Many of us will view with a jaundiced eye the Faustian deal made by Toronto with the Ford government that signs over Ontario Place for development in exchange for transit and highway funding the Province should have been providing anyway. The planned spa for the well-heeled will obliterate precious green space while also curtailing public access.
Deals like this put us on a slippery slope to – well, you know where.
And here’s one that’s even more diabolical: the Liberal government’s new Carbon Capture and Storage tax credit program. This is a bad deal for Canadians in every way imaginable. Having already given away $2B of our money to oil barons for CCS, our government is now making a deal of Faustian proportions that will dramatically increase the drain on taxpayers while doing nothing to bolster Canada’s abysmal climate action track record. A far cry from eliminating fossil fuel subsidies!
This is not what carbon tax dollars should be spent on, so it’s no wonder that Pierre Poilievre, beating his “axe the tax” drum, is finding a following – conveniently ignoring the quarterly climate action incentive payments we get. Kick backs like CCS tax credits just play right into Poilievre’s hand, because already Canadians aren’t seeing tangible results from carbon pricing. We want all-out green energy development and a just transition for oil patch workers, not more funding help for profit-rich oil giants.
In fact, many of us advocating for a liveable future for our children and grandchildren in a world racing towards climate tipping points are beyond frustrated at the federal government’s “one step forward, two steps back” climate policy, of which this CCS subsidy is a glaring example.
In a 2021 letter to US and Canadian governments over 500 signatories urged lawmakers to: “Stop subsidizing CCS. Stop permitting CCS. Stop using CCS to justify climate inaction.” Why take this position? There isn’t room in this article for a deep dive into the non-viability of CCS and that’s too bad. But here are some of the compelling reasons to give it a pass:
- CCS does not remove CO2 from the atmosphere. It only captures production emissions, and even at that it falls short: projects to date have systematically overpromised and under-delivered on emissions reductions. And those who trumpet the technology conveniently skip any reference to the downstream emissions of fossil fuel combustion.
- Five decades of research and billions spent so far haven’t led to economical scalability of CCS – the technology is costly and over 80% of US projects have failed.
- A new report from the International Energy Agency warns that sequestering enough carbon to be effective “would require an increase in global spending on the technology from $4 billion last year to $5 trillion by 2050.”
- Funding CCS diverts funds from green energy investment. Canada has already provided 14 times more fossil fuel finance than support for renewables between 2018-2020.
- Tellingly, 70% of the CO2 captured in Canada is used for enhanced oil recovery (i.e. pumping out more oil). No wonder oil magnates are gleeful.
So instead of consigning CCS to the rubbish heap of failed strategies, we’ll be lining the pockets of oil companies and giving them a licence to up production, while handing them an excuse to abandon their wind and solar investments, as Suncor did recently. Metaphorically, we are making a deal with the devil.
And when you deal with the devil, you end up in an inferno…
Jane Jenner is a grandmother and climate action advocate living in Burlington