Vancouver Sun Editorial, July 9, 2011
Government policy that seems sensible when written must also be assessed on its effect. If it leads to an absurd result, the policy must be deemed to be absurd and abandoned. That is now the case with the carbon offsets policy that is now part of the Clark government’s climate change agenda.
That policy, which was developed under then-premier Gordon Campbell but officially acknowledged as still being part of Premier Christy Clark’s climate change strategy, calls for all public-sector entities to be carbon neutral.
If they can’t achieve carbon neutrality by cutting their own emissions, they are required to buy offsets from the Pacific Carbon Trust, the bureaucracy set up by the province to buy and sell redemption.
While carbon neutrality sounds like a sensible policy in a climate-challenged world, the absurd result is that public institutions, including school boards and hospitals, spent more than $18 million last year buying offsets rather than providing the health care, education and other services that should be their sole focus.
Among the local entities required to buy offsets were the Vancouver school board, which spent more than $400,000 to meet the requirement, and the University of B.C., which had the highest tab of any individual institution at $1.5 million.
The money that came from cashstrapped school boards and health authorities was passed on, minus the cost of maintaining the new bureaucracy, primarily to private corporations, including the energy giant Encana Corp.
The inherent absurdity of this simple transaction is sufficient reason to revisit the very notion of carbon offsets, which work on the idea that rather than reduce emissions ourselves, we can pay someone else to reduce theirs instead.
The government set up the Pacific Carbon Trust as a broker for carbon offsets.
It vets potential offsets, buys them in bulk and then resells them by the tonne to either publicly spirited private companies or public organizations such as school boards that are being forced to offset their emissions.
To qualify, the activity or enterprise creating the emission reductions being purchased should not be viable without being subsidized through the selling of offsets. In the case of Encana, the offsets were from the use of what the PCT described as a drilling technique that eliminates the need for routine flaring.
Natural gas production is one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gases in B.C.
The question for the provincial government should be: Why isn’t Encana required to use techniques that reduce emissions rather than being in a position to demand an infusion of dollars that taxpayers rightfully believed would be going to pay for education and health care to achieve that end?
Despite the fact that British Columbians have acquiesced to carbon taxes introduced to date, much of the government’s strategy to meet its emission reductions targets is in shambles.
The cap-and-trade plan being developed in conjunction with some American states is in danger of foundering and emissions have actually increased since the strategy was announced.
It’s time for the Clark government to rethink the whole initiative in light of the changing economic circumstances and the political climate south of the border.
For starters, we need to stop wasting money desperately needed for health care and education on what is amounting to a make-work project. We must also re-examine whether we can effectively address emissions with what often amounts to little more than an exercise in creative accounting.