The morning after

While most GHG policy discussions in Canada have addressed the issue of whether the country should have ratified Kyoto in the first place and should stick to that commitment, we focus in this Commentary on the design and implementation of an optimal package of GHG emission reduction policies for the Kyoto timeframe and beyond. [...] As a result, the government finds itself in the position of possibly imposing significant near-term costs on consumers and businesses for hazy and poorly understood benefits in the future, benefits that might mostly be realized by people on the other side of the planet. [...] In contrast, Bramley (2002) found that the VCR had minimal effect on emissions after examining the evolution of aggregate industrial emissions (24 percent increase in the 1990s), program coverage (less than 55 percent of industrial emissions), and case studies of the target setting and emission accounting practices of individual companies in the VCR. [...] The components of our policy package are summarized in Table 3. We selected the targets in our policy package with the objective of roughly equating the incre- mental costs of GHG abatement between sectors, and we tested more and less aggressive versions of each policy. [...] Moreover, conventional technologies and in- dustry practices are associated with each step in the production chain: the man- ufacture of hydrogen; the separation of pure CO2; the pipeline transport and geo- logical sequestration of CO2, and the pipeline transport of hydrogen.