Targets for greenhouse emission cuts not on for NDP

Jason Markusoff
The Edmonton Journal

Thursday, February 14, 2008

EDMONTON - Alberta's NDP won't follow their political rivals and set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Liberals say they'll do it in five years while the Tories say they'll accomplish it in 12 years.

"It's so complex and it's so important that to sort of say we would set this cap five years from now or next year and so on, anybody who's talking like that has not really analyzed it," Mason told The Journal's editorial board.

Premier Ed Stelmach has branded the Liberals' targets to reduce emissions as destructive to Alberta's petroleum-driven economy, while Liberal Leader Kevin Taft has said the Conservative's target is irresponsibly slow.

Part of Alberta's climate-change problem now is that nobody set tough emissions goals in the past, said Nashina Shariff of Toxics Watch Society of Alberta. Europe's tough, Kyoto-inspired targets are ideal and signal to industry how far they have to go, she said.

"There is a strong basis in science for targets of a particular magnitude."

Mason's party also differs from the Liberals and Tories with its refusal to embrace carbon capture, a highly touted technology that would see the energy sector's greenhouse-gas emissions siphoned off flue stacks and piped into underground aquifers, oil wells or coal seams.

"We just don't believe in that technology," he said.

Environmental groups such as Sierra Club, Toxics Watch and Pembina Institute see carbon capture as a viable and scientifically tested approach, but say there's more research to be done.

Like Mason, they don't want taxpayer dollars to help pay for industry's green initiatives.

jmarkusoff [at] thejournal [dot] canwest [dot] com

© The Edmonton Journal 2008