a sibilant intake of breath

Environmental Defence has put out a new report on the oil sands that speaks well to both a general and a specific issue. Climate change policy is often about deciding on a total permissible quantity, then haggling over how it gets divided, with everyone asserting that their special circumstances justify lenient treatment. For instance, Canada argues that it should be able to cut its emissions by less than other states because it is large, cold, an energy exporter, etc. By contrast, other states argue for more generous targets on the basis of past action, ongoing extreme poverty, and many other reasons.

Of course, for everyone who gets lenient treatment, someone else needs to pick up the slack, if you are going to meet your targets. What the Environmental Defence report highlights is how giving an easy ride to the oil sands will mean higher costs for everyone else, if Canada is to hit its 2020 and 2050 mitigation targets.* The report – entitled Divided We Fall: The Tar Sands vs. The Rest of Canada – highlights how placing a disproportionate reduction burden on Ontario and Quebec could be harmful for their economic prospects, especially given how greater opportunities for mitigation exist in the fossil-fuel intensive western industries. Also, given the degree to which resource windfalls (in terms of both tax revenues and jobs) tend to accrue provincially, Ontario and Quebec have an even stronger case against allowing a weaker carbon pricing system for hydrocarbon production in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Domestically, this is just one of the innumerable issues of Canadian federalism. Regional interests generate tensions that can sap the ability of Canada as a whole to achieve good outcomes. Certainly, some provinces will find it much easier than others to recognize and accept the fact that the fossil fuel industry has no long-term future. It’s a one-off bonanza that our legal and moral obligations on climate change will not permit us to fully realize. Instead of continuing to invest in a dead end, Canada needs to get serious about building an economy that can thrive in a low- and ultimately zero-carbon future.

The report is also available in French (PDF).

* It is worth remembering that, while the 2020 and 2050 targets have received much more media attention recently, the original announcement of the current government’s Turning the Corner climate change plan promised that total Canadian emissions would peak no later than 2012. Most people seem to have forgotten about the third promise.

Obama’s decision to extend California-style fuel efficiency standards across the US is a very welcome one, not least because it seems likely that Canada’s government will copy them. The US rules take effect in 2012 and create a federal fuel efficiency standard. The aim is to push the efficiency of the US car and light truck fleet to 35.5 miles per gallon (6.63 L/100km) by 2016: 40% better than now. Such a move is long overdue, given the poor efficiency of the US vehicle fleet, the huge amounts of oil imported by the United States in order to keep them running, climate change concerns, and reasonable doubts about the availability of low-cost hydrocarbons in the near to medium future.

While the new standards are a marked improvement, it is worth thinking about them in context. They will not bring the US up to speed with Australia, China, the European Union, or Japan. Indeed, even in 2020, the planned American standards lag behind where the EU and Japan were in 2002. Given the degree to which North American taxpayers now own the big car companies, it may well have been possible to demand more progressive action from them.

Toughening standards may seem even more prescient if the end of the economic slump brings back high oil prices, as some are predicting. As reported in The Economist, the Saudi oil minister is concerned that a sharp increase in oil prices could slow or stop an economic recovery, while attendees at an OPEC summit apparently expect oil to return to $150-per-barrel territory:

The explanation is simple. Oilmen are worried because they believe that many of the factors behind the record-breaking ascent last year remain in place. Much of the world’s “easy” oil has already been extracted, or is in the hands of nationalist governments that will not allow foreigners to exploit it. That leaves firms to hunt for new reserves in ever more inhospitable and inaccessible places, such as the deep waters off Africa or the frozen oceans of the Arctic. Such fields take a long time and a lot of expensive technology to develop. Worse, new discoveries tend to be smaller than in the past and to run dry faster.

More efficient vehicles make sense as a near-term mechanism for dealing with the linked problems of climate change and energy security, but they are only an incremental step. Rather than being able to rely on increasing the efficiency of an unsustainable practice, we need to alter the basis on which that practice occurs, so as to make it both efficient and sustainable. By all means, we need to increase the efficiency with which vehicles of all kinds transport people and freight, but we must remember that we will only have attained our basic goals when those efficient vehicles operate using zero-carbon, sustainable electricity or sustainably grown, carbon-neutral biofuels as their fuel sources.