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Tag: climate change
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
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Jurisdictional wrangling is overshadowing concrete action on climate change as Alberta ramps up its assault on the federal plan to decarbonize the country’s electrical grid by 2035.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith invoked her sovereignty act this week, introducing a motion in the legislature that includes plenty of sabre rattling, threats to refuse implementation of federal regulations and the possibility of a new crown corporation to build new natural gas plants.
Smith argues her measures are necessary to keep the lights on and electricity affordable in the province.
Using the act is a warning to the feds to stay in their lane, says Smith. The Alberta government argues utilities are provincial jurisdiction under the constitution. The motion hints at a potential for a court challenge on the issue.
There was obviously a fair bit of government work going on behind the scenes in Alberta to produce this latest salvo in the province’s ongoing battle with the federal Liberals.
Wouldn’t it be grand if that energy went into the far more pressing fight against carbon emissions?
By rigidly setting a 2050 target, Smith is giving permission for the private sector, which currently generates the power in Alberta, to slow roll technology changes and transitions to carbon-neutral generating sources.
The government itself aided that drag on innovation by declaring a half-year moratorium on new solar and wind power projects.
The UCP sovereignty act is largely political theatre, meant to bolster Smith’s reputation as a battler for provincial rights. The federal regulations related to the 2035 grid target won’t be finalized until next year, so no court challenge can happen until then. And by 2035, the political scene in Canada, and perhaps in Alberta, is likely to have changed somewhat.
Alberta’s jurisdiction over utilities is just another front in the war with federal Liberals. Smith takes heart from two recent court decisions slapping down federal overreach on large resource project approvals and a ban on plastic straws as proof of her legal footing.
She fails to mention a Supreme Court decision in 2021 that is perhaps more relevant. In a 6-3 decision the court ruled the federal government’s carbon pricing regime is constitutional, partly because the threat of climate change demands a national approach.
Several provinces had argued that natural resources were in provincial jurisdiction.
In a similar vein, while utilities may be in the province’s purview, the carbon emissions to keep them running could arguably be a federal concern.
That said, it’s important for the federal government, and specifically Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, to recognize that Alberta has a far more difficult and expensive road to decarbonization than provinces which are blessed with emission-free hydropower resources. He continues to bluster that getting to net zero won’t be nearly as bad as Smith suggests, but concrete numbers and mitigating policies need to be put on the table immediately.
Immediacy, in fact, is the real imperative here. The Alberta government is so set on proving that its oil and gas industry has a future that it won’t articulate a plan that phases it out of the utility mix.
And that lack of leadership, so urgently needed as the climate clock clicks down, is sending a negative message to industry and entrepreneurs about the province’s willingness to embrace a net-zero future.
The day after the UCP invoked the Sovereignty Act, a government press release trumpeted that Alberta had reached its target for reducing methane emissions three years earlier than expected. Both levels of government are moving ahead with incentives for carbon capture and storage.
So there is real work being done behind the scenes, but is it meaningful enough or fast enough to make a dent in Alberta’s poor carbon emission record?
Smith’s rhetoric on utilities is clever. It’s pretty evocative to talk about Albertans freezing in the dark if the provincial grid fails mid-winter because the private sector backs off building more natural gas power plants.
But on the flip side Albertans need to contemplate the cost of those plants in global terms. Just as a reminder, the province has had a weirdly mild November, after a summer filled with forest fire smoke.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
The “Fire Information for Resource Management” online map for June 5, 2023 was provocative. At this point active wildfires larger than 1,000 acres were much bigger and more widespread in Canada than in the United States. (Two days later the smoke from wildfires in Canada — especially in Quebec — had drifted all the way to New York City — and other US centres in the northeast and midwest.)
It could be argued that this just reflects the extent to which there are still a lot more forests left to burn in Canada, with a destructive human population equivalent to only 11.5% of the 330 million destructive human beings in the USA today.
At the same time, on June 5, 2023 federal cabinet ministers updated Canada’s wildfire situation — as smoke from fires north and west of Ottawa covered the downtown “in a grey haze.”
The ministers urged that wildfires across the country are among “the most severe ever witnessed in Canada.” Forecasts suggest “higher-than-normal” activity” for the next few months. On the late afternoon of June 6 there were “415 active wildfires across the country” with 238 “considered out of control.”
According to the Forest Service of the US Department of Agriculture, over the past few decades: “Longer fire seasons; bigger fires and more acres burned … have become the norm.” Even so the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre in Winnipeg reports that 2023 in Canada is “definitely an unprecedented season … It started early and it accelerated very quickly.”
Constitutionally, provincial governments have responsibility for the “development, conservation and management of … forestry resources in the province.” Disasters like the Canadian wildfires of 2023, however, can soon enough outstrip resources even in large provinces.
Prime Minister Trudeau has so far dispatched Canadian Armed Forces troops to help fight wildfires in Alberta, Quebec, and Nova Scotia .
Federal officials suggest that: “About half of fires in Canada” are started by lightning. Yet they must equally be fought by non-destructive human fire fighters (including much valued help from other countries with different fire seasons — and American good neighbours next door).
Some Canadian Armed Forces officers stress that their troops are not trained to fight forest fires, and this may not be a wise use of military personnel. Other observers have proposed an independent federal fire-fighting service.
The federal government itself is reported to be “studying options for creating a new national disaster response agency” — that would deal with wildfires and all other natural disasters.
According to The Canadian Press: “discussions on a new approach are already well underway and include analyzing the merits of creating a Canadian version of the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] in the United States.”
Meanwhile, freshly elected Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has remarked that federal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proved “very helpful” in dealing with wildfires in her province.
In the wake of her recent election victory she has also raised her longstanding objections to the kind of federal climate change policy that could ultimately reduce wildfires.
The rhetoric is that almost any such policy will thwart the continued development of a key current branch of the traditional Canadian resource economy. And in the real world Alberta’s (and Saskatchewan’s) oil and gas sector still does bring important strengths to the larger Canadian economy.
Yet as Don Martin at CTV News recently urged about federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s attack on an “expensive” Liberal carbon tax : “While the carbon tax could be a defining issue in the next election, his timing sucks. To focus on it with wildfires caused by climate change ravaging the country and Ottawa choking on smoke? Sorry, no.”
At the same time again, just before the Alberta election Premier Smith was talking about a “reset” and “more collaboration” with the Trudeau government in Ottawa. She has proposed such things before, and there are deep grounds for scepticism.
To see Justin Trudeau and Danielle Smith together in public is to similarly see an unusually odd couple. Yet they arguably both have strong political self-interests in some kind of new deal on the environment and the economy.
In the very end, they just may be odd enough to somehow combine a climate change policy that leads to less severe wildfires with a bright future for the western energy sectors in the traditional Canadian resource economy.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
