The Upside of the Underground

In his 2008 book Tar Sands, investigative journalist Andrew Nikiforuk called carbon capture and storage a “morally bankrupt … last-ditch survival effort that defies economics and shirks logic.” Better to invest the billions of dollars carbon capture and storage will cost in renewable energy and energy efficiency, he says, which is cheaper and greener by far than strip mining and burning dirty coal and bitumen.

Nikiforuk and the environmental community do have a point – several points, in fact – but the only fact that matters is that we can’t deal with the magnitude of the climate problem (huge) in the timeline it needs to be addressed (less than 50 years) without CCS. In the dim light of the Unicorn pub, Keith chided environmentalists for being unrealistic about their insistence on switching immediately from hydrocarbons to renewables to meet our growing energy needs.

“You probably could solve the climate problem without CCS, but it would be pretty hard,” Keith says, using risk and life-cycle analysis to handily dismiss the arguments about safety and expense.
“It’s almost impossible to solve it without one of two dirty, ugly technologies that most environmentalists hate, and that’s CCS or nuclear. There isn’t a third.”

But to replace our current energy system with some combination of CCS and nuclear (and wind and solar and energy efficiency) will require more than government handouts and a top-notch public-relations campaign. It will require the full force of the market, which means a meaningful price on carbon that would force polluters – you, me and the oil and gas industry – to pay for our climate change sins. And that means Stelmach and the rest of the Tory caucus would do well to embrace a market-based regulatory mechanism, before Uncle Sam shoves it down their collective throats.

“As much as possible, we want to put a clean price on carbon that is technology-neutral, that encourages individual people and individual companies to figure out the best way to solve the problem,” said Keith near the end of the question-and-answer period. “You put a significant tax on carbon, and you use 100% of the money you got from the tax to cut personal income tax and corporate income tax, so you’re not choosing the winners. If you start shifting the tax from income to carbon, you encourage people to do what we want them to do, without telling them exactly how to do it. And that is crucial.”

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