Hiding Under The Bed

Andrew Scheer says that his environmental policy is a work in progress. But it really is hard to know what his party is thinking. It changes gears frequently. Rick Smith writes:

Trying to follow the Conservative stance on climate change can give you whiplash.

After all, this is a party that voted unanimously against signing the Paris Climate Accord in 2016, only to turn around eight months later and vote fully in support of the Accord (with only one Tory member dissenting).  This new commitment didn’t last long, however, with Leader Andrew Scheer first stating that the party’s climate plan would be built around achieving the Paris targets and then retreating to the vaguely defined goal of achieving “meaningful targets.”

All we really know is what the Conservatives don't like:

We know taxing pollution is out, despite a long history of Conservative support for market pricing mechanisms. Technology now seems to be a big part of the Tory answer.  Scheer has not been terribly specific about what “clean technologies” he is thinking of when he talks about how Canada is a leader in climate technology that it should be exporting to the world.  It doesn’t seem likely that he is referring to electric vehicles or renewable energy, support for which have been slashed by his friends in the Ford and Kenney governments.

It would appear that they are putting their faith in Carbon Storage and Capture (CCS):

Scheer’s Environment and Climate Change Critic, Ed Fast, may have given us a hint of where the Conservatives are headed in praising carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.  Fast notes that despite the standard Conservative skepticism about governments picking “winners and losers” it could be useful for the government to put its thumb on the scale in favour of CCS, stating “we do want to encourage clean technology, especially in our oil and gas sector.”

CCS has long been favoured by the oil and gas industry as a handy way of continuing to rely on fossil fuels while addressing a growing public demand to get a grip on greenhouse gas emissions.  The problem is that there is little evidence it can actually be cost-effectively scaled up to deal with the scope of the problem.  Currently, the National Energy Board calculates that existing and proposed CCS systems worldwide would capture carbon equal to just 1% of current global emissions.  So the Tory’s magic bullet is unlikely to be any more effective than the Liberal carbon tax that Fast and Scheer contend is too low – and too economically harmful at higher levels — to effect real change.

You get the impression that Scheer would rather ignore the whole thing -- which, frankly, is what the Conservatives have been doing for years. They are hiding under the bed, hoping the bogeyman will go away.

Image: Jewish Public Media