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.
If you had a billion extra dollars to spend on Saskatchewan, how would you spend it? Our governments chose to fund a project that reduces power production and drives utility rates up. In March, Prime Minister Harper stopped in Estevan to rehash his federal budget commitment: $240 million to turn part of the Boundary Dam Power Plant into a clean coal facility. Sask Power pledged a further $758 million, leaving another $400 million to come from Òindustry.Ó Harper admits that power bills could go up as a result of the retrofit Ð and not simply because of the $1.4 billion cost. The same technology that should reduce CO2 emissions by more than 90 per cent will also reduce power production. The dam provide 30 per cent of SaskatchewanÕs power, meaning reduced production will have a measurable impact. Even so, our leaders insist this project is necessary to demonstrate technology developed at the University of Regina. The technology captures carbon and stores it for later use in the process of extracting oil. Harper was quite frank in his admission that tightening federal regulations, to be put into effect in 2010, will carry a price for businesses and consumers. Yet, he also claims these very regulations are what will make carbon capture technology viable. Voila! Direct government investment, plus heavy regulation, equals economic development! Even environmentalists arenÕt happy. The chief climate change analyst for the David Suzuki Foundation said that Sask Power could have reduced the same level of carbon emissions at one-tenth to one-fifth of the price had it only created efficiencies and used alternative power sources. The crunch is on as the province aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 32 per cent by 2020. The merits of such goals are debatable. The theory that the earth is significantly warming due to man-made increases in carbon emissions remains highly contested by some leading scholars. Another question is whether all the money in the world would reduce emissions enough to make a substantial difference. Nonetheless, a province anxious to appear it received something from Ottawa is using the modest handout to move forward. The retrofit will take seven years to complete, putting an even greater strain on a tight labour market. At least when those workers are done, theyÕll be able to pay the higher power bills. But will the rest of us?
