Mark Jaccard and Chris Ragan: This time, let’s set climate targets — and achieve them too
Credit to Author: Stephen Snelgrove| Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2019 01:00:17 +0000
Last week, Greta Thunberg forcefully called out governments for their “empty words” on climate change. She has a point. Here in Canada, we have an unfortunate history of setting ambitious climate targets — and failing to achieve them.
What then should we make of the federal Liberal party’s commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050? After all, while new policies are bending our emissions trajectory downward, we are not yet on track to achieve our 2030 target, let alone deep reductions by 2050. Is this another empty promise?
Or perhaps this time is different — if we can build on the progress we’ve already made.
For the first time, Canada has multiple policy tools in place that reduce emissions. We can debate which of these is best. But we can agree that taking these tools off the table is a sure path to failure.
Under the Pan-Canadian Framework, every province in Canada faces either a federal or provincial carbon price. Carbon pricing makes producing greenhouse gas emissions more expensive, and thereby creates incentive to look for alternatives.
Carbon pricing works. In the short-term, people and business might make small changes in their driving and heating habits. In the medium-term, they might choose more efficient or electric equipment. And in the long-term, carbon pricing will drive innovations that reduce more emissions at lower costs.
Carbon pricing isn’t an “all-or-nothing” proposition. Even a relatively small carbon price in B.C. reduced emissions by five to 15 per cent from where they would have been. Do we need a higher carbon price to get deep emissions reductions? Absolutely. The next step is to steadily and predictably increase the price. In other words, we need to increase the stringency.
On the other hand, regulations also have a clear record of success. Phasing out coal-fired electricity, for example, has reduced more GHG emissions in Canada than any other single policy. Federal and provincial regulations for oil and gas will significantly reduce methane emissions by 2030.
Moving forward, the federal Clean Fuel Standard (CFS) represents one of the biggest opportunities to use regulations to drive deep emissions reductions. The regulation requires that an increasing share of fuels be cleaner. And critically, it is a flexible regulation. It gives businesses options for how they comply with the policy. That flexibility gives the CFS much better “bang for buck” than less-flexible regulations.
Again, the details matter. A more ambitious CFS drives deeper reductions. And a more flexible CFS reduces costs. If Canada is to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 through regulations, we must increase the stringency of policies like the CFS.
We have each advocated strongly for one of these approaches. Carbon pricing has the advantages of simplicity and of minimizing costs to the economy. Smart regulations can come close to this economic performance if designed and implemented well, but also may be less polarizing.
The difference between flexible regulations and carbon pricing may be more important to policy wonks than to Canadians and the climate. Both can drive significant emissions reductions. Both can do so at modest costs. And both are currently in place in Canada.
The impacts of a changing climate — from forests fires to heat waves to floods — are getting worse and are making life harder for Canadians. A commitment to achieve deep emissions reductions by 2050 in Canada is consistent with the scale of the threat. Other countries, states, cities, and even corporations are taking on the same goal.
The question now is how to deliver. We already have the policies. Now we must increase their ambition: increasing the stringency of regulations, the price of carbon, or both.
The alternative is more empty words.
Mark Jaccard is director at the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University; Chris Ragan is the director the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.
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