The Crucial Role of Government in Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Hoping for the Best but Planning for the Same

By Tyler Bryant

Wishful thinking is not a sound foundation upon which to address one of the most important environmental, political, social, economic and technological challenges in human history. Unfortunately, emissions abatement strategy in Canada has heavily emphasized wishful thinking as a policy option. Hoping for individuals and businesses to change their actions and use less energy from fossil fuels has been a policy failure and is clear evidence that wishful thinking will not work.

Canadian emissions have been rising since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and show few signs of leveling-off, let alone falling. Federal and provincial policies to reduce emissions concentrate on insignificant incentives, idle threats of regulation and voluntary programs like the One-Tonne Challenge. These policies provide no certainty and only hope that individuals and businesses change their actions. Predictably, this lack of leadership and off-loading of responsibility to businesses and individuals has not had any real impact upon emissions abatement and clearly demonstrates that government must be the leader in implementing emissions reduction programs.

Some would suggest that because individuals and businesses produce and consume fossil fuels, they should be responsible for the environmental damage of their actions. Making the polluters responsible for their emissions makes the most moral sense but, so far, the polluters aren’t paying. The reason they are not paying is because there is no framework to do so. Real polices are the only way to implement a framework where the polluters are responsible for their emissions. Otherwise, it is unfair to criticize individuals and businesses for behaving in ways that are independently advantageous within our current legal and social framework. It is nice to think of a world in which individuals behave with more environmental altruism and businesses attempt to maximize social benefits instead of profits. Unfortunately, we cannot hope for this to happen with an impending crisis that will have significant short, medium and long-term costs.

Individuals and business have failed to reduce their emissions for many reasons that they should not be blamed for. It is wrong to assume that the average person will have even a basic understanding of energy and waste flows in our economy. I don’t think that individuals should be responsible for failing to understand that turning on an extra light potentially contributes, in some small way, to more fossil fuels being combusted. We have designed a system where the outputs of our consumption are removed from the inputs. Nobody wants a coal plant burning in the middle of the city so political institutions and markets have helped to shield us from our waste. Similarly, it is a stretch to assume that individuals will understand abstract concepts like tonnes of carbon emitted from their automobiles. As a result, individuals are, for the most part, disconnected from the visual and environmental consequences of their energy consumption.

Businesses will not reduce their carbon emissions if it does not make economic sense for them to do so. It is unrealistic to expect business to begin adopting costly abatement measures without adequate returns for shareholders. And businesses are not moral agents. Governments have always had the responsibility to regulate businesses in order to ensure that they are not responsible for more social costs than benefits. For example, business didn’t voluntarily begin abating sulfur emissions to combat acid rain in the North-Eastern United States nor did business voluntarily decide to stop producing ozone-depleting CFCs. Government provided the regulatory leadership for firms to stop emitting pollutants. Reducing pollution became economically feasible once government implemented financial penalties for polluting.

Individual and corporate behaviour can be changed using a portfolio of various policies that regulate the most polluting behaviour and penalize carbon emissions at the margins. Imagine a policy framework where technological standards are tightened and continually evaluated to ensure that low efficiency consumer goods are phased-out quickly and high efficiency goods are adopted as soon as they become economically feasible. Making high efficiency technologies economically viable would internalize the cost of environmental damages from carbon emissions into the price of the good or service.

Regulating the most carbon intensive behaviour so that it is more environmentally benign is another crucial responsibility of government. This could mean capping emissions and using market mechanisms to efficiently ensure compliance or by simply prohibiting the most carbon intensive processes. Unsurprisingly, jurisdictions with the most pronounced emissions abatement have used various forms of regulation and taxation.

It is important not to confuse the means and the ends of climate abatement. The ends of abatement, from a policy perspective, are people and businesses behaving in ways that emit less total carbon into the atmosphere. Because we are the agents for change does not imply that we also bear the responsibility to act. We need to be bound by a useful policy framework that guides our actions; otherwise we will not behave in ways that will reduce our aggregate emissions. This framework for human behaviour may be pessimistic but it is a safer alternative to thinking wishfully that individuals will just start behaving in a more environmentally conscientious way.

Governments need to provide the right policy framework that binds actions with environmental consequences. Incorporating real policy levers like regulations and taxes is the only way to do this and government is the only institution with the legitimacy and authority to implement these measures. Therefore, the greatest responsibility to reduce emissions falls on government to design and implement a policy portfolio that promotes real changes in the way people and businesses use fossil fuels. Hoping that individuals and businesses both have the ability to understand the effects of their actions on emissions and then make a complete shift in the way they act is a model for failure and is potentially dangerous. We must not give up hope for individuals and businesses to pollute less but we must also plan for individuals and businesses to pursue a business as usual approach.

Tyler Bryant is a student of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University. He is interested in resource, climate and development policy and is finishing up his thesis on restructuring British Columbia's electrical supply sector. Tyler plans on working with the Federal Government as a policy analyst and doing development work in South Asia particularly, Bangladesh.