Sarah Gabrielle Baron

Hi all. If you have time, please use this form (from the amazing Time4Action NGO) to tell the Trudeau federal government what you think of the carbon reduction options.

In a nutshell, they want us to tell them if they should go with Option A or Option B.

Option A is to develop a new Cap and Trade system, country-wide, that is federally controlled. This works in the European Union. Unfortunately, we've seen the proceeds of federal monies wasted exclusively to extremely dangerous next-gen nuclear experiments, the false flag of green hydrogen, and seriously stupid carbon sequestration experiments. Overall, they can not be trusted to apply dividends from the Cap and Trade systems to proven carbon reduction methods that Greens have been touting for decades.

Option B is the current system: a dog's breakfast of provinces and territories doing their own thing (cap and trade and/or fee and dividend and/or legislations and penalties and/or tax gifts to this or that industry). The federal government is supposed to police this and apply penalties for provinces that don't meet their targets. Cricket cricket.

Here is what I sent in today (use this email if you'd like to write your own).

Hi Ken.  

Here's what I came up with. I just sent it in.  

Hello. My name is Sarah Gabrielle Baron. I am a candidate for leader of the Green Party of Canada. Our movement is global. Our movement has been providing climate-crisis-aware policy for decades. Please consider listening to our policies, based in the key principles of Ecological Widsom, Social Justice, Nonviolence, Participatory Democracy, Respect for Diversity and Sustainability.

Question 1: 

1. How do you envision the future of the oil and gas sector in the Canadian economy or your community?

I envision the oil and gas sector as obsolete in the Canadian economy and my community within the next 3 years.  

2. What do you see as the role of your organization or community in contributing to reducing oil and gas sector emissions in Canada?

I see the role of the Green Party of Canada membership as being the main group of citizens creating the infrastructure today that future generations will rely on during the era of Climate Catastrophe. We are making the small scale energy resiliency solutions available via cooperative groups within our municipalities and cities. We are entrenching local-based food security options in our town and cities. Greens are the only political movement facing reality with intelligent planning. Please catch up, fast.  

Green Party of Canada members are activists. We also populate and support NGO's like EcoJustice whereby young citizens are suing current governments for Ecocide: you are responsible for destroying their basic right to life.  

Green Party of Canada members recognize Indigenous traditional governance systems, UNDRIP and 1763 Royal Proclamation’s entrenchment of Indigenous right to Self Government. We therefore support the Land Back movement. We fully support the traditional governance leaders of the Wet'suwet'en to stop LNG, the Tiny House warriors to stop TMX, and the Wolastok Nation to stop dangerous nuclear experiments on the Bay of Fundy.  

The Green Party of Canada is the only political party standing in the way of Bay duNord.  

3. What are the benefits or drawbacks of the options outlined in the discussion document?

The drawback of both Option One (a national Cap and Trade system) and Option Two (provinces do what they want while the Federal Government is too afraid to apply real penalties) is that both systems fail to recognize that we must

halve all oil and gas production in the next three years and fully stop all oil and gas production in the next seven years. Governments are focused on massaging their next election cycle, not making our planet liveable. Provincial and territory governments are led by the current Federal level abuse of the phrasing "Net Zero by 2050": this target is a false flag of criminal proportions. Canada, a “have” country, has blown past the 1.5 degree marker. The Paris requirement that Canada reduce our carbon and methane footprint by 40% by 2030 just won’t happen, and the 2050 rhetoric is why. Shame!   

4. Of the two approaches outlined, is there an approach your organization or community would prefer?

The Green Party of Canada has been saying it for DECADES: 

a) efficiencies and retrofits can reduce our carbon footprint by up to 60%. Pump our tax payer dollars back into the economy with a massive project: small scale contractors can balloon our workforce to make our homes and businesses as efficient as possible. Stop wasting our tax money on desperation-level experiments ($10 billion+ to Gen4 Nuclear; $2.4 billion in the 2022 budget to unproven “Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage” and false-flag “Green-Hydrogen”) and give us back our tax dollars on economy-boosting solutions that are ready NOW, that are effective NOW. This is the “just transition” plan that oil and gas industry workers require.  

b) local based food security infrastructure is required now, so that future generations can survive, and even thrive. Industrial agriculture is a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions. Kill two birds with one stone: no-till agriculture is a powerful carbon sink and provides the local-level food security future generations will need in the dystopian climate catastrophe era we have created. 

c) small scale energy resiliency solutions that are controlled at the community level are expertly designed to fit local ecosystems - minimal ecological impact must be our energy horizon goal. All new build communities should be geothermal and solar heat capturing maximizers; all electricity grids should be 'smart' (climate event resilient); wind, solar and tidal technology is ready now and should be the sole focus of government handouts; legislation & tax-dollar support should target automobile manufacturing and transportation infrastructure to get us rapidly off gas onto electric (and off personal use vehicles onto public and cooperative transport systems).

5. Do you have suggestions on how to improve the options outlined?

Don’t put a “September 30 deadline” for public input on democracy.  

Get public oversight and transparency systems in place.  

“Allocate up to $10 billion to the Canadian Infrastructure Bank or Clean Growth Fund to create a competitive bidding process for contracts-for-difference, developed in consultation with ECCC, FIN, NRCan, INFC, and other relevant agencies. The contracts would be primarily focused on difficult to decarbonize sectors excluding oil and gas (e.g., cement, steel). There should be explicit rules capping upfront and long-term subsidies paid to industry, use competition and targeted calls for contracts to drive cost-efficient emissions reductions, engage stakeholders, and be clear on which aspects of Canada’s carbon pricing landscape are in scope. The program should report on its role in subsidizing sectors, program costs, revenues, and emissions reductions it achieves. To enable these contracts, federal and provincial carbon pricing systems must make credit prices public information, their stringency must increase at least 4% per year to align with Canada’s net-zero commitment, and transparent processes are needed to monitor and make recommendations on credit market management.” (MacDougall, Scott.

Recommendations for Budget 2023, Green Budget Coalition, pg 53). 

Be true to your own expert panels guidance:

In 2019, Canada’s Expert Panel on Sustainable Finance recommended the establishment of a “Canadian Centre for Climate Information and Analytics” (C3IA) as an authoritative source of climate information and decision analysis.

Any carbon system must be grounded in citizen-led oversight and transparency. So far, Canada fails that grade.  

6. What potential short or long-term socio-economic impacts do you foresee or anticipate for particular regions or population groups resulting from an oil and gas emissions cap in general, and more specifically, the two proposed regulatory options?

Both regulatory options (Option 1 Cap and Trade; Option 2 Dog’s Breakfast with the Federal Government afraid to apply real penalties to provinces that don’t comply with ever-tightening caps) fail fundamentally at recognizing we are at an extinction-level emergency moment.  

Also, both options focus solely on the source of emissions (extraction level polluters) and fail to address the panoply of petroleum and methane-based value-added economies.  

Finally, both options completely fail to address the main problem: governments focus spending on industry-led experiments like nuclear-weapons proliferation Gen4 nuclear, and carbon sequestration dreams - a continuance of the capitalist-centered industrial era infrastructure that is killing us.  

Scope of coverage

7. Should consideration be given to facility emission thresholds to set different approaches and requirements for small versus large emitters?

Yes. Auction systems must have guardrails that allow innovative new industries to compete with the world’s worst oil and gas mega-companies. 

8. Should the cap include petroleum refineries and natural gas transmission pipelines?

Yes. 

9. Are there other considerations relevant to determining the scope of the cap?

Yes. Extinction.  

Focus on creating the infrastructures now that future generations will require to survive and thrive: small scale energy resiliency projects that are locally controlled and designed to have minimum impact on ecosystems; local level no-till food security systems; rapid transition for our transportation infrastructures (off gas onto electric; off single use vehicles onto cooperative and public transportation systems). 

Emissions cap trajectory

10. What are the relevant considerations for determining a GHG emissions trajectory, particularly over the first 10 to 15 years?

This is a very poorly worded question. Oil and Gas (all greenhouse gas emitting industries) must be phased out entirely by 2050. They must be halved by 2030. You haven’t even started. Instead, you go in the wrong direction and fund TMX and Baie du Nord.  

All faith in Liberal, Conservative, and NDP political ability to get serious on greenhouse gas reduction is evaporated.  

11. 

How should the trajectory of the oil and gas emissions cap be designed to support Canada's 2030 targets and achieve net-zero by 2050? Should the cap set annual or multi-year emission levels?

The cap should reflect our 2030 targets alone, as this is Canada’s long-standing internationally agreed upon requirement to pretend 1.5 degree warming is still achievable.  

“Net-zero by 2050” is rhetoric used by cowards who only focus on the next election.  

12.

Should the trajectory be fixed out to 2050, or should the approach include steps to ratchet up the trajectory at one or more fixed intervals?

Why did you reword question 11 in this way? See response, Question 11. 

13. Competitiveness and carbon leakage

What design features should be considered to maintain Canadian competitiveness and minimize the risk of carbon leakage?

Strong federal guardrails on any auction systems (see your own recommendations under Option 1) . 

14. What compliance flexibilities should be allowed, and what conditions should determine eligibility?

There should be no “compliance flexibilities” (aka loopholes) whatsoever, except to allow for smaller enterprises with better technologies (wind, solar, geothermal, smart grid energy storage, efficiencies contractors, retrofits providers, and cooperatively-owned energy & climate era food resilience providers) to enter into systems that should be designed to reward existing proven non-emitting energy producing technologies and existing proven carbon-sequestering methodologies.  

15. 

Should the use of compliance flexibilities decline over time? If so, to what extent?

Gotta love the way you folks reword the same questions to massage for your predetermined outcomes.  

See 14

16. Under a potential cap-and-trade option, should distribution of allowances be done through auction, free allocation, or a combination of the two?

Auction. With strict guardrails. 

17. 

Policy coherence and coordination across jurisdictions

Would there be merit in excluding or taking an approach that results in lower compliance costs for emissions generated from the production and processing of fuels used to support the development of clean fuels (e.g., natural gas required for low carbon hydrogen production)?

No. Natural Gas companies are abusing the myth of “Green Hydrogen” to misappropriate government hand-outs. Hydrogen technology is only efficient in high-heat scenarios (cement production).  

This is also the way oil and gas dollars are pivoting into Gen4 nuclear experiments. The kleptocratic military-industrial owners that keep humanity enslaved must not be allowed to start a plutonium economy. Canada is already burdened with whole biospheres forever ruined by radioactive legacy waste for which there is NO SOLUTION (northern Saskatchewan; all nuke power facilities on the Great Lakes and Bay of Fundy; all nuclear medicine facilities at small universities; Elliot Lake tailings lakes leaking into the Great Lakes; Blind River Cameco refinery and incinerator fall-out zones; Port Hope Cameco processing and international distributor; Chalk River SNC-Lavalin controlled experiments and waste and therefore the entire Ottawa River watershed; a small suburb in Peterborough controlled by BWXT the USA’s largest nuclear weapons producer; Stephen Harper’s outfit Terrestrial in Oakville; Mark Carney’s outfit Westinghouse in Burlington; Pinawa Manitoba; Gentilly legacy site in Quebec; whomever is the lucky recipient of a Deep Geological Repository aka DUMP in Ontario or New Brunswick; etc). Let’s please enact a moratorium on new nuclear until the above problems are dealt with in a citizen-controlled - not industry controlled - forum.    

18. How should the Government of Canada ensure that the cap incents investments in diversification and other preparations for a clean energy transition?

See answers to Question 4 a) b) and c). Only the Green Party of Canada is capable of seeing reality and providing intelligent solutions that meet nature on her own terms. 

19. How would each potential cap approach interact with other climate measures?

Option A only works if non-carbon-emitting existing small-scale local solutions are allowed to compete for carbon credits.  

Option B only works if there is the political will from the federal level to truly penalize provincial governments that don’t comply with truly strict caps.  

Neither option recognizes that we’ve already blown past 1.5 degrees warming. Too many feed-back loops are engaged (like the warming of the tundra with runaway methane release; like the melting of the arctic and subsequent runaway warming by the sun). We are now in the era of Climate Catastrophe. The only ‘climate measures’ we should be funding are:

• small-scale local level energy resiliency solutions and smart grids (proven technology available now) 
• small-scale no-till local food security solutions (proven carbon sequestration technology available now)
• workforce expansion at the small contractor level for retrofits and efficiencies (proven to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by up to 60%)
• rapid transition of transportation manufacture and infrastructure away from single-use vehicles to cooperative use and public transit; away from gas towards electric. 

20. 

What opportunities exist for coordination among federal and provincial and territorial measures?

Option A and Option B are fine, but only with the political will, and only if realities of the era of climate crisis are met with intelligent planning (see 19, above). 

Implementation

21. How should a cap on GHG emissions be implemented to maximize emission reductions while avoiding potential challenges related to layering of multiple policies and regulations?

Option B is already in existence, is already layering multiple policies and regulations. However, it respects the constitutionally-entrenched right of provinces and territories to control decisions related to infrastructure. What’s missing is the political will by the federal government to apply strict penalties to provinces that don’t comply with evermore stringent caps.  

Option A Cap and Trade is proven to work in the European Union and did work between California, Ontario and Quebec. Success is only guaranteed if the agreements are so legally binding that subsequent governments can not immediately pull out (à la Doug Ford). These laws are embedded in our current ‘Free Trade’ agreements. Why not into Cap and Trade agreements?   

22.

What other factors related to implementation should be considered in developing an approach to cap and cut GHG emissions from the oil and gas sector?

1. Extinction
2. stop with the “net zero by 2050” jargon
3. stop funding unproven experiments (Gen4 Nuclear / SMRs; ‘green’ hydrogen; Carbon sequestration)
4. start funding carbon reduction technologies that already exist (local level wind, solar, geothermal, solar heat sequestration, smart grids, tidal, electric vehicle bidirectional, local level food security measures like no-till gardening, home and business retrofits and efficiencies).  

Yours in solidarity for a liveable future,

~ Sarah Gabrielle Baron

host, RADIOACTIVE podcast

Candidate for leader Green Party of Canada 2022

M'nidoo M'nissing / Manitoulin Island

Anishinabek First Nation territory