The Upside of the Underground

The idea really isn’t as radical as it seems. For one thing, it’s a market-based solution that seems natural for Alberta’s free market-obsessed Tories to embrace. Everyone from the conservative
C.D. Howe Institute to the environmentalist Pembina Institute, from tax policy expert Jack Mintz to former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, agrees that putting a price on carbon is the only way to encourage the investment necessary to build the multibillion-dollar system necessary to capture and store large quantities of carbon. Although they rarely say it publicly, even many oil executives support a carbon tax, as long as it is introduced slowly and it is accompanied by a stable regulatory framework.

British Columbia has instituted a carbon tax “the best way it’s been done in the world,” says Keith, and the federal government, despite a lacklustre performance on the climate portfolio to date, has recognized that under United States President Barack Obama, a U.S. cap-and-trade system is a fait accompli that will compel it to adopt something similar, if not exactly the same.

Why, then, is the Alberta government so opposed to putting a meaningful price on carbon? It is afraid the tax will ruin the Alberta economy. By contrast, Keith and others feel it is the only thing that might save our carbon-dependent economy.

At the end of the evening, a young man in the back of the Unicorn expressed his concern that the audience still seemed “lukewarm” to the idea of CCS. He pointed out that whatever your thoughts on climate change, it seemed to him that there was a tremendous economic opportunity to develop carbon capture and storage technology as quickly as possible and then sell it back to China and India, where coal-fired power plants are being built at the rate of almost one a week.

After the Pembina Institute’s Griffiths reiterated her preference for alternative forms of energy and then tacitly endorsed CCS “on a case-by-case basis,” Keith stood up and, taking the microphone in his left hand, looked down at the floor for a few moments while he formulated his thoughts.

“I want to try answering that with a different tack,” he said, holding his right hand at shoulder-height and forming his index finger and thumb into the shape of a gun, as young boys will do when playing cowboys and Indians. “Say you don’t care about the environment at all. Say you only care about jobs in Alberta. What’s your strategy? I would argue that there are plenty of places in the world where you could deal with the climate problem and forget CCS. But this is a place where CCS is pretty much an existential necessity if we want to keep the jobs here.”

“Let’s be clear,” he continued, the audience now perched on his every word. “A lot of Albertans, people who are members of APEGGA, for instance, the engineer and geophysicist group in Alberta, don’t believe that climate change is a problem, and quite a few members of our cabinet don’t believe it’s a problem. But what they believe doesn’t actually matter. We’re going to be regulated from the outside. The U.S. is moving [climate change] regulations through the House and the Senate that are very serious. Sometimes you may wish the world is one way. You may wish you don’t have a problem. But we do.

“I think people are frighteningly naive about what the impacts of this could be. Serious carbon regulation [in the U.S.] could have people walking away from their mortgages they way they did here in the early 1980s. Alberta needs to make some strategic investments to protect itself against carbon regulation, and CCS is something that will minimize the regulatory threat to the Alberta economy. And right now, [the government is] just dropping the ball. Just go look at the plants in China, where they’re actually breaking ground [on CCS facilities] while we still talk about the problem. Don’t be too sure about who’s going to be selling who the technology.”

Keith is just one expert in a world full of experts, but it is hard not to take him seriously, and the applause from the crowd indicates that they do. The big question is, does the government?

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