The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
In his recent report, Alberta Auditor General Fred Dunn chastised the Alberta government for its greenhouse gas emission reduction plan. He suggested that ÒAlberta could spend a lot of money but not achieve emissions targets. Or it could achieve targets, but not cost-effectively.Ó This assessment is correct, but perhaps a more global perspective needs to be taken into account. After all, itÕs called Òglobal warmingÓ not ÒCanada warmingÓ or ÒAlberta warming.Ó The $2-billion the Alberta government has committed for carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects are expected to remove five megatonnes of C02 from the atmosphere by 2015. ThatÕs s only 0.69 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. Or put another way, since CanadaÕs emissions are only 2.2 per cent of all C02 emissions worldwide, this project will remove 0.015 percent of world emissions at a cost of $2,000,000,000. Essentially, it will cost taxpayers $400 per tonne to capture and store this C02 underground. From a per tonne standpoint, this is extremely expensive compared to the prices of carbon offsets that can be purchased around the world. Taking the carbon capture price tag one step further; consider the costs if Canada were still obligated to meet the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. Our nation would have had to shed 163 megatonnes of C02 by 2012 to meet Kyoto. At $400 per tonne, the total cost to taxpayers would be over $65-billion. And what would Canadians get for our $65-billion? A reduction of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions of less than one-half of one per cent. More importantly, what would it do to stop climate change? Virtually nothing. It would only off-set about one monthÕs worth of growth in ChinaÕs emissions Ð as China is building coal-fired power plants at a rate of one every five days. Developing nations currently contribute 40 per cent of EarthÕs annual carbon emissions, and some believe they will be contributing 75 per cent by the end of the century. Until a global solution is found, costly projects will only reduce the size of Albertans and CanadiansÕ bank accounts Ð not global temperatures.
