Recent Canadian Climate Policy Links

Post date: Sep 24, 2014 4:59:56 PM

With world leaders in New York for this years UN Climate Summit, there have been lots of interesting articles published lately. These are a few pieces focusing on Canadian climate policy that I thought to be especially notable.

1) A Climate Gift or Lump of Coal?

The Canadian think tank IISD put out a report comparing Canada's federal GHG regulations on the electricity sector with the planned regulations on the same sector in the US. This is a topic that I have been wanting to study for awhile, but have always had projects ahead in the queue. Basically, our regs don't come out looking as good because of the long time period until the regs become binding (post-2020). Unfortunately, there seems to be a technical glitch on IISD's website and I wasn't able to access the full report to link to today.

2) The Speech Stephen Harper could give on climate change

Aaron Wherry at Macleans writes a hilarious, but very informative, article about the federal government's failure to bring promised GHG regulations on the Oil and Gas sector past the informal industry consultation phase (the formal consultation phase is after proposed regulations have been published in the Canada Gazette).

3) It's time to implement a tax on emissions

Jen Winter from the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary (and regular attendee of the Canadian Resource and Environmental Study Group) argues in a Calgary Herald OPED that Alberta should replace its Specified Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER) policy with a broad-based and potentially revenue neutral carbon tax. The SGER policy is an emissions intensity based cap & trade/carbon tax hybrid policy that imposes a price on carbon emissions of about $15/tonne on around half of Alberta's emissions. Andrew Leach has a very very good paper in the Canadian Tax Journal outlining the SGER (pdf).