No leak here

I have no special line to Liberal environment critic David McGuinty, so I haven’t seen the supposedly leaked remarks for Environment Minister John Baird introducing heavy-industry emissions targets.

but…

The Conservative government’s new climate change plan calls for greenhouse gas emissions to be slashed by 20 per cent below current levels by 2020, Environment Minister John Baird said in an opinion piece published Wednesday in CanWest Newspapers.

The goal still puts Canada 11 per cent above its international obligation under the Kyoto protocol on climate change, but in his opinion article, Baird blames the previous Liberal government for putting that target out of reach.

First glance: not good enough. No moral leadership or prospect for economic/technological leadership, either.

B.C. signs on to cap-and-trade

British Columbia today signed onto a regional agreement with five western U.S. states to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions using a cap-and-trade system.

The news release on the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative is here. The short (at this point) Canadian Press wire story is here.

The memorandum of understanding among Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, and now B.C. is here in PDF form (it’s actually a PDF of a what appears to be a scan of a fax, which is a strange way to present a government document, suggesting this was done in a hurry). The key promises are:

• Setting an overall regional goal, by August of this year, to reduce emissions from the states and province involved collectively, consistent with state-by-state goals. B.C. has promised to cut its emissions to 10 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 (the Kyoto Accord calls for cutting them to 6 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008), so B.C.’s goals are, overall, less ambitious than Kyoto but a lot more ambitious than any other part of Canada’s.
• Developing, by August 2008, some sort of cap-and-trade system for achieving the overall regional emissions-reduction goal.
• Setting up a registry to enable tracking, management and crediting for entities that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

This is a very big deal, with subnational jurisdictions simply sidelining their national governments to do an international deal in an area where the Canadian and U.S. governments have simply refused to move.

If you believe that emissions-trading markets are the best system we have available for rewarding greenhouse-gas cuts and punishing profligacy (as I do, with some reservations and openness to persuasion otherwise), a wider market can only be a good thing, for the same reason that free trade and efficient capital markets are. It offers would-be emissions-cutters access to more capital to fund their improvements and gives them access to more expertise. It should increase the value of the credits created by cutters (increasing the punishment for laggards).

Also, in the interests of the planet, it lets carbon-credit investors across all the jurisdictions involved access to the lowest-hanging fruit — the quickest and cheapest options for reducing emissions, which are what we’re all trying to find.

Of course, the low-hanging fruit doesn’t last forever, and if these cap-and-trade markets “take,” jurisdictions that don’t join early will find they’ve harmed their own interests, exactly as if they’d decided not to let companies within their boundaries sell shares on an exchange, while other states and provinces steamed ahead.

Ontario has mused about joining the WRCA, too; consider the pressure cranked up.

Biofuel prospects in oil-rich Alberta

The Edmonton Journal‘s Hanneke Brooymans is writing an excellent series on the prospects for biofuels in Alberta. Brooymans is a longtime environment reporter and her expertise shows.

Part One is a survey of the ethanol and biodiesel scene today.

Alberta took a big step towards a biofuels future last October when it announced a $239-million bioenergy program.
It was taking a cue from the federal government, which had announced the previous May its intention to legislate the blending of ethanol into the gasoline we pump into our vehicles.
Ottawa backed this up in March by budgeting $2 billion over the next seven years to promote investment in renewable fuels. Though the federal ethanol mandate is not yet law, it’s coming, and many provincial governments are acting to ensure their voters don’t miss out on a guaranteed market.
Provinces like Saskatchewan, with three ethanol plants, and Ontario, with 10 ethanol plants either operating or under construction, have proved that when it comes to producing fuel from crops, initiative matters more than the plain dumb luck associated with petroleum deposits.
Figuring out the formula to attract these plants is becoming crucial, as federal and provincial cash pours into the industry, allowing companies to pick and choose where to locate.

Part Two takes a suitably skeptical look at the environmental impact of biofuels.

All told, the federal mandate of five per cent ethanol in gasoline blends by 2010 should reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by about three million tonnes a year, said [mechanical engineer and biofuel efficiency analyst Don] O’Connor, who finds this objective worthwhile. (In 2004, all the vehicles, trucks, motorcycles and off-road vehicles that consume gasoline in Canada emitted about 98 million tonnes of the gases.)
“The challenge with the transportation sector is finding anything that works to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” O’Connor said.
When you look at all other options, there isn’t much low-hanging fruit, he said. There are other fuels that would produce lower greenhouse-gas emissions, but you’d need to buy a redesigned car at the same time. “The nice thing about biofuels, whether it’s ethanol or biodiesel, is you can blend them into the existing fuels and use them in every single car that’s on the road today.”
Dale said carbon dioxide is not the most worrisome greenhouse gas generated in biofuel production.
Nitrous oxide, for example, is about 300 times more potent than CO2. Nitrous oxide is produced naturally in the soil by micro-organisms that are very sensitive to how the land is farmed. So it matters, for example, how much fertilizer farmers use to grow their grains for ethanol, he said.

Part Three examines the economics of biofuels for individual farmers (and tells the particularly interesting stories of canola farmers who power their equipment with canola oil they process themselves).

[Farmer Ken] Herlinveaux estimates it costs about 13 to 15 cents a litre to make the canola oil fuel, if they use low-grade canola. Regular diesel costs about 67 cents per litre for farmers. For someone who uses up to 12,000 litres of fuel a year, that’s a big saving.
Herlinveaux used to make biodiesel with his canola oil, but found his machinery will run just as well on straight canola oil.
While this biofuel literally helps Herlinveaux run his farm, canola growers would like to see the federal government do something that would help them all — adjust the mandate for a higher concentration of renewable fuel in diesel.
“We’d like to see a gradual increase in the mandate levels,” said Tyler Bjornson, vice-president corporate affairs, Canola Council of Canada. The council feels confident growers could meet a mandate of two per cent biodiesel by 2010 and five per cent by 2015, he said.

It’s not clear whether the series is finished with Part Three, which ran today. If not, I’ll point to Part Four tomorrow.

Subsidizing sprawl

That government subsidies meant to attract large employers also appear to contribute to sprawl should come as no great surprise. If you’re looking for a place to put your business and a critical feature is that the place be cheap, you’re going to want land that’s as inexpensive as possible, architecture that’s as inexpensive as possible (what’s cheaper than a one- or two-storey building with concrete tilt-up walls?), and a bare minimum of amenities for your employees and their community (a couple of acres of surface parking should just about do it. Of course you’re going to locate as far as you can from an urban core.

Here’s Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group:

Of 86 subsidized corporate relocations in Minnesota between 1999 and 2003, involving 8,200 jobs and more than $90 million in government payouts, four-fifths were outbound from the Minneapolis-St. Paul urban core. People of color and transit-dependent workers lost out; more affluent, less racially diverse areas gained, registering increases in jobs that were five times that of the central cities.

The map of subsidized job shifts in the Twin Cities area, says Greg LeRoy, Good Jobs First’s founder-leader, resembles an “evacuation plan.”

Good Jobs First, which provided Peirce with his data, is on an excellent campaign to tie subsidies like this to requirements that companies receiving subsidies like free land or buildings or waived development charges locate their operations near transit or on brownfields or in troubled but inhabited districts.

As they point out, there’s absolutely no point giving a company a one-shot subsidy to move into your town if its arrival puts permanent pressure on your infrastructure that eats up any financial benefit it delivers.

In many cities, it’s a dirty secret that growth doesn’t pay for itself even if it’s not subsidized. So why on earth would a thoughtful government use taxpayers’ money to make things even worse?

(Via Planetizen.)