Raising prices for oil will do little against climate change
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Open in new tab There has lately been much debate about Quebec’s surplus electrical energy production and what to do about it. As Peter Hadekel noted recently in the Gazette (“Energy Shift” Sept. 15), at least one energy-policy expert has suggested that electricity rates for households should increase by half — at a time when Hydro-Québec is forced to sell energy to the U.S. northeast at a loss because of overproduction. The idea makes no sense.
Why, when there is a surfeit of energy, should Quebec citizens, whose tax dollars subsidized the James Bay development for decades, be rewarded with increased electricity costs, when surplus electricity is sold at a loss to the other side of the border? Besides the fundamental illogic of the proposition, this is a recipe for electoral disaster.
The Quebec government’s participation in the cap-and-trade scheme called the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) has also been criticized. The Quebec government’s own special commission on energy has recommended that Quebec withdraw. Ontario and several other governments have already withdrawn from it. Aside from the fact that the WCI makes consumers once more bear the burden, the WCI’s basic difficulty is that it will have no effect upon the problem that it seeks to solve, namely reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The inconvenient truth is that nothing that anyone does will have any significant effect upon carbon emissions as long as China continues to generate two-thirds of its electricity from coal. China no longer uses coal to generate electricity for households, but coal consumption drives its industrial production. China’s share of world carbon emissions from coal alone has risen from 10 per cent in 2001 to almost 23 per cent in 2013. Quebec’s total carbon emissions, by contrast, amount to about one-sixth of 1 per cent of the world total.
The WCI scheme would reduce Quebec’s carbon emissions by only a small fraction of that already small amount, while raising the price of gasoline and home-heating oil for Quebec consumers by more than a few per cent, and without affecting the global problem at all. China opens a new coal-burning electricity plant every week to keep up with its industrial growth. Beijing’s policy dwarfs anything the WCI could do to counter it.
The Quebec government commission on energy is correct in suggesting that a new energy policy is needed. It is absurd that in oil-rich Canada, Quebec is so dependent upon highly expensive foreign oil imports. The Enbridge and Energy East pipeline projects would reverse that dependence while lowering energy prices to Quebec consumers. That might take until the end of the current decade, but the James Bay project took over 20 years to complete.
Hydro-Québec has to rein in spending on all energy developments, including popular but uneconomical technologies like wind power and biomass, not just hydroelectricity. It does not need the WCI to do this. Nor do voters need the added burden of increases to their rates that WCI would bring, in addition to normal inflation.
The global carbon emissions problem is out of Quebec’s hands. WCI may make people feel good about themselves, it may be good public relations for some politicians, and it may bring financial institutions windfall profits from the enormous commissions to be made on buying and selling carbon tax credits, but it does not solve the problem.
If Quebec wants to make a difference here, it should seek to influence Canada’s position in international climate negotiations in which China participates. That is not as politically appealing a thing to do, but at least it has a chance of making a difference.
[First published in Montreal Gazette.]