Shunpiking Online Vo.4 No.4 'Emissions break for oil sands' by GARY ZATZMAN

HALIFAX (27 April 2007) - THE HARPER Conservative administration has made a great to-do once again about bashing the Kyoto Protocols as "ruinous" for Canadian industry. This time it was on the occasion of introducing its so-called environmental initiative in the wake of the large mass turnouts marking "Earth Day" this year. The Canadian government is joining initiatives already further advanced south of the border by the Bush Administration. These all entrench the authority of monopoly right over any and all forms of environmental stewardship.

It has come out that the central point all along of Environment Minister John Baird's program announcements of 25-26 April 2007 was not to legislate a broad social responsibility to protect the environment. The real aim has been to entrench an exemption from such responsibility specifically for companies operating in Canada's oil-sands.

Typically, this intention was not announced in a straightforward way by "Canada's New Government." Instead, it was sprinkled within the bland and disinforming prose of a front-page report in The Globe and Mail Report on Business of Friday, 27 April by Shawn McCarthy and David Ebner, entitled "Ottawa signals emissions break for oil sands." According to this report (reproduced in full below), the government's regulations would be "exempting new projects from greenhouse gas emission targets until three years after they are up and running."

The entire business of setting out regulations is significant. Canadian parliamentary procedure enables the Opposition parties to rail against the government while the bill can be debated and voted. However, the regulations implementing the government's bill cannot be debated. These regulations are exclusively the affair of "the Governor in Council," i.e., the Cabinet, and the responsibility for their enforcement falls not on Parliament but on the Environment Minister of the day - both of whom are at the service of the agenda of the monopolies, not the people. This arrangement of enforcement authority relative to regulatory authority merits all-sided attention from all those concerned to prevent government-led attacks on Canadian people's rights and freedoms.

Within it, a trap has been planted to buttress the powers of the rich monopolies over the public while demoralizing any resistance on the legal front. For example: the Fisheries Act makes it a serious offence to destroy habitat, subject to serious and costly penalties. Section 35 of that Act empowers the Cabinet to make, and the Fisheries minister to enforce, regulations implementing the provisions of the Act. The first regulation under Section 35 specifically exempts the fishing industry from any possibility of being prosecuted under this Act and its penalties. That leaves an aggrieved party only the possibility of proving damages in a private civil action against a fishing corporation. The most that any other party can bring against the government under this law is an action against the local implementation of a regulation - what are frequently effected by means of what are known as "variation orders."

In 2003, the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax prepared a challenge on the legal front against one such "variation order," aimed at setting a precedent that would rein in the free hand enjoyed by trawling fleets to scour the ocean bottom and destroy any remaining habitat that would support any livelihood for small independent fishermen. Their action was given leave to proceed in Federal Court.

However, the real reason leave was granted only became clear after the fact. Not only was there a negative judgment in the specific case, but the judgment put down on the record the methods of precisely how every possible avenue of appeal against the federal Cabinet's regulation-making powers under Section 35 of the Fisheries Act could be denied by this court.

These arguments become part of the federal arsenal against any future legal challenge. In this way, the Federal Court vested the federal government and the corporate trawling fleets with the legal veneer to act with impunity. This impunity could likely never have been obtained through the ordinary processes of House of Commons debate of proposed legislation. This is an important precedent for honest and democratic environmental activists to keep in mind when planning what to do about these latest schemes of the Harper Conservatives.

The arrangement of the emission-credits trading system

In the case of this particular set of regulations, the same Globe and Mail report points out: "...large industrial emitters will have to reduce their emissions per unit of production at existing facilities by 18 per cent in the first three years, and then a further 2 per cent a year. Companies that can't meet those so-called intensity targets, however, will be able to purchase credits from more efficient ones or contribute to a technology fund..."

What is not mentioned here is the arrangement of this particular emission-credits trading system. The Canadian and US multinational corporate entities dominating this sphere intend to establish such a system only among the companies operating in Canada, the US and Mexico. The idea is not to participate in the emission-credits trading system that many developing countries have wanted to launch at the United Nations level, monitored by an authority controlled by the participating governments and not by private agglomerations of finance capital. This is the exception being carved out to preserve and protect "monopoly right," and it is to be unfolded as part of the "Security and Prosperity Partnership" being hatched as part of creating a United States of North American Monopolies. This means that the environmental health and rights of Canadians cannot be defended without opposing annexation by the US.

The aim of this particular variant on the idea of an emission-credits system has emerged already in academic journals that discuss "environmental management" as well as those that discuss "corporate social responsibility." It is deliberately and consciously designed to foreclose establishment of an international system based on public right. The system that the corporate sector has in mind, based on and guided by "monopoly right," enables the biggest and worst polluters to purchase carbon credits from smaller, less-developed companies - in effect, a right to continue to pollute without having to abate any damages for which their present or past activities are already responsible.

What Environment Minister Baird and his government are proposing is:

1. to pay the rich with vast multi-year tax exemptions for continuing operations on this side of the Canada-US border; and

2. to abandon at the same time, once and for all, any government funding for social programs of environmental cleanup.

This shows that this apparently "environmental" question is in fact a problem to be taken up for solution by a broad non-partisan political movement. Those who confine these questions to a matter of a so-called "green agenda" are setting themselves and others up for a fall. While many other forms of opposition can be readily marginalized, opponents of this scheme who address its solution from the standpoint of an overall program that serves the vast majority will win support.

Elimination of government-regulated environmental cleanup funds has been an objective of these emission-credits trading schemes from the outset. At the time of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, it was the first Bush Administration which proposed the earliest emission-credits trading schemes, explicitly to get rid of "polluter pay" notions brought forward in that conclave. Under what Environment Minister Baird proposes, helping triple oilsands production and oil exports to the United States by 2015 becomes an act of the highest patriotism deserving of the biggest tax break, the dominant interests in the oil patch get to pollute with impunity forever, the smaller less-developed companies selling them unused credits acquire money-capital to continue participating in the circus, and the working people are left to suffer the damage and pay all the bills.

Contrary to the capital-centred views inspiring the approach of the Canadian government and opposition parties to solving environmental challenges, the preservation, fostering and humanizing of the environment is a proper field of action in the 21st century for major social programs. This latest announcement of the Harper Conservatives represents yet another of their gross anti-people criminal acts. It shows once again the necessity to organize so that the Canadian people bring into being governments that stop paying the rich and increase funding for social programs.

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Reference: Ottawa Signals Emissions Break for Oil Sands

Shawn McCarthy & David Ebner

Globe and Mail, 27 April 2007

The Conservative government has signalled that it won't let its climate change plan derail aggressive oil sands expansion, exempting new projects from greenhouse gas emission targets until three years after they are up and running.

Under regulations announced yesterday by Environment Minister John Baird, large industrial emitters will have to reduce their emissions per unit of production at existing facilities by 18 per cent in the first three years, and then a further 2 per cent a year.

Companies that can't meet those so-called intensity targets, however, will be able to purchase credits from more efficient ones or contribute to a technology fund, at an initial cost of $15 a tonne, rising to $20 in 2013.

For new plants, corporations will face only a traditional environmental assessment process, and then will have three years before they must begin reducing their emissions.

Calgary-based petroleum companies had warned that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was prepared to get tough on the oil sands, which account for the fastest-growing component of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Baird said the new plan seeks to balance the environmental goals with the needs of a growing economy.

The industrial targets are "concrete, challenging, yet realistic," he said.

He said the government felt it was necessary not to impose initial emission limits on new plants in order to allow for economic growth.

Critics said Canada will not be able to meet the government's emission targets -- which environmentalists consider to be woefully inadequate -- unless emissions from the oil sands are somehow reined in.

"I'm afraid that the entire [industrial emitters] program is a sequence of loopholes," said Julia Langer, director of the World Wildlife Fund's global threats program.

She said the initial exemptions for new plants and the $15-a-tonne maximum payment into the technology fund seriously undermine the plan.

"This is a regulatory plan that is geared to business as usual for the tar sands sector," Ms. Langer said.

However, industry spokesmen said the government's targets represent a realistic "stretch" goal for industry.

Senior oil patch executives, including Ron Brenneman, chief executive officer of Petro-Canada, and Clive Mather, the retiring CEO of Shell Canada, met at a downtown hotel in Calgary with Jim Prentice, the Conservatives' senior minister from Calgary, and Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn.

The oil patch executives said the targets were tough, but likely do-able, and said they were happy to see the energy business wasn't singled out with specific targets.

"They're aggressive targets, but as you know our company supports government frameworks for greenhouse gas reductions," said Kevin Meyers, president of ConocoPhillips Canada, one of the country's biggest energy firms and a leading oil sands player.

"We believe what's been presented here is a good start toward slowing our emissions and hopefully eventually stopping them and reversing them. We've got to work through a lot of details and they are aggressive targets."

Petrocan is preparing to unveil details of its planned Fort Hills oil sands project and Mr. Brenneman said the new rules are only "one factor" in the company's overall thinking.

"We need some time [to weigh it]," he said in a brief interview with reporters.

Pierre Alvarez, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said the ability to offset emissions rather than just reducing them internally is key for oil companies, but industry data will take time to compile.

"I don't think anyone's going to be putting hard numbers out there for a while."

Environment Canada officials said the new climate change plan will stabilize Canada's greenhouse gas emissions by as early as 2010, and reduce them by 20 per cent of 2006 levels by 2020, or a decrease of 150 megatonnes.

The Pembina Institute has forecast that the expansion of the oil sands -- where production is expected to triple in the next 10 years -- could increase emissions by as much as 142 megatonnes by 2020.

Companies will initially be able to meet 70 per cent of their target by paying into the fund, which will in turn finance research and development into technologies, including the capture and underground storage of carbon dioxide. By 2017, they would be able to meet only 10 per cent of their regulatory obligation through fund contributions.