Rivers takes on Rex - will we never get to read Rivers again - all about hot air.

Rivers 100x100By Ray Rivers

May 27th, 2106

BURLINGTON, ON

Leap Manifesto graphic

A significant document that few have actually read.

CBC and National Post political contributor Rex Murphy rants that Ontario Premier Wynne’s climate change strategy is her own version of LEAP. He is referring to the LEAP Manifesto shepherded by author and political activist Naomi Klein and best-friend film maker Avis Lewis. The document came out last year during the federal election, and was presented at the NDP convention earlier this year. It is a strategic document, laying out long term goals for achieving a more harmonious, equitable, and environmentally friendly Canada in the age of global warming.

RexMurphy_0

Rex Murphy – National Post columnist – CBC on air personality.

Rex Murphy apparently considers those goals the equivalent of leaping into hell, as he accounts that, in his view, it would be political and economic suicide to stop using fossil fuels. One wonders if he had actually read the LEAP document as he spreads his hyperbolic poison over a topic he clearly doesn’t understand, and for an issue which he is clearly out of touch with the majority of Canadians. And he is not alone, as Globe and Mail contributors Margaret Wente and Jeffrey Simpson also felt the need to jump into the fray.

But at least Simpson has focused his comment, and legitimately challenges the complexity of the emission trading aspect, rather than criticizing the end goal itself. He gets it – that we need to do more. But because something is complex doesn’t make it unmanageable or bad. It is not clear that Simpson understands what a cap and trade program is, preferring to characterize it as something conjured up by an overzealous environment minister, Glen Murray, and using that as an ad hominem to help discredit the provincial strategy.

Cap and trade, or more generally emissions trading, was first conceived at the University of Toronto by an economist in 1968. Professor John Dales was looking for a way to reduce pollution by making it more expensive for polluters without penalizing the rest of society – an equitable approach to curbing pollution based on economic incentives. And more complexity is required if one is to internalize the unintended effects of human activities into the costs of production, thus making polluting activities relatively more costly.

File picture of gas fired power station at sunset in Minsk

Gas fired power station at sunset.

In the case of greenhouse gas reduction, as in Ontario’s plan, it is an implicit carbon tax. But unlike the explicit carbon taxes B.C. and Quebec have in place, emissions trading is business-friendly, allowing more emission-efficient enterprises the added incentive of selling carbon credits to those who aren’t – incentivizing as well as taxing.

That explains why the business community largely favours emissions trading over a universal tax, like B.C.’s carbon tax. And that is why this approach can also inadvertently result in an overachievement of its goals, as when the US government phased-out lead from gasoline years ahead of schedule in the 1970’s, one of the first applications of emissions trading.

Since then, cap and trade applied to sulphur emissions from coal power plants led to another remarkable overachievement of US based acid rain emission reductions in the 1990’s. The European Union, Japan and Australia have all used emissions trading in tackling carbon emissions. The 1997 Kyoto protocol, which failed when the US pulled out in 2000, had emissions trading as an inherent tenet of its design.

Although the log jam on Capital Hill has hindered the US from implementing a truly national carbon cap and trade program, some states have moved ahead. The Western Climate Initiative, started in 2007, is one such carbon trading regime which also includes Quebec, B.C., Manitoba and Ontario. And Ontario’s program will ultimately be integrated with that of the other Canadian provinces as well as California and other US states – so we’d better get used to this level of complexity.

And Simpson is wrong about this being something Murray just conjured up. Ontario has been working on emissions trading for decades, and with the blessing of all three political governments over that time. The provincial government supported an early voluntary trading program in the 90’s and developed its own mandatory allowance trading program in 2002 to reduce emissions from coal and gas power plants.

traffic - green house gas

Exhaust emissions from automobiles are close to the worst polluters.

In fact just about all of the provinces and the federal government have been looking at emissions trading systems similar, in some way to what Ontario is implementing as part of a climate change strategy. Alberta had implemented a more limited trading program well before the NDP swept into power last year, and they no doubt will be looking to Ontario’s experience as they enhance their efforts. Indeed Ontario and Alberta have just announced a new clean technology initiative for climate change, a corollary to this discussion.

Alberta, home to Canada’s fossil fuel industry is also home to those other fossils, the dinosaurs. One dominant theory is that these marvellous creatures were the victims of another period of climate change some 65 million years ago. But unlike our modern-day dinosaurs, who should understand that the climate change affecting us today is of our own doing, those dino’s likely couldn’t and didn’t do anything about it. We do know how to start fixing this – it’s right there Rex – in that Leap Manifesto.

Rivers-direct-into-camera1-173x300

Ray Rivers is an economist and author who writes weekly on federal and provincial issues, applying his 25 years of involvement with federal and provincial ministries.  Rivers’ involvement in city matters led to his appointment as founding chair of Burlington’s Sustainable Development Committee.  He was also a candidate in the 1995 provincial election

Background links:

Rex on LeapRex Murphy on Ontario –  Ontario’s CC StrategyLEAP

Cap and TradeFort McMurray and Climate WenteSimpson on Cap and Trade

Western Climate InitiativeAlberta and OntarioDinosaurs

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4 comments to Rivers takes on Rex – will we never get to read Rivers again – all about hot air.

  • craig gardner

    Rex Murphy is paid or has been in the past by the oil industry so one would expect he would protect his bread and butter Never thought of him as a legit journalist not sure why CBC keeps him in light of its many staffing issues.

  • Steve Smith

    I don’t see any real life adult alternatives to oil and gas, as of yet. Sure we can switch to solar and wind and I can get my 2000 dollar by-monthly electrical bill and peddle to work 20 miles everyday. We can shut down Alberta oil and then import oil from countries that imprison women for not knowing their place, or behead magicians. If we make the cost manufacturing in Ontario high enough, it will become even more of a have not province then it’s already become.

  • John Coakley

    Excellent treatment of the topic, Ray. You really should forward it to Rex and Jeffrey. Keep up the good work.

  • Fred Pritchard FCPA, FCGA

    Ray, are your chair legs ok? It seems you are leaning a bit more left than usual. Kidding…. It is not hard to be left of Rex, lol.

    Really, I just wish local governments would start to pick up recycling from businesses. In our case, we pay to have the cardboard picked up, and we take home the cans and bottles along with our shredded paper waste and recycle it at home. However, if our local government knew this, they would warm me to stop doing it. Case in point, we had 6 full blue bins this morning, 5 of them from work. It would be a crime to send that to the land fill or worse, burn it, because local governments don’t want to incur the cost of picking up in more locations.

    Sometime the solutions are so easy, yet so difficult.