What's Our Real Carbon Footprint?

Here in British Columbia we are in the middle of a provincial election where much of the debate has focused on BC's carbon tax, brought in by the Liberals as one way to tackle global climate change.

Along with many economists and climate change experts, I support the carbon tax, and am distressed that the opposition has chosen to play partisan politics with it, calling it a "gas tax" while hiding the fact that it is 100% revenue-neutral.

I also support - with some reservations - the system of 'cap and trade' - supported by all parties - that BC will be engaged with in partnership with the regional Western Climate Initiative, which would create a declining cap on the production of greenhouse gases by industry. Another proposal for "Cap and Dividend" also has merit, and needs to be seriously discussed.

On paper, BC produces 68 million tonnes (MT) of CO2e by burning fossil fuels and other means, which we need to reduce to zero as soon as possible because of the urgency of the climate crisis. Make no mistake--we are on the Titanic, heading right for the iceberg.

BC's real carbon footprint is far greater, however - for three reasons.

Firstly, there's all the food and goods we import, and emissions from the trucks and ships that bring them here. A 2007 study from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research found that 23% of China's carbon footprint came from its exports. We must also include the international flights we take, that are not included in BC's figures.

It is hard to put a number on all this, but when the Stockholm Environment Institute studied Britain's true emissions, they found them to be 49% higher than was being reported, adding 5.44 tonnes per person to Britain's carbon footprint. If we apply this ratio to BC's 3.9 million people, we should increase our carbon footprint by 21 MT to 89 MT of CO2e.

Secondly, we are a big exporter of coal. We've all seen the terminals at Roberts Bank, next to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal. Every year, we export some 26 million tonnes of coal to 20 countries for use in steel-making, primarily to Japan and South Korea, but also to Germany, Brazil, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, and Turkey.

In 2006, our coal exports were worth $2.8 billion, and supported 3,200 direct jobs in BC's ten coal mines, mostly in the East Kootenays and the South Peace. The coal industry is proud of its safety record, and the coal-miners are proud of their work - but when you burn 26 million tonnes of coal it produces 60 million tonnes of CO2, increasing our carbon footprint to 149 MT. The "clean coal" technology that would capture coal's CO2 before it is released is years away from becoming a reality.

In Britain, there was a climate protest in 2008 at a coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth, Kent, where six Greenpeace activists climbed a smokestack and painted GORDON on it (for Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown). They were duly arrested, and tried for the £35,000 it cost the company to clean it off. In their defense, they brought in NASA's top climate expert, James Hansen, who gave testimony on the disastrous nature of climate change, and how coal was the fuel most responsible for threatening our future.

When the jury of nine women and three men considered their verdict they found the six not guilty on the grounds that they had "lawful excuse" to damage property to prevent even greater damage by climate change, following the precedent that that it is legal to break into a house to put out a fire. All around the world, coal industry executives must have felt the ground shake.

What should BC do? Without casting personal moral judgment on the coal workers involved, given what we know about climate change, producing and selling coal in the 21st century is similar to capturing and selling slaves in the 19th century. It is an absolute moral wrong that has to stop. As taxpayers, we should buy out the companies, close them down, and pay their workers to retrain for new lines of work.

BC also exports some 20 billion cubic metres of natural gas to the US each year, adding 40 MT of CO2 emissions when the gas is burnt. When we include the gas industry’s methane leakage rate of 1.4%, knowing that methane traps 25 times more heat than CO2 over 100 years, its footprint increases to 54 MT. This would bring BC’s carbon footprint to 203 MT, which is almost three times larger than we think it is.

It is also essential to note that over 20 years, which is the timescale of the emergency that matters, natural gas has a far greater impact, with a warming footprint that is at least twice as great – 100 MT of CO2e for BC, bringing BC’s carbon footprint to 250 MT, or 360% larger than we think it is.

This is a hard discussion for any politician, for we benefit mightily from this trade in fossil fuels, just as Britain benefited from the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, as did and southern US landowners. In 2007, revenues from oil and gas land rights sales contributed $2.4 billion to our BC provincial budget.

The discussion must start, however. We could begin by placing a moratorium on coal-bed methane, and on the development of any new coalmines, such as in the beautiful Flathead Valley in southeastern BC. We could plan a ten-year phase-out of BC's budget dependency on oil and gas revenues. We could eliminate the industry's tax breaks. Doing nothing is no longer an option.