All we had were questions. Now we have answers. The answers aren't pretty.
A major bank has paid two environmental organizations to produce a groundbreaking report that, for the first time, calculates the costs of both the Harper government's modest plans to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and the much more ambitious targets set by the environmental community, nationally and regionally.
The conclusion: Canada can still meet a 2020 target to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions below 1990 levels while preserving some economic growth through the next decade.
But to meet that target, the federal government must act immediately. The impact of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions will be deeply disruptive to the economy. It will be very expensive. And Alberta, especially, will suffer.
“It will be the biggest fiscal shock in Canadian history,” observes TD chief economist Don Drummond. “But the study shows it can be done.”
The question is whether Canadians are willing to bear these burdens, in the cause of preventing a potential environmental catastrophe, whether our leaders are willing to pay the political price of acting in the planet's best interests.
But no one now can hide behind bafflegab and rhetoric. The stark truth confronts us. Fighting global warming will cost us. A lot.
The Toronto-Dominion Bank provided funding to the David Suzuki Foundation and environmental research group the Pembina Institute, which in turn brought in the respected economic modelling firm of M.K. Jaccard and Associates, to create a rigorous and unbiased assessment of what Canada will look like in 2020 if (a) it adopts the Harper government's plan to reduce emissions 3 per cent below 1990 levels or (b) adopts the much more ambitious goal of 25 per cent below 1990 levels, which environmentalists and many scientists say is essential to prevent the worst impacts of rising temperatures.
To get there, Canada will have to turn itself into an environmental Elysium, and do it practically overnight. To meet any 2020 target, the report concludes, the federal and provincial governments must immediately impose sweeping and powerful legislation.
A new system that caps and then lowers industrial emissions, forcing industries to purchase credits to offset anything they emit above that cap, would have to be up and running by 2011, which is probably politically impossible.
All new residential construction would have to be 50 per cent more energy efficient than the average new home today. All motor vehicles would have to meet the strict new fuel-efficiency standards that will come into effect in California in 2012. All home appliances would have to be as energy efficient as the most efficient ones today. All homes and offices constructed in British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec would have to be heated electrically. There would be much else besides.
Even in this extremely energy-frugal world, and in pursuit of the most modest Harper-government targets, there would be an enormous gap between target and actual performance. To close that gap, by 2020 Canada would annually be purchasing somewhere between $2-billion and $6-billion of offshore carbon credits a year, depending on whether the rest of the developed world enacts similar measures.
To meet the environmentalists' goal, the cost would be $8-billion. And in the environmentalists' case that assumes that new methods – which haven't been invented yet – would be capturing and storing much of the carbon generated by energy-producing industries, including new production from the oil sands.
