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PrintOttawa should follow B.C.'s approach on green economy
Conservatives guilty of 'cognitive dissidence' by pretending that environmentally-friendly policies would destroy economy, says top economist Jaccard
The policy tools and technology needed for Canada to transition to a green economy already exist, what is missing is the political will to use them, says one of the country's top environmental economists.
Mark Jaccard, a professor of environmental economics at Simon Fraser University who has advised British Columbia's provincial government, said B.C. currently has many of the policies in place needed to facilitate the shift to a green economy, and yet the Conservative federal government continues to ignore it and successful examples in other jurisdictions.
"It's no longer possible to say a cap and trade is too complicated, the Europeans have had it for six years. Or that a carbon tax will hurt your economy, the Scandinavians have had it for 20 years and have outperformed us economically while their emissions went down," said Prof. Jaccard, who is the lead author of the Global Energy Assessment, an international effort seeking to redefine the global energy policy agenda. "It's starting to get ludicrous. It's like somehow our Conservative federal government has been able to convince people that this is all really difficult and impossible and it's getting harder and harder for them to sell that. ... It's starting to get really crazy in terms of cognitive dissidence."
He said the first thing Ottawa needs to do is put a price on carbon, which B.C. has already done through a carbon tax that adds 4.45 cents per litre to the price of gasoline, and 5.11 cents per litre on diesel fuel. Prof. Jaccard said if a national carbon tax was high enough than it would be sufficient to change consumer behaviour and encourage technological innovation, but that would likely be too difficult politically and so a more feasible approach would be pairing the tax with other policy tools, such as a cap-and-trade system.
Most of the revenue generated by B.C.'s carbon tax was used to lower income and corporate taxes, but Prof. Jaccard said an alternate approach would be using some of that money to make necessary public investments that would be too large for private companies to undertake, such as updating the energy grid to make it more amenable to integrating zero emission electricity, and investing in green transit systems.
Another step B.C. has taken, which Prof. Jaccard said is definitely worth emulating at the national level, is decreeing that all new energy generation projects must not emit any greenhouse gas emissions.
Finding enough clean, renewable energy to satisfy Canada's steadily rising demand has been labeled an overpriced and unreliable pipedream by some skeptics. But many studies, including a paper published by Jacobson and Delucci in Science magazine last November, outline a clear path to a 100 per cent renewable energy future by 2030 using only wind, water, solar, and geothermal sources.
The report approaches the issue using technologies that are currently commercialized, and shows that the price of energy from many renewables is competitive with traditional energy sources, and will become even more competitive as they scale up production towards 2020. The authors explain that eliminating energy subsidies from fossil fuels, which the International Energy Agency currently pegs at more than $300-billion per year, would reduce price distortions in the market that artificially depress fossil fuel costs, making renewables even more cost-competitive. Reorienting these subsidies towards renewable energy deployment would accelerate their uptake dramatically.
But creating a green economy in Canada is about more than just energy and bringing down GHG emissions, said Prof. Jaccard, and the other major piece of puzzle is putting in place "cradle to grave" regulations on industry, whereby producers would be held accountable for the waste resulting from their products.
"Green economy is a lot more than just lowering emissions. It has to do with material flows, energy flows, and how much nature is preserved," he said.
Prof. Jaccard said businesses already must follow a lot of regulations, and therefore he doesn't believe that the policies necessary for a green economy would be overly onerous.
"What we really need are what we call closed-cycle [regulations], where if I'm making a car or a cell phone I have to make sure that somehow I recover that material, or the material is biodegradable. ... We basically have to change the rules that business community faces. It's not going to happen by people being green consumers, or volunteerism."
hmacleod@hilltimes.com
The Hill Times
What would it take to green Canada's economy?
The Gigaton Throwdown Initiative Team, a group comprised of investors, entrepreneurs, and executives, who teamed up with leading academics, has spent the past 18 months evaluating what it would take to scale up clean energy aggressively so that it has a major impact on job growth, energy independence, and climate change during the next 10 years.
Ottawa should follow B.C.'s approach on green economy
Conservatives guilty of 'cognitive dissidence' by pretending that environmentally-friendly policies would destroy economy, says top economist Jaccard
The policy tools and technology needed for Canada to transition to a green economy already exist, what is missing is the political will to use them, says one of the country's top environmental economists.
Mark Jaccard, a professor of environmental economics at Simon Fraser University who has advised British Columbia's provincial government, said B.C. currently has many of the policies in place needed to facilitate the shift to a green economy, and yet the Conservative federal government continues to ignore it and successful examples in other jurisdictions.
"It's no longer possible to say a cap and trade is too complicated, the Europeans have had it for six years. Or that a carbon tax will hurt your economy, the Scandinavians have had it for 20 years and have outperformed us economically while their emissions went down," said Prof. Jaccard, who is the lead author of the Global Energy Assessment, an international effort seeking to redefine the global energy policy agenda. "It's starting to get ludicrous. It's like somehow our Conservative federal government has been able to convince people that this is all really difficult and impossible and it's getting harder and harder for them to sell that. ... It's starting to get really crazy in terms of cognitive dissidence."
He said the first thing Ottawa needs to do is put a price on carbon, which B.C. has already done through a carbon tax that adds 4.45 cents per litre to the price of gasoline, and 5.11 cents per litre on diesel fuel. Prof. Jaccard said if a national carbon tax was high enough than it would be sufficient to change consumer behaviour and encourage technological innovation, but that would likely be too difficult politically and so a more feasible approach would be pairing the tax with other policy tools, such as a cap-and-trade system.
Most of the revenue generated by B.C.'s carbon tax was used to lower income and corporate taxes, but Prof. Jaccard said an alternate approach would be using some of that money to make necessary public investments that would be too large for private companies to undertake, such as updating the energy grid to make it more amenable to integrating zero emission electricity, and investing in green transit systems.
Another step B.C. has taken, which Prof. Jaccard said is definitely worth emulating at the national level, is decreeing that all new energy generation projects must not emit any greenhouse gas emissions.
Finding enough clean, renewable energy to satisfy Canada's steadily rising demand has been labeled an overpriced and unreliable pipedream by some skeptics. But many studies, including a paper published by Jacobson and Delucci in Science magazine last November, outline a clear path to a 100 per cent renewable energy future by 2030 using only wind, water, solar, and geothermal sources.
The report approaches the issue using technologies that are currently commercialized, and shows that the price of energy from many renewables is competitive with traditional energy sources, and will become even more competitive as they scale up production towards 2020. The authors explain that eliminating energy subsidies from fossil fuels, which the International Energy Agency currently pegs at more than $300-billion per year, would reduce price distortions in the market that artificially depress fossil fuel costs, making renewables even more cost-competitive. Reorienting these subsidies towards renewable energy deployment would accelerate their uptake dramatically.
But creating a green economy in Canada is about more than just energy and bringing down GHG emissions, said Prof. Jaccard, and the other major piece of puzzle is putting in place "cradle to grave" regulations on industry, whereby producers would be held accountable for the waste resulting from their products.
"Green economy is a lot more than just lowering emissions. It has to do with material flows, energy flows, and how much nature is preserved," he said.
Prof. Jaccard said businesses already must follow a lot of regulations, and therefore he doesn't believe that the policies necessary for a green economy would be overly onerous.
"What we really need are what we call closed-cycle [regulations], where if I'm making a car or a cell phone I have to make sure that somehow I recover that material, or the material is biodegradable. ... We basically have to change the rules that business community faces. It's not going to happen by people being green consumers, or volunteerism."
hmacleod@hilltimes.com
The Hill Times
What would it take to green Canada's economy?
The Gigaton Throwdown Initiative Team, a group comprised of investors, entrepreneurs, and executives, who teamed up with leading academics, has spent the past 18 months evaluating what it would take to scale up clean energy aggressively so that it has a major impact on job growth, energy independence, and climate change during the next 10 years.
Here's what they found:
1. The clean energy sector is growing rapidly but could grow significantly faster and sustain this growth for decades.
2. An aggressive scale-up is needed for clean energy technologies to fulfill the promise of economic and job growth, energy security and independence, and solutions to the climate problem.
3. Clean energy technologies could add five million direct jobs to the global economy, strengthen energy ecurity by reducing dependence on foreign oil, and abate more than the total carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions currently projected to be necessary for 2020 climate stabilization goals.
4. Immediate, stable policies and increased investment are needed to support the necessary, aggressive scale up in clean energy. Annual private investment must grow by more than 3X in the next 10 years to scale up renewable energy technologies to meet climate stabilization goals. This level of growth is feasible, but policy action is needed immediately to support it.
5. Sound, stable policy is needed to guide investment:
• The supply chains for clean energy technology take years to ramp up capacity and require clear policy signals to attract investment today.
• Past experience shows that investment in efficiency—the cheapest form of energy savings requires policy action.
• Stable policy that establishes a meaningful price on carbon is the single most important action that will encourage investment across the clean energy sector and ensure that capital flows to the most cost-effective technologies. Although clean energy is already providing solutions and attracting significant investment—private investment totaled more than $450-billion during the past five years with $135-billion invested in 2008—a large amount of private capital remains on the sidelines or is currently diverted to supply fossil fuel energy.
—Source: The Gigaton Throwdown
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