Environmental Policy Revisited

It's no secret that the Liberals bungled implementing a plan to meet our Kyoto commitments. With the Conservatives trying to step away from Kyoto commitments, and making vague noises about addressing environmental policy issues, it's nice to see another voice stepping forth that approaches the obligations we are signed up to in Kyoto as a challenge.

A few days ago, The Green Party announced their strategy entitled GP2 Green Plan. While I certainly have questions in my mind about aspects of it, I like the underlying optimism it presents.

There's several interesting ways that the Green Party is proposing to implement:

1) A carbon tax, but counter balancing that by reducing other taxes such as income and payroll taxes. This will, no doubt, annoy Alberta politicians and oil companies, but overall, it's a strategy that balances two key issues in a positive fashion. It creates an interesting "positive" incentive for energy companies to act - by moving tax load off the payroll, and putting it in a place where the company can actually reduce its tax burden by reducing its emissions.

2) Aggressive involvement in the implementation of alternative power generation and fuel sources. I've always felt that we stand to gain a lot by moving of traditional power generation strategies. Making some of the technologies involved commercially viable is a difficult thing to do right now, and the Green Party is talking in terms of taking the risk factors down a notch or two.

3) An assortment of programs and restoration of programs such as Energuide and the R2000 strategies to make our consumer uses of energy more informed and reasonable. (I don't know about others, but I actually found the "energuide" information on appliances rather useful)

There are other aspects that I think are short sighted. The view taken of nuclear power troubles me. Whether or not I like it, nuclear power is likely to be a significant player in the world as the cost and practicality of oil, coal or natural gas generation becomes more questionable in the coming decades. I would have liked to see investment made in the direction of improving the key technologies as well as the handling of the waste.

Similarly, the one aspect of Kyoto that has always bothered me is the "emission credits" trading system. There's something about this piece that I've just never quite been able to reconcile with the objective of reducing the impact of human activity on the environment. It seems problematic to pay another nation money so that we can spew more pollutants. I can't say I was happy to see that part of Kyoto reflected so strongly in the GP2 policy paper.

Other aspects of their plan is clearly aggressive, but unlike the Conservative "non-policy policy", or the years-long dithering of the Liberals, they have tried to balance things off in a manner that attempts to achieve what seems to be a practical approach. Pleasantly, they seem to have thought about the overall balance of economy, people and environment issues and have proposed something that tries to be positive.