Category Archives: Aldyen Donnelly

I have talked to EPA officials, staff in bill-drafting senators and house members’ offices and two presidential advisors on this matter on a number of occasions, including in the last week.

Every time I ask about the role of tax measures in any North American continental carbon/energy market design, they respond that these are revenues, not emission reduction measures. Obviously, if emission taxes are generating revenues then, by definition, they are not resulting in emission reductions.
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In his interview on "The House", John Drexhage erred, importantly, in his description of current national GHG discharges arising from energy use. This is quite understandable, as I am sure John is very tired after two weeks in Copenhagen.

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There is nothing "secret", as suggested in a recent article by Kevin Gaudet, about new global tax proposals being discussed in draft treaties at Copenhagen. Every one of the new taxes outlined in the article was included in a set of options appearing in brackets in the draft Copenhagen agreement for negotiators that was published in October and I circulated and commented on in early November. 
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Question: I am concerned about this clause in the current draft of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA).

The clause I am most concerned about tracking is the following:

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The conclusions outlined in this Toronto Sun article are completely wrong.

It says "The U.S. figure [17%] is derived strictly from cuts that can be achieved by capping greenhouse gases and trading emissions permits."

This is not true.
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It appears that British Columbia is also blowing it with the GHG reporting rule that the province announced recently. But the BC and Ontario rules, as proposed, are quite different and blow it in quite different ways. As a starting point, the fact that the two leading provincial members of the Western Climate Initiative clearly cannot agree on a common GHG reporting standard is a pretty bad sign.
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On December 6, 2009, expect Obama to announce that the US, Japan, South Korea and China have agreed to announce national GHG targets before the summer of 2012 and to implement common domestic "cap and trade" systems. (None of the national targets will be legally binding, but the national leaders will downplay that reality.)

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In my first response, I focused on the relevance of Dr. Jaccard’s plan and costing model from a rather theoretical perspective.  In this message, I try to take the debate to the ground.

Dr. Jaccard’s model puts his compliance cost and GDP estimates in a very general setting. One question I asked myself was: which Canadian communities will be most impacted, and how much?

Remember, you can only reduce GHG emissions where they physically occur.
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Denmark’s economic recovery—from the financial crisis that hit Scandinavia in 1990—over the last 2 decades is anything but a transition to a green economy. "Experts" who remark only on Danish green technology exports are failing to tell the whole story.

It is true that Denmark consumes less imported coal than it did in 1990 (Denmark has no domestic coal reserves). But 50% of Danish electricity, steam and heat supply still derives from the combustion of imported coal.

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