Analysts respond to green throne speech

Premier Gordon Campbell's green throne speech and greened-up image has left prominent environmental analysts optimistic but cautious.

“A throne speech is nice, but it doesn't reduce emissions,” Dale Marshall, David Suzuki Foundation climate-change policy analyst, told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.

As recently as October 2005, Marshall was telling the media in a DSF analysis that despite the “urgency of reducing the real threat of climate change”¦many provincial governments have no plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions”. In the same report, Marshall said that B.C., Newfoundland, and the Northwest Territories had “weak and vague climate change plans”.

“Right now we have a speech,” he told the Straight . “If I see a plan [from Campbell's government] before October 2007, maybe B.C. will get a much more favourable grade.”

Marshall admitted that Campbell has taken some “important first steps”, such as setting a target to reduce B.C.'s greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 33 percent below current levels by 2020.

“That is a good target.”

Campbell also promised new climate-action and energy plans—ideas like a “new personal conservation ethic” and a reduction of “greenhouse-gas emissions from the oil and gas industry to 2000 levels by 2016”.

Bioenergy, geothermal energy, tidal, run-of-the-river, solar, and wind power are all mentioned as “potential energy sources in a clean, renewable, low-carbon future”.

Elsewhere in the 13-page segment on climate change and energy, Campbell promises to bring in a B.C. green building code and a “hydrogen highway” from Alaska to San Diego.

“But we need to see a plan,” Marshall said. “We need to see interim targets and a timeline for implementation of that plan. So, if he's talking about building codes, when are we going to see the building code in place? When is it effective and what kinds of emissions reductions are we going to get from it? That's just one example.”

Despite mentioning the potential of renewable sources of electricity generation, Campbell would only say that “all new and existing electricity produced in BC will be required to have net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2016”.

“That's nine years away,” Marshall said. “There's no need for that. He could have demanded it in the Kyoto period [2012], and he could have stipulated that all new generation come from renewables.”

Karen Campbell, staff counsel and B.C. policy director for the Alberta-based Pembina Institute, sat in on the February 13 speech in the legislature.

“I was impressed to see some of the targets,” Campbell told the Straight . “I'll be very interested in seeing some of the details now. [B.C. Finance Minister] Carole Taylor has already said there is no new money in the budget, which will frame the government spending over the coming year.”

She added that Premier Campbell—unlike the Opposition NDP—has not called for an emissions cap, although he has demanded that all emissions resulting from coal-fired power generation require that the carbon be sequestered.

“That pretty much kills the proposals for two coal-fired plants,” she said. “Unless there is a loophole that grandfathers them.”

Marshall agrees with Karen Campbell that the size of the generating plants—Princeton's is at 56 megawatts of production and Tumbler Ridge's is at 184 megawatts—will make it difficult for Compliance Energy Corporation (Princeton) and AESWapiti Energy (Tumbler Ridge) to adopt the coal-sequestration technology and make it economically viable.

William Rees, a UBC professor in the school of community and regional planning, told the Straight the throne speech represented “a good move” but added it was “not nearly enough”.

“He [Campbell] talks about the fact that if we're going to have coal-fired electrical-generating facilities, we're going to have to sequester the carbon,” Rees said. “But that's a completely unproven technology in this part of the world as yet.”¦It's something of a technological stumbling block, as far as I can tell.”

Rees, who pioneered the “ecological-footprint” analysis, noted he would like to see more emphasis on demand-side management—conservation—and less on supply-side solutions that he said are often a “technofix”.

“The question we are asking as a culture is, ”˜What can we do to keep the cars on the road and the parade moving forward in the same direction that it has been?' ” he said. “There's a problem with carbon-dioxide emissions, so rather than switch drastically to some other form of energy, we'll continue to produce fossil fuel. That's where we've got all of this capital investment and huge corporate interests who will scream bloody blue murder if we do anything else.”

Gordon Campbell and B.C. Environment Minister Barry Penner did not return calls by deadline. -