The Globe and Mail has a fairly lengthy article about the recent federal budget, oil sands policy, and environmental policy integration with the United States. It highlights the speculative nature and unknown costs of emissions reductions associated with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology:
However, this week’s federal budget provided little sense that Ottawa is preparing the country for a shift to a green economy, or even that it is concerned about the slump in the oil sands, which extends to the oil and gas industry generally.
Rather than any direct measures, the federal government provided $69-billion to ease access to credit in the economy generally — admittedly, an important problem for a capital-intensive oil industry — and vague promises of funding for carbon-capture-and-storage technology.
CCS is the fig leaf of the oil sands — an untested, hugely expensive technology that governments and industry claim will be critical if oil-sands emissions are to be reduced to acceptable levels. The idea is to divert CO2 emissions from smokestacks and store it permanently underground, but skeptics doubt it will ever be commercially viable.
A lot of talk these days surrounds a joint North American approach to climate change and energy security. Few people seem to have publicly considered the jurisdictional difficulties associated with such an approach. If I were Barack Obama, trying to get a cap-and-trade bill through Congress, I really doubt that I would want to have to deal with ten provincial governments, a second federal government, a separate legal and constitutional arrangement (including, for instance, aboriginal issues), and all the other complexities associated with jumping straight into a two-state system. That being said, having a North American strategy that is at least poised for integration could be important for securing the support of private firms worried about cross-border competition.
Without a doubt, these are interesting times for the emergence of climate policies.