suffocating from its use of them. And when it has so many other clean, renewable and economically rewarding options to meet its incremental energy needs, as the International Energy Agency has so extensively documented.

In B.C. premier Christy Clark’s brave new world, apparently.

She too has bought into the fallacy that we must aspire to compete with those who are already adding to the planet’s atmospheric burdens by sending more of our worst polluting forms of energy to China and elsewhere.

It is a logic that defies logic, except for those who hope to profit from increasing emissions that will escalate global warming.

It flies in the face of the commitment made by 95 countries in Paris last December to cut their emissions, so as to limit global warming to “well below 2°C.”

It makes a mockery of Canada’s lofty appeals to further restrict global warming to just 1.5 Celsius.

It makes the federal government’s improbable commitment to reduce Canada’s carbon emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 virtually impossible to achieve.

And it runs utterly counter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent agreement with U.S. President Barack Obama to reduce methane emissions by 40-45 per cent below 2012 levels by 2025 from the oil and gas sector.

As such, it is incumbent on B.C.’s provincial New Democratic Party to stand with the Green Party in fundamentally opposing the acceptance of the LNG pipe dream as a starting point for serious climate action.

In the first installment of this series, I suggested that an independent Auditor General for Climate Action should be appointed by the legislature to annually monitor the government’s progress on climate action.

That individual might also be asked to annually audit and report on the true cost of climate action subsidies and less obvious “tax expenditures” that are today completely invisible.

Taxpayers should know how much more they are being taxed through all manner of taxes, fees, utility rates and other hidden charges that directly relate to measures taken to reduce and offset the added emissions from each sector.

They should also know how much of their money is being devoted to investments and subsidies offered to businesses, to help them remain “competitive” in the new world of carbon pricing.

Indeed, government should be obliged to report on those costs in every provincial budget, just as it does today on its most obvious forms of tax expenditures (i.e. reductions in revenue from delivering government programs or benefits through the tax system, such as special tax rates, exemptions, or tax credits.)

And each year, the legislature should vote on all of those tax expenditures and newly identified “carbon pricing mitigation measures,” just as they do on each ministry’s annual Estimates appropriations for operating programs.

B.C. taxpayers and families should not be obliged to pay more than need be for cutting British Columbia’s carbon emissions. More on that subject in the next two installments of this series.

Image: Christy Clark/Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Taking Real Action on Climate Change by Putting Teeth in Toothless Targets

Martyn Brown — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 16:00:56 +0000

This is the first of a four-part series on B.C.’s climate action plan. Part One addresses B.C.’s GHG reduction targets. Part Two addresses how that plan is at risk of being co-opted by Big Oil. Part Three takes a closer look at the B.C. Climate Leadership Team’s recommendations for the carbon tax. And Part Four focuses on how the oil and gas industry stands to profit from that advisory team’s proposed climate action plan.

Any day now, the B.C. government is expected to release its updated climate action plan. Then again, it initially promised to do that last December and then last spring, before revising that deadline again to the end of June, so who knows?

Honouring its commitments has never been the Clark government’s strong suit, to put it mildly.

Nothing proves that more than its failure to honour B.C.’s legislated targets to reduce provincial greenhouse gas emissions.

As premier Christy Clark’s Climate Leadership Team determined, the province won’t even come to close to meeting its legal obligation to cut its GHG emissions by 33 per cent below 2007 levels by 2020.

Nor will it fulfill its statutory requirement to reduce those emissions by 18 per cent as of this year.

And it is wildly off-track from being able to meet the 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases that it is legally required by 2050.

At the rate we are going, British Columbia’s annual emissions are projected to increase by about 39 per cent over 2014 levels by 2050, according to the Pembina Institute.

The federal government’s Second Biennial Report on Climate Change further suggests that B.C.’s per capita GHG emissions will increase, from 13.7 tonnes per capita in 2013, to 15.3 tonnes per capita by 2020.

In other words, we are headed decidedly in the wrong direction from what is required by the 2007 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act under our carbon-loving premier’s “climate leadership.”

To put it bluntly, British Columbia’s climate action imperatives have been sacrificed to the premier’s LNG pipe dreams and to the barons of Big Oil.

Enter the Climate Leadership Team (CLT).

It was comprised of 17 handpicked advisors, including its chair, B.C. Liberal MLA Jordan Sturdy, and the head of the government’s Climate Action Secretariat.

Other CLT members included three mayors (all supportive of the B.C. Liberals, including one who is running for the party’s nomination in Comox Valley); three industry representatives (from LNG and forestry, and a former B.C. Hydro executive); three First Nations chiefs; three academics and three environmentalists.

The CLT’s consensus report was submitted to the government last fall. It offered 32 recommendations to get B.C. “back on track” in meeting its legislated GHG reduction targets for 2050.

It is important to note the main difference between the province’s 2008 climate action plan and the Climate Leadership Team’s (CLT) proposed plan.

The former was a very specific, action-laden strategy.

It not only established targets for emissions reductions and recommended broad strategies for achieving those targets. It also identified dozens of concrete policies, partnerships and best practices that other jurisdictions had embraced, and in some cases implemented, that would make B.C. a global leader on climate action.

That tactical action plan touched upon almost every sector of the economy, to target the “low hanging fruit” that was ripe for relatively “easy picking” in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

The challenge now in getting to where we need to go in combating global warming is that so many of the most obvious climate action “solutions” have already been identified and acted upon, with the marked exception of properly pricing carbon pollution.

Fast forward to the CLT’s plan. This passage is especially telling.

“Generally speaking, the Climate Leadership Team has focused on strategic-level recommendations. It is recognized that successful implementation will require much more in the way of detailed specifics at the policy and program level.”

No kidding.

In fact, some 26 of the report’s 32 recommendations are fundamentally aimed at establishing targets and putting in place processes to develop future strategies, best practices, harmonized approaches and adaptation measures.

Seven of the 32 recommendations are either entirely or largely fixated on setting or affirming targets that speak to desired goals, yet that are silent on how to achieve them. (#1-3, 12, 15, 19, 20)
13 recommendations call for policy reviews, for the development of best practices, and for new or updated strategies — none of which say much about what specifically, should be done. (#8, 13-18, 20-22, 28-29, 32)
Two recommendations call for the creation of task forces to research and recommend strategies to stimulate the low-carbon economy and to review and update best practices in the agricultural sector. (#10, 18)
Two recommendations speak to seeking “parity” and “alignment” with other jurisdictions on B.C.’s adopted climate actions and best practices — which makes sense, but does nothing in itself to further reduce B.C.’s GHGs. (#30, 31)
Two recommendations are concerned with adaption, rather than with mitigation. (#24, 25)

That is not to diminish the recommended actions that are sometimes included in the CLT’s strategic vision. Rather, it is to point out how hard it will actually be to move beyond its wish list for GHG reductions, to a specific action plan that can be executed with hard policies.

The CLT’s plan would replace the 2020 legislated emissions reduction target with a new target to reduce B.C.’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 2007 levels by 2030.

That is similar to the European Commission’s even more stringent target to achieve at a 40 percent cut in emissions below 1990 levels by 2030.

The CLT report also proposes to establish new sectoral greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2030, including cutting emission levels from buildings by 50 per cent and from the transportation and industrial sectors by 30 per cent, below 2015 levels.

British Columbians might be rightly skeptical that those new targets will ever be met by successive governments over the next 14 years. Especially without clear interim targets that at least notionally hold them to account.

Surely if we have learned anything from the Clark government’s essential dismissal of its legislated GHG targets for 2016 and 2020, it is that targets are a double-edged sword, if they can be cavalierly missed with political impunity.

On the one hand, they can and should be useful tools in prompting and scaling political actions to the magnitude of the task at hand and to the timelines that demand constant incremental improvement.

On the other hand, they can also be held up as legal commitments to reassure people that progress will and must be made. They can be held up as a shield to provide a convenient cover for politicians to ignore, delay or even reverse the hard actions that are actually required to meet those targets.

Over the last five years, Clark and her minions have basically thumbed their noses at the legislated GHG reduction targets and other laws that so many of them voted for under the Campbell administration.

That initial climate action plan, clean energy plan and bioenergy strategy did succeed in meeting the interim target of a six percent reduction in GHGs by 2012. But it has been all-downhill ever since.

Indeed, Clark has systematically dismantled much of her predecessor’s climate action and clean energy plans.

Most significantly, she froze the globally lauded carbon tax in 2012 and vowed not to increase it again until at least 2018.

Smart politics, no doubt. But downright stupid climate leadership.

As the government itself noted in its own 2014 Climate Action Report, “Some policies lose effectiveness over time if they are not updated. For example, the carbon tax impact effectively diminishes if the rate remains unchanged, as inflation dampens the price signal.”

Exactly.

The eight-year freeze on the revenue-neutral carbon tax runs completely contrary to the logic of that initiative, which was always intended to gradually increase the price of carbon pollution and to return that carbon tax revenue to British Columbians through other new tax cuts.

It is a policy that at least one study suggested has been tremendously successful in reducing B.C.’s emissions.

The Clark government’s record of failure and pandering to its party paymasters on the climate action plan, including the carbon tax, has significantly compounded the challenge of meeting B.C.’s greenhouse gas reduction targets.

What do targets matter if they can be deliberately neglected and missed without any political repercussions?

If they can be abused by politicians to defend their inaction on climate change?

If they have no political relationship to any particular government’s term in office?

If we must wait 14 years to determine if we are “on track” to meet other targets set for 34 years away?

What do GHG targets matter if they can be neglected & missed without political repercussion? https://t.co/Mu958vBAIq @christyclarkbc #bcpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) July 14, 2016

What is the point of having targets at all, if the response to missing them is to simply change the goalposts and set distant new targets that are even more toothless in holding governments to account than the ones that were missed and abandoned?

Instilling real political accountability for meeting GHG reduction targets must be Job One if they are to be remotely credible.

The Climate Leadership Team missed that critical point.

Progress to any new targets for 2030 must be annually measured against annual targets that point to interim legislated targets, which in turn, entail tangible penalties for those who fail to meet them as legally required.

The lesson from the first failed experience with meeting B.C.’s legislated GHG reduction target for 2020 is clear.

We need to legislate hard caps on absolute emission levels, in addition to mandating continually declining emission intensity levels.

The latter reduce the allowable amount of carbon that is released per unit from any particular activity; but they might also inadvertently allow net emissions to rise, if those regulated industrial and consumer activities also increase in volume.

Regulated industries should be obliged to limit their overall emissions in absolute terms, encouraged by an escalating carbon tax that makes carbon pollution ever less profitable.

But relying on a carbon tax that can be frozen by decree for years on end by any government that considers it political opportune to do so, is not sufficient.

It must be complemented by laws that impose hard caps on B.C.’s largest GHG emitters and that make them fully pay the costs of offsetting any emissions in excess of their allowable declining caps, with an added premium that ensures that simply paying to over-pollute doesn’t, in fact, pay.

By the same token, cabinet should be held truly accountable for ensuring that B.C. meets its interim emissions reduction targets.

Once those interim GHG reduction targets are passed by the legislature, they should not be amended without all-party support.

That could be assured through either a simple majority vote in the legislature, upon the unanimous recommendation of an all-party legislative standing committee.

Or it might perhaps be achieved via a requirement that any changes in B.C.’s legislated emissions targets are supported by at least two-thirds of all voting MLAs.

At least every four years, in the final year of its mandate, every government should be obliged to answer for its GHG reduction performance, before the election.

A small portion of cabinet ministers’ paycheques is already withheld to ensure they meet their individual and collective annual budget obligations. An additional portion of their remuneration should be withheld that will only get paid back if they meet their collective duty to ensure B.C.’s climate plan stays on track.

An independent Auditor General for Climate Action should be appointed by the legislature to annually monitor the government’s progress on climate action and its due diligence in meeting provincial GHG reduction targets with appropriate policy responses.

If any government’s efforts are found by that Auditor General for Climate Action to be woefully negligent and indirectly responsible for failing to meet the interim four-year targets for reducing provincial GHGs, those cabinet ministers should be legally precluded from running again for at least the next election.

That would sure make climate action a real priority for future governments.

It would put real teeth in GHG reduction targets that would serve to drive appropriate policy responses, to ensure those targets are met, however politically tough those required climate actions might be.

Image: Christy Clark/Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

LNG Industry Could Make B.C. Canada’s Worst Actor on Climate

Emma Gilchrist — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 17:45:07 +0000

While the B.C. government may like to claim it’s a “climate leader,” the province has quietly become a climate laggard compared to Canada’s other most populous provinces according to a new analysis released by the Pembina Institute on Tuesday.

The analysis indicates that eight years after B.C.’s Climate Action Plan was implemented, B.C.’s emissions are projected to continue increasing — standing in stark contrast to Ontario, Quebec and even Alberta.

Between 2011 and 2014, B.C.’s emissions increased by the equivalent of adding 380,000 cars to the road — putting B.C. on track to blow past its legislated 2020 emissions target.

If the province’s inaction on climate change continues, B.C.’s emissions will increase 39 per cent above 2014 levels by 2030, according to modelling.

Meantime, carbon pollution in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec is expected to decrease by 26 per cent, 22 per cent and 23 per cent, respectively, over the same period.

How is it possible that B.C. will perform worse than oilsands heavyweight Alberta? The predicted increase in B.C.’s emissions is largely due to projections for B.C.’s nascent liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector — which would account for more than 80 per cent of B.C.’s emissions increase between 2014 and 2030. And that calculation is based on the equivalent of just one LNG terminal getting up and running (roughly the size of the LNG Canada project in Kitimat, which would create 24 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year).

Yup, despite whatever insane statements Premier Christy Clark might make about how the LNG industry is going to fight climate change the opposite is true due to its carbon intensity.

#LNG Could Make BC Canada’s Worst Actor on #Climate https://t.co/aznNQhPhv0 @christyclarkbc #bcpoli #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/fgUX9tdF6v

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) June 14, 2016

Pembina is applying pressure on the B.C. government as it makes the final decisions on a new Climate Leadership Plan, expected to be released later this month. Last fall, Clark’s Climate Leadership Team (which included Matt Horne of the Pembina Institute) delivered 32 recommendations to the government to get B.C. on track to meet its 2050 climate target.

“In 2008, B.C. built a solid foundation with the Climate Action Plan. But when it came time to construct the proverbial house, Premier Clark balked at taking the next steps,” Horne said in a news release. “It’s time to quit stalling and finish the job.”

The Climate Leadership Team’s recommendations included reducing emissions from buildings by 50 per cent by 2030, establishing a new zero-emission vehicle standard, cutting methane emissions from the natural gas sector by 40 per cent in the next five years and increasing the carbon tax by $10 per tonne per year.

Image: Christy Clark attends an LNG rally in Fort St. John/Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Christy Clark’s Hand-Picked Climate Team Voices Frustration at B.C.’s Lack of Climate Leadership in Open Letter

Carol Linnitt — Tue, 17 May 2016 18:33:49 +0000

Seven members of Christy Clark’s hand-picked, blue-ribbon Climate Leadership Team are going public with their disappointment in the province’s lack of climate action in an open letter released Monday.

Signatories include noted environmental leader Tzeporah Berman, hereditary chief of the Squamish Nation, Chief Ian Campbell, professor of oceanography at the University of Victoria, Tom Pederson, B.C. associate director of the Pembina Institute, Matt Horne, Cayoose Creek Band chief, Michelle Edwards, professor Nancy Olewiler and executive director of Clean Energy Canada, Merran Smith.

The letter, addressed to Clark, states B.C. is in no position to shrug off the 32 recommendations made by the team last November in advance of the UN Paris Climate Talks. At the talks, Clark used the Climate Leadership Team’s work to bolster the province’s environmental credibility.

But the team itself is saying the B.C. Liberals have failed to implement the recommendations made by the group of experts. B.C has consistently pushed back the release date of a provincial climate plan.

The province, once an international leader in carbon pricing, has stalled action on climate by imposing a restriction on carbon pricing, creating loopholes for large industrial emitters and agressively advancing the creation of an LNG export industry. Compared to provinces like Ontario, which just announced $7 billion in funding for an ambitious climate plan, and Alberta, which announced an ambitious plan to phase out all coal-fired power plants last fall, B.C. is quickly falling behind.

Between 2011 and 2013, B.C.'s emissions climbed by 1.7 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. That's the same as adding 440,000 cars to B.C. roads, according to Clean Energy Canada. According to Canada’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change t hose emissions are forecast to grow by 32 per cent between 2013 and 2030.

“B.C. can’t be a climate leader if carbon pollution is rising,” the letter states.

Read the full text of the letter here:

Dear Premier,

One year ago, you asked us to serve on the Climate Leadership Team and provide your government with advice on how to advance B.C.’s climate change plan. The motivation for the new plan was clear: while B.C. had been a leader on developing climate policy in Canada, and in fact around the world, the province’s carbon pollution was rising and stronger policy would be needed to get the province on track to meet our legislated emissions reduction targets.

You asked us for recommendations that would enable the province to meet its 2020 and 2050 climate targets, maintain a strong economy, and provide support to the British Columbians most in need. You asked us to reach consensus across a group that included leaders from First Nations, business, academia, local government, the provincial government and environmental organizations.

The process we worked through last year was difficult, but it was also successful. We managed to deliver in six months. Our work resulted in 32 recommendations that we provided to your government last November. The package of recommendations represents a mix of innovative thinking and compromise that fulfills our mandate and respects the different perspectives represented on the team. The recommendations provide a blueprint to help get the province back on track for our climate targets, stimulate innovation, create jobs, protect B.C. businesses and support rural communities.

We advised your government to commit to the package of recommendations this year so that British Columbians and B.C. businesses have time to plan. This is particularly true of our recommendations to strengthen the carbon tax, which were central to the overall package. Committing to a next schedule of increases, closing gaps in its coverage and explaining how the revenue will be used will help reduce uncertainty, ease the transition to a low-carbon economy for emissions-intensive and trade-exposed sectors and families, and support investments in clean energy across the province.

The reasons to move forward with this plan are stronger than ever. Climate change threatens our economy, our communities and our environment. To confront those threats, we need to increase our efforts to reduce fossil fuel use and better prepare ourselves for a changing climate. And as the world increasingly begins to act, the demand for clean energy is accelerating. The actions we take to increasingly shift to clean energy in the province will also help position B.C. businesses to provide the solutions the world needs.

We want to see the province reach its climate targets; delay only increases the costs and makes it harder to succeed. We are thus concerned about the shifts in deadlines. You initially committed to having a draft plan in advance of the Paris climate talks last December and a final plan by this March. The draft plan was cancelled and the deadline for the final plan was pushed to June.

B.C. is in no position to delay or scale back its efforts. The rest of Canada and the rest of the world have been taking action since B.C.’s initial climate plan in 2008, and B.C.’s increasing carbon pollution is taking us in the wrong direction.

B.C. can’t be a climate leader if its carbon pollution is rising. As the federal government places a renewed emphasis on climate action, now is the time for B.C. to be articulating its next steps. The new federal-provincial relationship on climate change will be defined by the jurisdictions taking actions to significantly reduce their carbon pollution and B.C. should be among them.

The Climate Leadership Team recommendations, implemented in their entirety, provide the blueprint for a B.C. climate plan to put the province back on track for the 2050 and interim 2030 targets.

Anything less is not climate leadership.

Sincerely,

Chief Ian Campbell, hereditary chief, Squamish Nation Chief Michelle Edwards, Cayoose Creek Band Tom Pedersen, professor of oceanography, University of Victoria Matt Horne, B.C. associate director, Pembina Institute Merran Smith, executive director, Clean Energy Canada Tzeporah Berman, adjunct professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University Nancy Olewiler, professor, School of Public Policy, Simon Fraser University

CC:

Honourable Catherine McKenna, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Honourable James Carr, Minister of Natural Resources Mr. Jonathan Wilkinson, Parliamentary Secretary Honourable Mary Polak, Minister of Environment Honourable Bill Bennett, Minister of Energy and Mines Honourable Shirley Bond, Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training Honourable Rich Coleman, Minister of Natural Gas Development Honourable Mike de Jong, Minister of Finance Honourable Peter Fassbender, Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development Honourable Todd Stone, Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Mr. Jordan Sturdy, Parliamentary Secretary

Image: Province of B.C.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The Narwhal | News on Climate Change, Environmental Issues in Canada

B.C.’s First LNG Plant Gets Investment Green Light

On LNG, B.C. Manages to Out-Trump Even Donald Trump

Taxpayers Subsidize Slim Odds LNG Gamble

Bearing Great Risk for Puny Reward

Fraudulent Claims that LNG Fixes Climate Change

More Wounds to B.C.’s Land and Water

Top 5 Questions Christy Clark is Dodging by Cancelling the Fall Sitting

1) What the @#$& is B.C. actually doing on climate change?

2) LNG Industry. What LNG Industry?

3) What’s the Province’s Stance on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline?

4) What the Heck is Happening with the Site C Dam?

5) When Will B.C. Ban Corporate Donations?

Hydro Reservoirs Produce Way More Emissions Than We Thought: Study

B.C. Climate Change Audit Won’t Be Released Until After Election: Auditor General

Rejecting B.C.’s Carbon Pollution Subsidy Plan: Martyn Brown

The Ludicrous Foundation of B.C.’s Climate Avoidance Plan

Revisiting the B.C. Liberals’ LNG Subsidy Plan

Hidden Subsidy #1: A Potentially Lower Carbon Tax for “Trade-Exposed” Sectors

Hidden Subsidy #2: A Lower Sales Tax That Will Disproportionately Benefit Large Emitters

Hidden Subsidy #3: The Elimination of Sales Tax on Electricity for Industry

Hidden Subsidy #4: Risk-free, Cost-free Electrification for LNG Plants

Hidden Subsidy #5: A Five-year Minimal Carbon Tax Holiday for Process Emissions

Conclusion

An In-depth Look at Improving B.C.’s Carbon Tax: Martyn Brown

A Brief History of the Carbon Tax

The Politics of Carbon Pricing

What About Cap-and-Trade?

The Slippery Slope of Carbon Offsets

Towards a Fairer and More Effective Form of Carbon Pricing

Rethinking the “Revenue-Neutral” Carbon Tax

How B.C.’s Climate Plan is Being Co-opted by Big Oil: Martyn Brown

Mission Impossible

Rush to Increase Oil and Gas Development

A Defeatist Strategy

The High Cost of Low Standards

Taking Real Action on Climate Change by Putting Teeth in Toothless Targets

LNG Industry Could Make B.C. Canada’s Worst Actor on Climate

Christy Clark’s Hand-Picked Climate Team Voices Frustration at B.C.’s Lack of Climate Leadership in Open Letter