Climate Change Action Plan

The Ontario Liberals are taking global warming seriously and although their intentions may be good, this may be the start of the biggest government led social engineering experiment since the Great Leap Forward.

The Globe and Mail broke the story when they got a copy of a confidential Climate Change Action Plan stating that Ontario will be introducing a government agency that will be making huge changes to our lifestyles.

New Ontario agency will be given sweeping mandate to overhaul energy use
Coming soon: Ontario’s green energy fiasco, the sequel
Ontario to spend $7-billion on sweeping climate change plan

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New Ontario agency will be given sweeping mandate to overhaul energy use
The Globe and Mail
Adrian Morrow and Greg Keenan
Last updated 28 April 2016

The Ontario government plans to make the majority of the province’s buildings emissions-free and slash the use of cars to just 20 per cent of commuter trips by 2050 as part of a dramatic plan to meet its climate-change goals.

To achieve these aims, the province will establish a “new ultra-low-carbon utility” – an agency with a sweeping mandate to change everything about how Ontarians use energy to reduce carbon emissions drastically.

These details are in a confidential draft of the province’s Climate Change Action Plan obtained by The Globe and Mail. The strategy, which wants to put “a zero emission or hybrid electric vehicle in every multicar household driveway within eight years,” is expected to be unveiled next month. It is meant to supplement a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that takes effect next year.

by 2050, 80 per cent of residents use public transit, walk or
cycle to work

A work group walking to their job site.

The draft plan promises to get at least 1.7 million electric and hybrid cars in use by 2024, take seven million gas-burning vehicles off the road by 2030, and ensure that by 2050, 80 per cent of residents use public transit, walk or cycle to work.

changing the building code

It would also cut emissions from buildings by 15 per cent by 2030 and ensure most buildings are emissions-free by 2050. This would be done by helping homeowners and businesses install solar panels or geothermal systems and undertake retrofits, and by changing the building code to require renovations and new construction to make buildings more energy-efficient.

It would buy offsets to make the Ontario government carbon-neutral next year. By 2030, the government will cut its own emissions by 50 per cent.

The plan would provide funding for industry to switch to cleaner factories, and for research into new low-carbon technologies.

To co-ordinate the electricity system, home-based power generation such as rooftop solar panels, low-carbon transportation and energy-efficient heating and cooling systems in buildings, a new utility would be established – effectively an agency to oversee a massive shift to low-emission homes, buildings and transportation options.

Environment Minister Glen Murray's spokesman, David Mullock, said the document obtained by the Globe is a preliminary draft circulated among industry to get feedback on the government's ideas.

"These discussion documents are very much draft in nature and do not reflect any final decisions regarding the Climate Change Action Plan. We will continue to consult on the Climate Change Action Plan to ensure that Ontario is successful in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and in meeting our reduction targets," he wrote in an email.

“This looks like a fairly comprehensive approach,” said Keith Brooks of Environmental Defence. He said the idea of having a single agency to help Ontarians retrofit their homes and oversee the transition to electric and hybrid vehicles is a good one; such things now are often handled piecemeal.

But Mr. Brooks cautioned the plan is short on details: “This looks like a precursor to an action plan.”

The document is largely silent, for instance, on how the new utility would fit with existing electricity distribution, transmission and generation companies. It also does not say how much more emissions-free electricity generation – whether from nuclear plants, wind farms or solar projects – would be necessary.

The plan does not spell out how it would get Ontarians to switch to zero-emission or hybrid electric vehicles in eight years. Possibilities include giving drivers more rebates on electric cars or mandating that a certain percentage of auto makers’ sales be electric or hybrid.

Either way, reaching that number will be hard. By The Globe’s calculation, it would entail sales of 1.7 million hybrid or electric vehicles in the next eight years in Ontario or about 200,000 annually – compared with just 52,000 last year.

“depends on what you’re smoking,”

Whether it is possible to reach that goal “depends on what you’re smoking,” said one auto industry source who has been involved in discussions with several provinces regarding plans to increase the electric and hybrid vehicle fleets. About 8 per cent of the fleet is replaced annually, the source said, which means it takes about 20 years to turn over completely.

“Manufacturers are not and will not make or sell that many cars for Canada by that date,” said Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association of Canada.

Such a move would also signal to manufacturers of large volumes of vehicles with internal combustion engines that the products they make in Ontario are not welcome in the province, Mr. Volpe said.

Transportation accounted for 35 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions in Ontario in 2013, the document says, pointing out that to meet the province’s goals, all vehicles will need to be low- or zero-emission by 2050.

“promote complete communities”

The report suggests the government will push for the trucking industry to switch to cleaner-burning natural gas. It also says the province will “promote complete communities” – planning jargon for encouraging cities and towns to stop sprawling and create dense developments where people live within walking distance of work.

Joe Vaccaro, chief executive officer of the Ontario Home Builders’ Association, said his industry can meet the province’s goals, but the government would have to make building code changes over a period of time so companies can adapt, and also make it easier to connect home solar panels and geothermal systems to the grid. He said some developers are already raising carbon-neutral buildings, with tight construction and strong insulation, and solar panels or geothermal systems producing electricity.

“The aspiration is great, as long as we’re reasonable about how to achieve this,” he said in an interview. “It’s not in the realm of the impossible.”

Mr. Vaccaro also pointed out that new home construction makes up only one per cent of the total annually, meaning the province will achieve its most signficant emissions reductions by retrofitting existing buildings. Among other things, he said the province could require an energy-efficiency audit whenever a home is sold; this would encourage people to retrofit their homes to raise their value.

Premier Kathleen Wynne and Environment Minister Glen Murray have made climate change a central policy priority over the past year. The province aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, 37 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050. Ontario currently sits about 6 per cent below, meaning it has a lot of work to do.

Cap-and-trade is expected to raise about $2-billion annually, and the government plans to use the proceeds to build new transit lines and set up other programs under the action plan.

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Globe Editorial
Coming soon: Ontario’s green energy fiasco,
the sequel
The Globe and Mail
April 29, 2016

Late last year, Ontario’s Auditor-General put out a report detailing the extent of the provincial government’s mismanagement of the electricity system. According to Bonnie Lysyk, thanks to a misguided government policy of artificially pumping up the cost of producing power in the province, Ontarians had overpaid for electricity to the tune of $37-billion between 2006 and 2014, and will continue to be overcharged by another $133-billion by 2032.

The scale of the waste

The scale of the waste is so large as to be almost incomprehensible, which may explain why Ms. Lysyk’s report was a one-day news wonder when it landed last December. Once the count gets into the hundreds of billions, the mind goes numb. If the province announced construction of the Burning Money Biomass Plant, fuelled by bales of five and 10-dollar bills, it probably wouldn’t be capable of destroying $170-billion.

The size of the disaster in the province’s electricity system is hard to get your head around. But voters, consumers, businesses and especially the Liberal government should be rereading Ms. Lysyk’s report. Because a document leaked to The Globe and Mail this week suggests that the Liberals, who a decade ago broke the electricity system through a fatal combination of good intentions and a willful disregard of both expertise and experience, may be preparing to repeat the exercise with their next greenhouse gas reduction plan.

The thing is, Ontario needs a greenhouse gas reduction strategy. So does every province, and so does the federal government. To meet our international commitments, and to bend the curve on global warming, those carbon-reduction goals have to be ambitious. Ontario’s proposed Climate Change Mitigation and Low Carbon Economy Act aims to reduce the province’s 1990 emissions by 15 per cent by 2020, 37 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050. The province is committing itself to substantial carbon reduction in the next decade, and a near-zero carbon economy in a generation.

Those are not impossible ideals. They’re doable – using the right tools. Dramatically reducing carbon emissions is not a crazy idea, but the way Ontario is proposing to get to a low-carbon economy almost certainly is.

look, Ma, we’re subsidizing the Green Jobs of the future!

A decade ago, the government of Ontario started driving up electricity costs with a simple objective in mind: It wanted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the production of electricity. This was the right objective. But the way it went about it was all wrong. Instead of encouraging the electricity sector to be as efficient as possible, the government essentially ordered it to become costly, inefficient and irrational. Some of this was motivated by fantasies of industrial policy – look, Ma, we’re subsidizing the Green Jobs Of the Future! – and some of it was driven by an insistence on ignoring basic economic advice, much of it coming from the government’s own experts.

The result is that the cost of generating electricity in Ontario has exploded, even as power costs plummeted elsewhere. Between 2004 and 2014, power generation costs in Ontario increased by 74 per cent, according to the auditor. This benefits no one. The higher prices don’t come from carbon taxes; they come from higher electricity production costs. And that imposes a heavy cost on the economy.

However, because prices were rising, Ontarians started using less energy. Power use dropped by 7 per cent between 2006 and 2014. But at the same time, thanks to subsidies to encourage greater power production from green sources, the province’s generation capacity grew by 19 per cent. As a result, the province is now a major exporter of electricity – sold at prices far below the cost of production. The more power the province exports, the more taxpayers and ratepayers lose.

Ontario could have chosen a different route. Instead of politicians completely remaking the electricity sector on a whim, introducing inefficiencies by deciding what power technologies to back and how much to subsidize them, Ontario could have done the opposite. It could have set a carbon-reduction goal, imposed carbon taxes on carbon-generating fuels – and left it to producers and consumers to figure out how to most efficiently respond by reducing their own costs and emissions. It should have taxed dirty power and let the market figure out the cheapest way to get to lower emissions levels.

more enthusiasm than knowledge
Nearly a decade later, this week’s leaked document on its upcoming greenhouse-gas strategy suggests Kathleen Wynne’s government has not learned from her predecessor Dalton McGuinty’s mistakes. Glen Murray, a minister with more enthusiasm than knowledge, is in charge of the environmental file; last time around, George Smitherman was the designated enthusiast. Ontarians should be worried.

The goal of any carbon-reduction plan should be to reduce emissions as much as possible at the lowest cost possible. Canada doesn’t need an economic revolution; it needs simple but clear incentives, like carbon taxes, for companies and people to reduce carbon use.

But what Mr. Murray is working on sounds like a Leap Manifesto. It’s not a plan to dramatically lower emissions while screwing up the economy as little as possible. It reads more like a blueprint to meddle as much as possible, to get government’s hands on as many levers and in as many pockets as possible, with climate change as a pretext.

subsidies galore for consumers

Ontario’s alphabet soup of electricity bureaucracies will now get another, the “ultra-low carbon service provider,” which promises a “state-of-the-art 21st-century approach” to managing power and more. There will be subsidies galore for consumers, ensuring a “zero-emission or hybrid electric vehicle in every multi-car household driveway within eight years.” There will be subsidies for industry, of course, “positioning the province to be a leading ultra-low carbon technology company hub.” It’s not a plan to harness the free market to achieve carbon reduction. It looks like a plan for a lot of central planning.

A decade ago, this is exactly how the province’s $170-billion electricity fiasco started. It’s Groundhog Day in Ontario, and the Wynne government still hasn’t seen its shadow.

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Ontario to spend $7-billion on sweeping climate change plan
The Globe and Mail
Adrian Morrow and Greg Keenan
16 May 2016

The Ontario government will spend more than $7-billion over four years on a sweeping climate change plan that will affect every aspect of life – from what people drive to how they heat their homes and workplaces – in a bid to slash the province’s carbon footprint.

Ontario will begin phasing out natural gas for heating, provide incentives to retrofit buildings and give rebates to drivers who buy electric vehicles. It will also require that gasoline sold in the province contain less carbon, bring in building code rules requiring all new homes by 2030 to be heated with electricity or geothermal systems, and set a target for 12 per cent of all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2025.

While such policies are likely to be popular with ecoconscious voters, who will now receive government help to green their lives, they are certain to cause mass disruption for the province’s automotive and energy sectors, which will have to make significant changes to the way they do business. And they have already created tension within the government between Environment Minister Glen Murray and some of his fellow ministers who worry he is going too far.

The 57-page Climate Change Action Plan was debated by Premier Kathleen Wynne’s cabinet Wednesday and subsequently obtained by The Globe and Mail. Stamped “Cabinet Confidential,” the document lays out a strategy from 2017 to 2021. It contains about 80 different policies, grouped into 32 different “actions.” Each action has a price tag attached to it, as well as an estimate of the amount of emissions it will cut by 2020.

public release slated for June.

The Globe had previously uncovered details of the plan, but this is the first time the full blueprint has been revealed. The strategy is scheduled to be further reviewed by cabinet ministers and fine-tuned, sources said, with public release slated for June.

The many new programs will be paid for out of revenue from the province’s upcoming cap-and-trade system, which is expected to be approved by the legislature this week and come into effect at the start of next year. Together, the cap-and-trade system and the action plan are the backbone of the province’s strategy to cut emissions to 15 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, 37 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050.

“We are on the cusp of a once-in-a-lifetime transformation. It’s a transformation of how we look at our planet and the impact we have on it,” reads a preamble to the plan signed by Ms. Wynne. “It’s a transformation that will forever change how we live, work, play and move.”

Highlights include:
•
 $3.8-billion for new grants, rebates and other subsidies to retrofit buildings, and move them off natural gas and onto geothermal, solar power or other forms of electric heat. Many of these programs will be administered by a new Green Bank, modelled on a similar agency in New York State, to provide financing for solar and geothermal projects.
•
 New building code rules that will require all homes and small buildings built in 2030 or later to be heated without using fossil fuels, such as natural gas. This will be expanded to all buildings before 2050. Other building code changes will require major renovations to include energy-efficiency measures. All homes will also have to undergo an energy-efficiency audit before they are sold.
•
 $285-million for electric vehicle incentives. These include a rebate of up to $14,000 for every electric vehicle purchased; up to $1,000 to install home charging; taking the provincial portion of the HST off electric vehicle sales; an extra subsidy program for low– and moderate-income households to get older cars off the road and replace them with electric; and free overnight electricity for charging electric vehicles. The province will also build more charging stations at government buildings, including LCBO outlets, and consider making electrical vehicle plug-ins mandatory on all new buildings. The plan sets targets of expanding electric vehicle sales to 5 per cent of all vehicles sold by 2020, up to 12 per cent by 2025, and aiming to get an electric or hybrid vehicle in every multivehicle driveway by 2024, a total of about 1.7 million cars.
•
 New lower-carbon fuel standards would require all liquid transportation fuels, such as gasoline and diesel, to slash life-cycle carbon emissions by 5 per cent by 2020. The plan will also provide $176-million in incentives to fuel retailers to sell more biodiesel and 85-per-cent ethanol blend. The government will also oblige natural gas to contain more renewable content, such as gas from agriculture and waste products.
•
 $280-million to help school boards buy electric buses and trucking companies switch to lower-carbon trucks, including by building more liquid natural gas fuelling stations.
•
 $354-million toward the GO regional rail network.
•
 $200-million to build more cycling infrastructure, including curb-separated bike lanes and bike parking at GO stations.
•
 $375-million for research and development into new clean technologies, including $140-million for a Global Centre for Low-Carbon Mobility at an Ontario university or college to develop electric and other low-carbon vehicle technology.
•
 $1.2-billion to help factories and other industrial businesses cut emissions, such as by buying more energy-efficient machines.
•
 $174-million to make the government carbon neutral. This will include retrofitting buildings, allowing some bureaucrats to work from home and buying carbon offsets.

The actions expected to cause the largest emissions cuts by 2020 are moving buildings and the electricity system off natural gas (three million tonnes); programs to make industry more energy efficient (2.5 million tonnes); the low-carbon fuel standard (two million tonnes); the renewable content requirement for natural gas (one million tonnes); and switching trucks and buses to liquefied natural gas and electricity (400,000 tonnes.)

Cutting natural gas

Cutting natural gas, which currently provides 76 per cent of heating, will require mass adoption of green technologies in buildings across the province. The plan lists geothermal systems, air heat pumps and rooftop solar panels as technologies that will be eligible for rebates. It could also require an expansion of the electricity grid. The plan promises, however, to subsidize any increased electricity costs for homeowners.

The electric vehicle targets represent a sea change for the province’s $16-billion auto sector. The 2025 goal would boost to about 86,000 the number of annual electric vehicle sales, more than 20 times the number of electric vehicles sold in the province so far this century.

Already, the plan is causing tension within government, pitting Mr. Murray against Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli and Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid. Mr. Murray’s colleagues, sources said, complained that he often did not bother to consult with other ministers as he drafted the strategy, and ignored their advice when he did.

the new Green Bank

Energy officials were particularly concerned about the new Green Bank, contending its functions could be handled by the Independent Electricity System Operator, sources said. Mr. Duguid, meanwhile, was worried about the effect on the auto sector. Mr. Murray also aggravated colleagues with an Economic Club speech last month, in which he chastised auto companies for not doing enough to fight climate change and mused about closing down the province’s nuclear power plants.

The behind-the-scenes battle played out at a meeting of cabinet ministers involved in the climate file two weeks ago, when Mr. Chiarelli and others confronted Mr. Murray with their complaints, sources said. After The Globe subsequently revealed the clash, all parties have tried to play it down.

“We’re working very well together. I’m very excited about it. We have a very, very good strong team and we’ve worked very hard for two years,” Mr. Murray said last week.

Mr. Chiarelli, for his part, acknowledged there had been “debate” at Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, but said it ended with “100 per cent consensus” on the climate plan.

“We have a normal amount of debate on this issue,” he said. “If you were to get a leak on every cabinet meeting, you would find out, you know, that there’s a good airing of points of view on issues.”

Asked if Mr. Murray had to change or water down the plan to get cabinet buy-in, Mr. Chiarelli cracked a grin.

“You know what? I’d be breaking my oath if I told you that,” he said. “You know that.”

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