New Canadian Climate Policy: Good News If It's For Real
In a suspicious "leak " to the Globe and Mail, the Canadian government has announced a "tough new green plan" that will force oil sands projects and coal-fired power plants to capture and store CO2.
This would be good if it were true, but the Globe article says the federal Conservative government is still using intensity targets and has given a free pass to all projects that are already "hit the drawing board." At last report, oil sands developers had existing plans to triple their operations by 2012, so the Tory plan may be similar to the Alberta government plan: which is, effectively, to let the oil patch do whatever it wants.
Now that the government has engineered this very favourable headline, it will be interesting to see what the fine print says when the actual policy is released later this week.
These denialists sure have
These denialists sure have lots of ways to describe the concept of Doing Nothing: "adaptive and resiliency strategies", "bottom-up strategy", "God's Still Up There", and now "intensity targets"...
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Frank Bi, fact-addict and anti-lie bigot
"Al `Fat Al' Gore [is fat]" -- Harold Pierce
Good News Delayed is Bad News
A quick review of the final framework documents reveals that the promise to have oil sands capture CO2 is an empty promise to regulate at some time in the future. The regulations are not yet drafted, but John Baird promises that they will apply only to oil sands/coal projects built after 2012, and the requirements will not kick in until 2018. The net effect will presumably to encourage even more oil sands projects to open shop before 2012 to avoid the consequences of regulations in 2018.