Fraser Institute report on carbon emissions misfires: environmental group
Posted Aug 16, 2016 2:42 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Environmental Defence says a new report about the impact of Alberta’s carbon emissions cap missed its mark.
The Fraser Institute study said Canada will lose billions of dollars because the policy will leave three billion barrels of oil in the ground by 2040.
Environmental Defence spokesperson Dale Marshall said that the policy is about emission reduction, not revenue, and the institute has yet to find positives in any carbon policy.
“They point to the cost of this policy versus the B.C. carbon tax, and yet they oppose the B.C. carbon tax when it was put into place,” Marshall explained. “They’ve opposed the Ontario cap and trade system. They’ve opposed every single climate change policy ever introduced, as far as I can tell. Once your starting point is to say that we don’t need address climate change, then of course every climate change policy seems unnecessary.”
The study said the plan will reduce global emissions by 0.035 per cent in about 25 years, but Marshall said that’s still a significant 30 per cent reduction of Canada’s total emissions.
“You can take any industry, or any factory, or anywhere in the world and say, ‘well, it’s only a minuscule percentage of the global total, so we may as well not do anything.’,” Marshall defended. “It non-sensical…. every sector, every country, every jurisdiction needs to be doing what it can to reduce emissions.”
