No matter how you do the calculations, it’s physically impossible to open a few liquefied natural gas plants and still realistically meet the B.C. emission-reduction targets that are now only six years away.
Opposition MLAs are spending hours stressing that fact to the B.C. government, which introduced a new bill this month that pretends it can happen.
The targets were imposed by law in 2007 and require major stepdowns in emissions, by 2020 and 2050. Emissions from huge gas-powered LNG plants — and from elsewhere in the production cycle — would put the ambitious targets wildly out of reach.
(Green Party MLA Andrew Weaver said meeting the target with LNG plants would be achievable — if all vehicles were taken off the roads. “We’re really promising British Columbians a bicycle, because they cannot use cars if we’re going to have this LNG industry and actually meet our targets.”)
But there’s something that’s being overlooked in the heated debate about LNG’s effect on the legally required emission reductions.
There’s no penalty in the law.
If B.C. arrives at 2020 and GHG emissions are not 33 per cent below the 2007 levels as required, absolutely nothing will happen. The target-reduction law was passed in late 2007 and several related GHG laws were passed in 2008 dictating how the targets would be met. There are stiff fines and jail terms proposed in some of those laws for private entities that try to cheat on the reporting requirements.
But as far the grand overall goal is concerned, the law that establishes it is entirely mute on what happens if it is missed.
Governments are not in the habit of fining themselves, even far off in the future. And politicians don’t often lay traps to throw themselves or their successors in jail.
The GHG target law is like the balanced-budget law. If the government misses the target, as it did four years in a row after the economic meltdown, it could just repeal the requirement. That would be embarrassing, but not much else. The B.C. Liberals won an election in 2009 while running a deficit and another in 2013 after three more deficits, despite the fact the practice at one point was deemed illegal.
There might be some expectation that missing the targets would be a big political liability. But that contention is indirectly questioned by a new report conducted by some Simon Fraser University professors, including climate-change expert Mark Jaccard.
They surveyed B.C. and found people know little about climate policies. Jaccard said Monday three-quarters of respondents couldn’t name a single climate-change policy. About one-quarter were able to cite the carbon tax, because it got intense media focus, was the subject of a provincewide repeal campaign and was one the main issues of the 2009 election.
The conventional thinking is that citizen support is important for climate-change policy-making. The SFU study concluded it is not: “Statistical analysis indicates that citizen knowledge of policy is not associated with higher policy support.”
The suggestion is that “widespread knowledge and well-informed citizen support are not necessarily required for implementation of effective climate policies.”
If you don’t need public support to pursue climate-change policies, it’s conceivable you don’t need public support to stop pursuing them, either.
Fighting climate change is a high-concept, complex issue, loaded with technical jargon that Jaccard’s study suggests most people have tuned out. The arguments happen in academic papers, environmental blogs and in the political sphere, and not many voters are paying attention to them.
In that environment, last week’s GHG Industrial Reporting and Control Act is just another complicated jigsaw piece.
It sets a comparatively strict emission standard for LNG plants, but allows them to offset some emissions over the limit and offers government subsidies to help plants get down to the standard.
A handful of plants even meeting the legal limits would add enough emissions to the provincial total to make the targets a faint hope.
But all the emphasis is on billions in new revenue and tens of thousands of new jobs.
It’s not hard to figure out at this point what most citizens consider more important.
