FOCUS: Canada’s emissions targets ‘impossible’

27 April 2007 17:19  [Source: ICIS news]

By Stefan Baumgarten

TORONTO (ICIS news)--Canada’s chemical industry will find it hard to meet the government’s new targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and a near-term reduction of 18% by 2010 will be impossible, a top industry official said on Friday.

 

The targets, announced by Canada’s Conservative government late on Thursday, call for industry to cut emissions by 18% from 2006 levels by 2010, with further reductions through 2020.

 

“That’s impossible,” said Richard Paton, president of Ottawa-based Canadian Chemical Producers Association (CCPA).

 

The industry would have to buy credits or pay into a new technology fund to meet its obligations.

 

CCPA member companies had already met their targets under the Kyoto Protocol, but the baseline for the new targets was 2006 and it remained unclear to what extent chemical firms would be credited for the greenhouse gas reductions they achieved before 2006, he said.

 

As such, buying credits or paying into the technology fund would amount to a significant tax on Canada's chemical industry, Paton said, and over the long term, Canada’s chemical producers would have to invest millions more to meet the targets.

 

The government’s emissions plan marks a policy reversal. The Conservatives had rejected the Kyoto greenhouse gas reduction targets after coming into power in early 2006.

 

The plan targets eight industrial sectors, including the chemicals industry. Also included are oil, gas, refining and smelting, cement, forest products, mining and electricity generation by combustion.

 

Under the plan, existing industrial facilities have to meet emission-intensity reduction of 6% each year from 2007 to 2010. Every year after that, a 2% continuous emission intensity improvement will be required.

 

Companies will be able to choose the most cost-effective way to meet their targets from a range of options: in-house reductions; contributions to a technology fund; domestic emissions trading; and offsets and access to the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism.

 

Commentators said on Friday that the plan was not tough enough on Alberta’s oil sands sector, a large and growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. Also, the plan failed to properly price carbon emissions, they said.

 

Sierra Club of Canada, an environmental group, said the plan’s intensity-based targets would cause emissions to rise, not fall, over the coming years.

 

Even if the plan was realised, Canada would still be years behind the original Kyoto schedule and reductions achieved in other industrialised countries such as the UK, Germany or Norway, the group said.

 

The plan would likely be implemented through regulations and may not come to a vote in Parliament, where the Conservatives only form a minority, facing three opposition parties, political analysts said.

 

Canada’s Kyoto commitment was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6% over 1990 levels by 2012. The previous Liberal government had committed Canada to the Kyoto protocol in 1997, and it was ratified by Parliament in 2002.

 

The Conservatives have accused the Liberals of doing little or nothing during their 13 years in office to curb growing emissions, leaving the Conservative government in an impossible position.

By: Stefan Baumgarten
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