Month: August 2016

Sudbury Steve May: Will Federal Liberals Be Champions or Chumps on Carbon Pricing?

If you’re serious about wanting to take real, effective action on climate change, you’ve got to put a rapidly escalating price on carbon pollution.  That was the message speakers gave to Sudbury MP Paul Lefebvre earlier this month at his climate policy town hall.  With Catherine McKenna, the Federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change, expected to release a draft national climate change strategy later this fall, Members of Parliament across the nation have been engaged in public consultation all summer long (see: “Yellowknifers join Catherine McKenna to talk climate change,” CBC, July 12, 2016).  
If Minister McKenna wants her Liberal government to be taken seriously by Canadians clamouring for action on climate change, she’ll have to ignore some provincial leaders like Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, and put a national price on carbon pollution.  But pricing carbon is the easy part. Determining how the carbon fee will be collected, and how the revenues used are the more difficult decisions the Liberals will need to make.


“To work, the price on carbon has to be high enough to change behaviour,” says Laurentian University Professor of Economics Dr. David Robinson, who gave a presentation to MP Lefebvre about the need to send clear and strong signals to consumers (see: “Why Ontario’s Climate Plan Has Already Failed,” Dr. David Robinson, Economics for Northern Ontario, June 19, 2016). “That means the [carbon] price is high enough to convince most people to stop using gasoline cars and stop using natural gas for heating.”

Robinson and others have suggested that an initial carbon price somewhere between $30 and $50 per tonne is an appropriate place to start.  To be effective, the price will need to rise to $100 to $150 per tonne by 2030. Right now, British Columbia has the highest carbon fee in the nation, at $30 per tonne, where it’s been stalled since 2012.  Alberta and Ontario’s climate plans call for an initial price of less than $20 per tonne, starting in 2017.


An effective climate change plan will require our government to convince the public that it’s serious about following through on escalating the price.  That means talking about how much more everything is going to cost consumers – and convincing voters that rising prices on goods and services are beneficial.  That hardly sounds like a winning political strategy.


Certainly, Ontario’s Liberal government was reluctant to go down that road. After hearing from the public about the need to put a transparent price on carbon, Premier Wynne and provincial Minister of Environment and Climate Change Glen Murray decided to use the most opaque method available for pricing carbon – a cap and trade scheme that exempts many of Ontario’s biggest emitters for several years.  Ontario’s plan hardly provides the right signals that the government is serious about the need to change consumer habits (see: “A Failure of Ambition: Ontario’s Climate Change Plan,” Sudbury Steve May, July 10, 2016).


Ontario and Alberta are going about carbon pricing the wrong way, treating it as a cash cow to fill government coffers.  Yes, the money collected from carbon fees is earmarked for new green infrastructure projects, like improving our public transit systems – but these are the sorts of investments that our governments should be making anyway, in the interests of our collective future economic prosperity, with existing tax dollars.


If elected officials like Lefebvre and McKenna are serious about climate change and want to champion the rapidly rising price on carbon needed to reduce emissions and incent alternative energy development, there is only one way to do it: give the lion’s share of revenue collected back to taxpayers in the form of a dividend cheque or an income tax reduction. The extra money in people’s pockets will help offset rising prices, and smart consumers will save money by selecting low-carbon options.


Canadians are looking for real leadership from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Let’s hope the federal Liberals choose to be climate champions, rather than climate chumps like their provincial cousins here in Ontario.

(opinions expressed in this blogpost are my own and should not be considered consistent with the policies and/or positions of the Green Parties of Canada and Ontario)

Originally published in the Sudbury Star as, “Will feds be champions or chumps on carbon pricing?” in print and online as “Sudbury column: champions or chumps on carbon pricing?” August 27, 2016. 

Continue reading

The Disaffected Lib: Lord Martin Says the Anthropocene Doesn’t Have to Be All Bad

He’s one of the best scientific minds Britain has produced in the postwar era. Lord Martin Rees (Baron Rees of Ludlow to the likes of you) has been Britain’s Astronomer Royal for the past 20 years, former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and past President of the Royal Society. In other words, he’s got a lot of cred.

Responding to the announcement that Earth has now entered a new geological epoch, the man-made Anthropocene, Rees has penned a commentary in The Guardian. His message is that all is not lost but it’s our choice.


Should we be optimistic or anxious? It’s surprising how little we can confidently predict – indeed, we can’t predict as far ahead as our forebears could. Our medieval ancestors thought the Earth was only a few thousand years old, and might only last another thousand. But they didn’t expect their children’s lives to be very different from theirs. They built cathedrals that wouldn’t be finished in their lifetime.

…Our time horizons, both past and future, now stretch billions of years, not just thousands. The sun will keep shining for about another 6bn years. But ironically we can’t forecast terrestrial trends with as much confidence as our ancestors could. Their lives and environment changed slowly from generation to generation. For us, technological change is so fast that scenarios quickly enter the realm of wild conjecture and science fiction.

…The darkest prognosis for the next millennium is that bio, cyber or environmental catastrophes could foreclose humanity’s immense potential, leaving a depleted biosphere. Darwinian selection would resume, perhaps leading, in some far-future geological era, to the re-emergence of intelligent beings. If this happens, or if there are aliens out there who actually visit and study the Earth, then, digging through the geological record (and applying archaeological techniques as well) they would uncover traces of a distinctive transient epoch, and ponder the all-too-brief flourishing of a species that failed in its stewardship of “spaceship Earth”.

But there is an optimistic option.

Human societies could navigate these threats, achieve a sustainable future, and inaugurate eras of post-human evolution even more marvellous than what’s led to us. The dawn of the Anthropocene epoch would then mark a one-off transformation from a natural world to one where humans jumpstart the transition to electronic (and potentially immortal) entities, that transcend our limitations and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth.

Even in a cosmic time-perspective, therefore, the 21st century is special. It marks our collective realisation that the Anthropocene has begun – and it’s a century when human actions will determine how long that epoch lasts.


So, what does all that mean? To me, he’s saying, “no more drunk driving.” We have to sober up, realize we alone are at the wheel, and start figuring out where we’re going and how we’ll get there. It’s the Anthropocene. We made it. On a geological time scale we made it in the briefest of instants. That doesn’t matter now. We’re here. It’s ours while it lasts and we get to decide how long what we have created will last or how quickly it will end.
The modes of organization that got us here have lost most of their utility and threaten our continuation. These modes – social, economic, geopolitical, industrial, environmental, the lot – need a major overhaul to reflect this new reality. We can’t afford the “game of chance” mentality of the past. That’s the worst bet of all.


Continue reading

Oilpatch to Solar Field: Alberta Oil and Gas Workforce Lines Up for Solar Training

oil and gas workers solar training

There just aren’t enough solar training centres in Alberta to keep up with demand from former oilpatch workers, according to Randall Benson, owner of Gridworks Energy Group, an Edmonton-based company that designs, supplies and installs solar panels.

Benson, who has worked in the solar industry since the year 2000, said Tweet: More training is needed to upgrade skills of #Alberta’s vastly underemployed oil & gas workforce http://bit.ly/2bwZGYj #ableg #cdnpolimore capacity is needed to upgrade the skills of the province’s vastly underemployed oil and gas workforce which has lost thousands of jobs in the wake of plummeting oil prices.

“We do a lot of training,” Benson told DeSmog Canada. “The interest in training is unbelievable, it’s gone up two or three fold just in the last couple of years. And it continues to grow.”

Benson, who said he’s had to turn people away from full classes, is currently considering opening up another training centre in Calgary to keep up with demand.

But as reports of overburdened solar training centres start to emerge, the biggest question — of who will employ all the newly trained workers — remains unanswered.

Continue reading