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Opinion: Governments need to work together to phase in green energy production

For Saskatchewan and Alberta, would not a long-term phased strategy of conversion to green make more sense?

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I read the opinion on June 27 by the professor emeritus in environmental studies from the University of Regina, and would like to provide some context that was lacking in the opinion promoted. I would also like to point out the current folly of the latest “urgent” nature of the climate change debate, and the ability of Canada to effect any substantive change.

What is the identified problem? The temperature of the planet is getting warmer, and apparently quicker than previously thought. The relatively new science of climatology and its more recent variations of computer modelling have decided by “consensus” that human production of CO2 is the major factor.

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So be it.

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On a planetary scale and across all levels of government and nation states, where is the biggest bang for the buck? Will Canada meeting its Kyoto or Paris accord targets have any real impact on climate change? Absolutely no chance!

This is what the EU Science and Technical Report 2018 has to say. Canada produces 617 megatons of fossil CO2 per year (2017). This has increased by 35 per cent since 1990 and amounts to 1.66 per cent of global emissions. The EU produces 3,548 megatons of CO2 per year and has shown a decline of 20 per cent since 1990. By all determinants, an excellent result. The USA produces 5,107 megatons of fossil CO2 per year and has shown a very slight increase of only 3.8 per cent since 1990. Again, a very good result. Together, the USA and the EU produce about 23 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions.

China now produces 10,877 megatons of fossil CO2 per year, which is 29.3 per cent of the world fossil CO2 emissions, and has shown a whopping, almost five-fold increase since 1990. India produces 2,455 megatons of fossil CO2 per year at 6.6 per cent of world emissions, with a huge, four-fold increase since 1990. In fact, all the developing nations worldwide have shown a massive acceleration in CO2 emissions since 1990, and account for most new fossil CO2 emissions since 1990. This is the often-repeated hockey stick acceleration on the graph of CO2 emissions so aptly noted by Al Gore in the production of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006.

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Saskatchewan and Alberta together produce about half of all of Canada’s CO2 emissions. This amounts to a fraction of one per cent of worldwide emissions and includes all the coal-fired electric plants, agribusiness and carbon-emission-intensive production of bitumen. This is the realty of those two prairie provinces.

Why? Because these two provinces produce energy and food for the rest of the world and do not have the benefits of cheap and readily available hydro-electric power. Hydroelectricity sources by province include Manitoba at 97 per cent, Quebec at 95 per cent, BC at 90 per cent, and down at the bottom of the list is Saskatchewan at 13 per cent and Alberta at three per cent.

This is one of the reasons why cap and trade or carbon pricing will work in a province like B.C., where you are trying to change the behaviour of only 10 per cent of fossil CO2 electric emitters and have a decidedly larger population of already “green “committed to work on residential and transportation. Won’t work in Alberta, where electricity from fossil fuels is 97 per cent of its generation and remains the largest producer of provincial CO2 emissions.

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Successive federal governments have punished these two provinces by including multiple categories of non-renewable resource income in the equalization formula and completely excluding hydroelectric income from the formula. The carbon tax is a double whammy on these provinces, which are already penalized under the equalization formula just because of their natural terrain and types of resources available.

Whatever happened to co-operative federalism? Would the James Bay or Great Whale hydroelectric development in Quebec — with its massive implications for the environment, green energy production, Quebec government revenues and with the co-operation of First Nations — have ever been achieved in today’s dog eat dog/best sound bite environment?

We all agree that renewable energy in the form of green electricity is the direction needed. In all forms — residential, industrial, transportation and commercial.

But recognizing the realities of these two land-locked provinces and the minuscule impact these two provinces have on the world’s carbon emissions, and the dependence their economies have on non-renewable at this time, would not a long-term, phased strategy of conversion to green make more sense? Co-operation of the federal and neighbouring provincial governments in both modular nuclear, wind, solar and hydroelectric production, and sharing of green electricity through improved electric tie grids, is much more likely to produce broad acceptance by the public and not damage these sensitive provincial economies.

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As for the economies of the world, all developing and mature nation states still crave oil and natural gas, and will get it from whomever they can at the best price. Canadian non-renewable production should be encouraged and utilized by all Canadians, in parallel with the ongoing implementation of a fully green Canadian economy. At the same time, the western governments should work in unison in managing their emissions programs and in doing whatever they can to decrease the massive rise in fossil CO2 emissions in China and India, and in the least-developed nations by promoting green electric production in these countries through all diplomatic and economic means possible.

Dr. Jim Melenchuk is a former Saskatchewan education and finance minister and holds degrees in biology, psychology and medicine.

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