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In Alberta, coal was first mined near Edmonton as early as 1850, and commercial coal operations took off in 1874. After the coal rush where hundreds of mines popped up across the province, the “black rock that burns” fell out of favour by the mid 1950s with the advent of natural gas.

While no new coal plants have been approved in Alberta in over a decade, it seems history is repeating itself. On June 30th, the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) approved the Milner Expansion Project, a 500Mw coal-fired generating facility to be built west of Edmonton. The final decision by the AUC to approve the coal plant is a serious black eye for the AUC and its ability to protect the public interest.

The project gives Calgary-based Maxim Power Corp. license to produce some of the filthiest power on the planet for 45 years while emitting 3Mt per year of greenhouse gas emissions. Alberta’s filthy tar sands are already the scourge of the planet, and this approval adds insult to injury.

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Simon Fraser University Professor and (Nobel-winning) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contributor Mark Jaccard has torn the BC New Democratic Party (NDP) policy document into little tiny shreds in an analysis released yesterday [PDF].

The NDP’s environmental proposals are not just doomed to failure, Jaccard said, they will also chase jobs from B.C. in the tens of thousands. 

For people not from Canada’s coast, the NDP is a traditional coalition of social policy progressives, labor activists and environmentalists. This particular iteration of the NDP, however, appears intent upon carving off its environmental arm in favour of pandering to the libertarian types who just love to scream about government taxation.

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Conservative policy "highly likely" to fail

Three top economists, led by Dr. Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, have released an analysis (attached) of the Conservative government's climate policy, saying that, as designed, the might make no headway whatever in reducing Canadian CO2 emissions.

Jaccard and fellow economists Nic Rivers and Jotham Peters, say the Tory plan is particularly faulty on two counts: it sets "intensity targets" that allow allow absolute emissions to continue going up, and it allows companies to purchase "offset" that completely absolve the firm of making any CO2 reductions itself. Both of these policies are proven failures in actually limiting or reducing the total emission of CO2.