Give Albertans a real chance

I was sitting here minding my own business yesterday when the CKUA news subjected me to the Alberta government's latest attempt to embarrass the people it represents. As if spending $25 million on a branding campaign to convince the rest of the world we're not what we are wasn't enough. Now they're trying to convince the rest of the world to follow our lead and not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

With the plaintive cry of a child who can't have any more candy, Alberta Energy Director of Communications Jason Chance complained that California's attempt to pass the U.S. 's first low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) "wasn't fair."

Alberta Energy's version of Nick Naylor (think: Thank You for Smoking), Chance was the mouthpiece for Alberta government officials in California this week wasting taxpayers' money (and political capital and international standing) trying to convince the state's air-quality regulator that banning carbon-heavy fuels singles out Canadian exports of oilsands-derived crude.

In a "historic vote," California's Air Resources Board passed the implementing regulations for the nation's first low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) by an overwhelming 9-1. This vote will put into action the LCFS first proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger as a key policy for meeting California's global warming goals. This precedent setting environmental policy will favor cleaner fuels over high carbon fuels such as Canadian tar sands, liquid coal and oil shale.

"Low carbon fuel standards are a critical complementary measure to a cap on global warming pollution," writes Liz Barrat-Brown, a senior attorney with NRDC. "The LCFS requires that the carbon content of fuels decline over the next decade, paving the way for lower carbon fuels, such as next generation biofuels, and other measures to reduce global warming pollution from our transportation sector.

"The approval of the California LCFS regulations gives a huge boost to efforts to pass a similar measure nationally. Today all eyes will turn to Washington D.C. where the House Energy and Commerce Committee will debate a national LCFS."

Despite Chance's ideologically motivated protests of "unfairness," the beauty of the LCFS is "it does not pick favorites," says Barrat-Brown. "Instead it provides a more level playing field for lower carbon fuels to compete against dirtier fuels. It does this by relying on a straight forward concept - determining how much carbon is embedded in the fuel through lifecycle assessment, an accounting measure that evaluates emissions from the production through to the combustion of a fuel."

How long is it going to take the dinosaurs in the Alberta legislature to realize that the world has changed? Despite the Alberta Tories' apparent apathy (if not outright disdain) for the environment around them, most of the rest of the world, including the U.S., our favourite trading partner and the world's most voracious consumer of oil, has decided that climate change is very real and very serious, and as such must be stopped with a vigour usually reserved for martial enemies.

“Let’s be clear,” Dr. David Keith prophesied last year. “A lot of Albertans, people who are members of APEGGA, for instance, the engineer and geophysicist group in Alberta, don’t believe that climate change is a problem, and quite a few members of our cabinet don’t believe it’s a problem. But what they believe doesn’t actually matter. We’re going to be regulated from the outside. The U.S. is moving [climate change] regulations through the House and the Senate that are very serious. Sometimes you may wish the world is one way. You may wish you don’t have a problem. But we do."

And as Keith points out, it's not just the environment Albertans should be concerned about. It's our entire economy: “I think people are frighteningly naive about what the impacts of this could be. Serious carbon regulation [in the U.S.] could have people walking away from their mortgages the way they did here in the early 1980s. Alberta needs to make some strategic investments to protect itself against carbon regulation, and ... right now, [the government is] just dropping the ball.”

Albertans could be global leaders in the fight against climate change, if only Premier Ed Stelmach would give us a different kind of chance -- one that involves honesty and integrity and transparency rather than shady PR campaigns and obstructionist government intervention.