Tories feel the heat over climate

Allan Woods, January 15, 2009, Toronto Star -- Don't tell Canada's environment minister about "Hope" and "Change," the rallying cries of Barack Obama's election victory.

In the coming months, Jim Prentice must steer a complex proposal to essentially harmonize his government's much-criticized climate change plan with the one proposed by the Obama administration. The result will be a North American market for trading greenhouse gas emissions credits, giving companies the incentive to cut their carbon footprint.

To do that, Prentice will have to change considerably the Tories' environment blueprint and hope that the hoopla over Washington's re-engagement in the global warming fight will bring the Conservatives the breathing room they have been denied for the last three years.

"The election of Mr. Obama and the determination and the clarity with which he has spoken on climate change really is a fundamental change in terms of the situation," Prentice said Monday.

"I think it's fair to say that we are now in a position where the policy framework we're talking about as Canadians and the policy framework the new president has spoken about are very consistent."

Prentice believes Obama's America has come around to the Tory way of thinking on climate change.

But faced with a new U.S. administration that is stacked with climate change fundamentalists – people on a first-name basis with former vice-president Al Gore – it will be up to Ottawa to find religion.

The Obama team includes the likes of retired Marine Gen. James Jones, the proposed national security adviser, who touts the primacy of energy security and is well connected in Alberta's oil sands. But it appears more weighted with appointees like climate czar Carol Browner, who dubbed President George W. Bush's team "the worst environmental administration ever."

Obama's energy secretary nominee, Steven Chu, is a Nobel-prize winning physicist, a sign that science will regain supremacy over politics when it comes to issues such as climate change.

It's unlikely to have escaped the new administration's notice that Canada has been a Bush ally on climate change.

Watch for the Harper government's conversion to global warming orthodoxy that includes more stringent goals for cutting emissions, scrapping "intensity targets" – a measure that allows overall emissions to rise – long before the 2020 date it had planned, and signing on with some of the widely accepted standards that have left Canada isolated internationally.

Two previous environment ministers have spilled copious amounts of blood in the Commons defending such controversial policies.

"All of this is very technical but ... certainly a North American approach would have to start with reasonably consistent standards or targets, if you will," Prentice said. "Whether you talk about baselines or targets levels, there's a need to have a discussion about all of that."

One former official with a government agency said Canada is "going to be policy-takers on some of this stuff, but that does not mean that it does not serve our interests."

A North American pact to cut emissions could secure the U.S. as a destination for oil from Alberta's oil sands at a time when Congress is trying to cut reliance on what an Obama spokesperson once termed "dirty" oil, said John Drexhage of the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Ottawa.

"Many of the advisers on this issue to Obama have been quite critical and skeptical about the whole oil sands issue," he said, adding that it would be tough to imagine the U.S. shutting off the oil supply from both the Middle East and Alberta.

The biggest challenge for Prentice and the Tory government could be keeping pace with the change expected to grip the U.S. once Obama hits his stride on the environment.

Compare the scope and ambition of Washington and Ottawa's respective plans: Obama has promised $150 billion over 10 years to push the private sector toward clean technologies like solar and wind power and clean coal; the Conservatives pledged $700 million over three years in last year's budget to turn Canada, in its words, from an energy superpower to a "clean-energy superpower."

"The U.S. is going to lean on clean technology and they are about to make it an economic issue and a fiscal stimulus issue, and they are about to clean our clocks competitively in those sectors," said one Ottawa lobbyist.

There's also the challenge of corralling the provincial governments into a unified national position that could put most of the burden on oil producing regions. Already, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is complaining that he was blindsided by the Tory overture to Obama.

Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Manitoba, on the other hand, have already signed on to a cross-border cap-and-trade system with a number of U.S. states, and appear well-positioned for the proposed new pact.

Under the system, government sets a limit on carbon emissions as well as a cap for each major polluting industry. Industries below their cap can sell emission permits to those that exceed their limit.