Government’s Math on Climate Change Plan Under the Microscope

By Jennifer Ditchburn, THE CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA – How many tonnes of greenhouse gases will be reduced by Canadians screwing in florescent light bulbs?

The federal government has an answer – 0.61 megatonnes in 2008 alone – but how it came up with that laudable figure has some of the best environmental and economic minds scratching their heads.

The math behind the Conservative government’s entire climate-change plan has landed under the microscope after an arm’s length government body said it had problems getting its hands on basic data.

The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) was careful not to pass judgment on the advisability of any government initiatives in their report, but neither could they fully judge their potential effectiveness.

The only thing members could repeatedly say was they either didn’t have enough hard data to draw a conclusion, or that the government had likely overestimated their predictions for tackling greenhouse gas emissions.

“There is a likelihood that the (plan) overestimates the extent of emission reductions in the 2008-2012 period but we cannot definitively conclude at this time by how much,” their report says.

On the question of light bulbs, for example, the round table said Natural Resources Canada provided them with “no specific methodology” for how they came to the conclusions about greenhouse gas reductions. The department also seemed not to have taken into account the body of economic evidence that suggests simply introducing an efficient product doesn’t automatically equate a reduction in energy use.

The authors, which included some of the top business and environmental leaders in the country, went on to recommend diplomatically that the government pay closer attention to “transparency and clarity” when presenting greenhouse-gas reductions, and the “consistency” in accounting for those reductions from department to department.

Environment Minister John Baird’s office would not comment on those recommendations Monday.

Environment Canada could only provide The Canadian Press with the name of the economic model used for one component of the climate-change plan it posted to its website last month. It directed inquiries about other components – including energy efficiency – to Natural Resources Canada and Transport Canada. Natural Resources could not immediately respond.

Round Table president David McLaughlin says he has some sympathy for the government because different departments often have different numbers at their disposal.

“The government as an organization maybe isn’t as well structured or organized to deal with this horizontally, but there’s a sense that it’s going to change,” he said.

One of the members of the round table, Mark Jaccard, is one of Canada’s pre-eminent scholars in economic modelling of environmental measures. He and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University developed a modelling system that is widely used when trying to figure out the impact of certain environmental initiatives or policies.

He points out that the United States government has a single model it uses when testing different environmental policies, and makes all the data available to the public so that it can be independently verified.

“If the Canadian public cares about policies that actually achieve what the politicians say they will, and that’s especially important when politicians are boldly telling us what they’ll accomplish by 2050, (it) should be demanding that the models used by the government for these estimates are publicly vetted, and their parameters as well, so independent experts can get a look at them as occurs in the United States,” said Jaccard.

The Conservative government is not the only one to be criticized for a lack of rigour in its environmental plan. Environmentalists such as the Pembina Institute had similar complaints about the Liberals when they put out their Project Green. It was the Liberals who first attempted to bring in a government-wide economic modelling system, but later let it drop.

Pembina and the round table both had similar takes on the government’s emissions reduction plan for big business. Both pointed out the difficulties in claiming a reduction by 2010, when companies have the option that year of pouring money into an environmental technology fund rather than actually cutting down their emissions.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper referred Monday at the United Nations to the fund’s “near-term” benefits. He spoke to a side panel during a world summit aimed at a new climate change treaty.

“This kind of lack of rigour, lack of seriousness about understanding the emission-reduction impact of policies, when you contrast it with the seriousness that is given to financial projections in government budgets, it sends a message that environmental performance is a poor cousin,” said Pembina’s Matthew Bramley.