Is there anyone who doesn't like Kathleen Wynne?
She just tells it like it is.
Wynne defends climate plan, citing Ontario’s ‘high’ carbon footprint
Premier Kathleen Wynne is defending the Liberal government’s decision to introduce a cap-and-trade program next year to combat climate change, calling Ontarians “very bad actors” when it comes to creating greenhouse gases.
Wynne admits Ontario led the way in fighting climate change by shutting down its coal-fired electrical generation stations, but said the province must do more even though it produces only fraction of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“Even though we’re a small percentage overall of the global greenhouse gas emissions, we’re very bad actors in terms of our per capita creation of emissions,” she told the Niagara Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday.
“Our carbon footprint is quite high for the number of people that we have.”
The Liberal government predicts cap-and-trade will add about $5 a month to home heating bills and about four cents a litre to the price of gasoline at the pumps when it kicks in Jan. 1.
Business groups have expressed concerns about the economic impact of cap-and-trade, which will require polluters to buy emission credits that they can sell if they come in under their limit or buy from others if they can’t meet their targets.
“I know there’s some anxiety in the business community,” Wynne said.
The Liberals chose cap-and-trade over a carbon tax because the money raised from emission auctions will be used to help businesses reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, in part by developing new, clean technologies, she added.
“It’s not just a financial burden,” said Wynne. “They actually get money back in order to innovate, so that’s how they will reduce their emissions and be supported by the system.”
The world is seeing more severe storms because of climate change, said Wynne, who insisted the cost of doing nothing would be much greater than cap-and-trade.
“We are developing the capacity to develop clean technologies that we can obviously use here in industry to reduce greenhouse gas emission, but we can also export that technology,” she said. “That’s the kind of combined motivation.”
Wynne insisted she wasn’t worried that two auctions for the cap-and-trade market with Quebec and California that Ontario is set to join next year sold just a fraction of available emission allowances.
Only 35 per cent of the available carbon pollution credits were sold in California and Quebec’s latest joint auction in August, and that was up from just 10 per cent in the previous round.
Wynne defends climate plan, citing Ontario’s ‘high’ carbon footprint - The Globe and Mail
