Ontario climate change plan to be out soon

Canada’s new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with the country’s premiers and territorial leaders on Monday to talk about climate change, and the result was pleasantly surprising. “This is the day we do our part”.

Phasing out the province’s 18 coal plants, Notley added, will be done in a timely, stay-on-schedule manner.

AltaLink, Alberta’s largest electricity transmission Provider, applauds the Alberta Government on the release of its Climate Leadership Plan. The western province said renewable energy sources will provide 30% of electricity production by 2030.

One of the biggest producers in the oilsands, ExxonMobil Corp.-controlled Imperial Oil (TSX:IMO), isn’t ready to endorse the policy.

What are the key components?

Alberta’s carbon tax is to reach $30 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 2018, and drivers and natural gas users will feel it starting next year. It also seeks to cut methane emissions by 45 per cent from 2014 levels by 2025. The limit will be 100 million tons, allowing the industry to continue to grow.

Clark noted proudly and repeatedly in media interviews Monday that B.C. has had a carbon tax that was launched in 2008 by predecessor Gordon Campbell’s government.

Who came up with this plan?

He also challenged her government’s claimed role as a national and global leader, given that she inherited and then froze a policy initiated by predecessor Gordon Campbell.

“The bulk of the revenue is going into transition funds, including protecting low-income families and going back to entities such as small businesses”.

“That means if oilsands producers want to pump more oil, they’ll have to do it in a way that stays under the cap”, Canadian Press reports. That’s the place that has all that oil locked up in tar sands and is anxious about Priuses and Teslas taking over.

Now, they face added pressure to devise more benign ways to extract crude from one of the world’s most expensive oil zones.

Canada will be heading to the UN-sponsored summit with a limited national strategy and carbon rules that vary widely between provinces. And I am also intrigued to see Big Oil cheering the phase out of Big Coal. Alberta, however, still has the largest oil, gas and coal sectors of all 10 provinces. He is calling for a more gradual phase-out.

Why does Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, for example, need federal taxpayers’ money from Trudeau to implement a cap-and-trade market her own officials estimate will increase her government’s revenues by up to $2 billion annually, once fully operational?

Policy experts including Warren Mabee similarly praised the move, but raised several questions about the implementation.

Regardless, Alberta has taken a needed bold step forward.

“Certainty has value. As a CEO I have to make risk-adjusted return decisions in terms of how we allocate capital and I now have certainty on what and how my company needs to perform, “said Brian Ferguson, president and chief executive of Cenovus”. “Will renewables be incentivized above and beyond the carbon levy (tax)?”

Meanwhile, other firms with significant stakes in the oil sands remain circumspect. After years of the Harper administration muzzling its climate scientists, cutting environmental research funding, and rarely discussing the issue publicly, everyone apparently agrees that climate change is real (whoa) and we’re not doing enough about it (double whoa).

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the New Democratic Party was victorious in the recent Canadian federal election.