Will Prime Minister Stephen Harper
speak some home truths to his fellow Albertans about energy and the environment? Chances are no, but we can always dream.
Albertans, without being conscious of the fact, are isolating themselves in Canada on climate change and, far more seriously, might well be isolating themselves in North America, while also heading toward the worst climate-change record in the industrialized world.
The serious candidates for the U.S. presidency - John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama - favour a national cap-and-trade system for carbon as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. States in the Northeast, Midwest and Far West are forming regional carbon trading markets. B.C. has joined the Western one - the Western Climate Initiative.
Whether by top-down congressional law or a widening of states' actions, the United States, circa 2011-12, will very likely have a cap-and-trade carbon market.
This will leave Canada, and especially Alberta, with one of those policy dilemmas. Should Canada form a national system and keep it separate from the U.S. one? (Could Canada even form a coherent one if Alberta somehow refused to join?) Or, should Canada seek to join the U.S. market while that country assembles a carbon trading market?
Alberta is an outlier at the moment, as in so many things related to greenhouse gas emissions. It produces more of them per capita than any other province. Its intended reductions are modest and very long-term.
The Stelmach government opposes any Canadian trading system because it fears the trading of credits would be done in Toronto and/or Montreal, so money would leech away from the province.
Events, however, would make these fears look silly when the United States, with or without Canada, conceives and executes a carbon-trading market. Firms in Alberta would then be constrained to selling only within the tiny confines of the province, a serious economic liability, because as every economist knows, the wider the market, the greater the chance of efficiency gains, and the greater the chance of profits.
So the head-in-the-sand, prickly defensiveness of the current Alberta government will do for the short-term purposes of the provincial election next Monday, and for a while thereafter, but not once the next U.S. president takes office.
Even more threatening are U.S. moves to prohibit the use of fuels from the tar sands if they continue to pollute the atmosphere so badly. (According to Statistics Canada, investment in the tar sands in 2008 will exceed that for manufacturing across Canada!) A ban on such fuels is being suggested in California, and recent legislation prohibited the use of oil from the tar sands in U.S. government vehicles, including military ones. Imagine the shock if these sorts of measures spread.
Oil executives and provincial Conservatives will scoff that the U.S. needs "our" oil and gas, and would therefore never shoot itself in the foot. That's a dangerous assumption under a new president with the kind of political climate growing in the U.S. around climate change.
The Stelmach government's policy statement on emissions calls for more emissions for some years to come and then a decline by 14 per cent from 2005 levels by 2050.
This effort would leave the province with the feeblest target and the worst record in the Western industrialized world. Britain, a big fossil-fuel producer, has given itself a target of a 60 per cent reduction - from 1990 levels! - by 2050, a target about five to six times more aggressive than Alberta's. Norway, another big fossil fuel producer, has a target at least as aggressive as Britain's.
Alberta now has two provincial allies in Canada: Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. But Alberta, if it doesn't change direction, risks being isolated within North America, at economic cost to itself, to say nothing of suffering damage to reputation - not from Ottawa but from the industrialized world.
Is that really what Albertans, who properly think of themselves as big achievers and big-sky dreamers, want for their province? Do they really want to be marginalized in Canada, isolated in North America, and pigeonholed internationally? Do they really want to risk economic retribution and damage to reputation?
A courageous Prime Minister from Alberta has a better platform than any other Canadian to speak home truths to his fellow citizens, to give them the big picture that their provincial government will not.
Don't hold your breath.Globe and Mail
