With the 2011 provincial election officially underway, the future of green energy in Ontario is once again up in the air. In the latest Ipsos Reid poll, conducted on behalf of Global News and other media organizations on Sept. 12, the leaders were virtually tied, with the Liberals at 38 per cent, and the Conservatives trailing slightly at 37 per cent.
Liberal leader and current Premier Dalton McGuinty is looking to continue with initiatives started with the Green Energy Act in 2009. Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak wants to move away from the current green energy system and adopt a new approach aimed at cutting the costs associated with the Liberal initiatives.
“We need to make sure it’s affordable,” said Ottawa Centre Conservative candidate Rob Dekker. “Right now the Green Energy Act is not affordable . . . we will honour the contract that the McGuinty government has already signed; however, we will not be signing any more contracts at the prices that the McGuinty government has laid out for the Green Energy Act.”
While an increasing green Ontario economy has been used as a model for green legislation in other provinces, it won’t necessarily encourage Canada to adopt more environmentally sustainable approaches federally, according to Dale Marshall, climate change policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation.
“We really haven’t seen the federal government jump in with policies that are similar in Ontario,” Marshall said. “Partly that’s because electricity is managed at the provincial level but frankly, also the federal government has shown itself to be less interested in addressing climate change and clean energy issues.”
“The federal government will have to take a different approach to climate change quite generally for our reputation to improve,” he said.
It’s a reputation that earned Canada the title of “Colossal Fossil” in 2009 from the global, online mobilization movement Avaaz.
“Canada’s performance here in Copenhagen builds on two years of delay, obstruction and total inaction,” said campaign director Ben Wikler in a press release. “This government thinks there’s a choice between environment and economy . . . Canada’s emissions are headed nowhere but up.”
However, economy and environmental sustainability are not mutually exclusive. At least that was the premise behind the 64th annual UN Department of Public Information and NGO meeting on sustainability, held in Germany Sept. 3-5.
The conference was an opportunity for NGOs around the world to have their say on sustainability and climate change issues prior to Rio+20, a top-level UN conference on sustainable development to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 2012.
The goal of the conference is to produce a detailed, political document between heads of state worldwide.
The message leading up to Rio+20, which falls on the 20th anniversary of the original Rio Conference in 1992 and the 10th anniversary of the Johannesburg Conference in 2002, is that change is happening but that government policies and business initiatives are needed to help guide the change.
“The transition to sustainable development . . . is underway,” said Daniel Mittler, political advisor with Greenpeace International. “It’s a decision moment for businesses: where are they going to stand,” he said, adding they can choose to be “leaders” or “laggards.”
Some countries have already made their decision and “have moved early to embrace the energy dimension of a green economy, and have introduced the necessary public policies and incentives,” said Achim Steiner, UN under-secretary general and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director, in a press release.
In Kenya, the government moved towards sustainable geothermal energy due largely to economic reasons, said UNEP spokesperson Nick Nuttall.
In an attempt to meet their Millenium Development Goals and improve access to electricity, he said the government looked at multiple different resources.
“Many companies are trying to sell Kenya thermal power stations, oil fire power stations, coal fire power stations . . . [the government] actually looked at it and said, ‘well hold on a second here. We have no oil, we have no coal, we are going to be forever dependent if we follow this path importing oil and coal at prices that we cannot predict over the coming years. Yet, here at home we have a resource of natural, clean energy, geothermal electricity from rocks in the Rift Valley,’” Nuttall said.
Geothermal energy in Kenya has an estimated potential of 7,000 to 10,000 MW of which only 209 MW was been harnessed since 1957, according to the state-owned Geothermal Development Company (GDC).
The rest went largely untouched until recently, Nuttall said. However, as a result of harnessing more geothermal energy, Kenya’s gross domestic product is now expected to grow by at least 10 per cent between now and 2012, according to the GDC.
“I think what’s happening is that governments around the world, both developed and developing, are trying to rethink the way they do their development and trying to rethink the way they grow their economies,” Nuttall said. “In part, because of the economic crisis of 2008, in part because we’re now seeing phenomenon like world oil and coal prices seesawing through enormous changes . . . that kind of unpredictability is not good for business and it’s not good for governments.”
In Australia, a developed country facing similar issues to Canada in terms of economic problems, a green economy is still being built.
“You have Australia in the middle of an economic downturn as well, but they just announced they were going to immediately, before the end of the year, introduce a carbon tax and a cap and trade system,” Marshall said.
As for Canada’s minimalist approach to sustainability, Nuttall said it could be partially due to a “resource curse.”
“It faces the challenge of having quite abundant quantities of water so you might call that a resource curse to the extent that you’re not as worried, but then Canada has to also start joining the dots because we live in a globalized world,” he said.
“A drought in one country can affect the food prices the next day, climate change can disrupt entire supply chains.”
It’s not a reason that Marshall finds plausible.
“There are still issues of water quality and water quantity in a number of places,” he said. “We are experiencing climate change. It’s true we are way less vulnerable than most other countries because we are a rich country . . . but nevertheless we are being impacted.”
Despite Canada’s less than positive climate change and sustainability reputation internationally, Ontario is still considered a leader, according to the David Suzuki Foundation, in the green economy. However, the Oct. 6 provincial election is a possible turning point as the Conservative party has announced they wish to change a system that Marshall said is doing fairly well.
The Green Energy Act and feed-in-tariff in particular are successful examples of Ontario’s green economy, he said.
“[It] allows small and large renewable energy projects to access the grid . . . that has led already to quite a substantial investment in billions of dollars in renewable energy in Ontario.”
The result, Marshall said, is more people being hired to build renewable energy technologies and programs in colleges and universities being developed to train people in the necessary skilled labour.
