Premier Blaine Higgs says he wants New Brunswickers and Canadians to look at “the big picture” in the fight over the federal carbon tax.
But the picture he paints is clouded.
Higgs’s global vision, articulated in several recent national media interviews, is a response to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s challenge to premiers who oppose the tax.
“Any province that wants to put forward a similarly robust way to fight climate change, but do it in a way that works for them, is more than welcome to do so,” he said in March.
Higgs was ready with his pitch.
“We’re not looking at the big picture in this,” Higgs told CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.
“While we force a higher cost of living on all of our citizens here, we have a unique opportunity in Canada that we’ve always had — a rich nation that can offset energy consumption in the world.”
Extracting natural gas in New Brunswick and shipping it to Europe, the premier argued, would allow the shutdown of heavy-emitting coal burning plants there.
Global emissions would be reduced even more and, as a bonus, New Brunswick would experience “an economic impact like we have never seen in the province before,” he added.
But the Higgs vision faces many obstacles and long odds.
“I think that the premier is dreaming in technicolour,” said Fredericton Liberal MP Jenica Atwin.
“Where is the evidence to suggest that this pie-in-the-sky idea that he’s put forward, with no real detail, I’ll add, is going to help us reach our climate goal?” Atwin said.
In response to a request from CBC News, Higgs provided a detailed three-page explanation full of statistics.
Natural gas is a fossil fuel but it is cleaner than coal, meaning it emits less of the carbon dioxide that is warming the climate and that is linked to extreme weather.
Higgs points out the European Union has 250 coal plants in 19 countries that produce almost one-sixth of the EU’s energy.
Sell our gas to Europe, Higgs argues, and some of those plants could close.
The first big hurdle is local.
The premier himself acknowledges that bringing gas from Western Canada or the U.S., via pipeline, to a Saint John export terminal would be too expensive.
The only viable alternative, then, is to take advantage of the estimated 77-trillion cubic feet of natural gas in New Brunswick.
But extracting that gas, by fracking, faced widespread public opposition more than a decade ago, leading a Liberal government to impose a moratorium.
“One of the conditions [to end the moratorium] was you need a social licence to be able to move forward on these projects,” said Moe Qureshi, the director of climate research at the Conservation Council of New Brunswick.
“And we don’t see that yet.”
The province would also need to show it has lived up to the legally binding “duty to consult” Indigenous nations.
That barrier has scared off companies that would otherwise be willing to invest, Higgs said.
Repsol looked at converting its Saint John LNG terminal to export gas but determined the business case was too risky.
“They can’t build a plant or retrofit a plant for LNG export without a confirmed gas supply,” he said in March, “and we can’t get that until we have a path forward with First Nations.”
Last year the premier pitched chiefs on a potential revenue windfall of $800 million to $1.6 billion if they signed on.
They passed on the offer, and there’s been no movement since then.
Even if large-scale natural gas development went ahead in the province, there are bigger obstacles internationally, where the premier has little to no sway.
Higgs’s vision includes Canada and New Brunswick getting credit for those emissions reductions in Europe.
“I think there should be a really good argument that if we are offsetting, and doing it for that very reason, then we should have a carbon credit that would reflect that,” he said.
Atwin said that means abandoning the thrust of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which requires each signatory country to lower emissions within its own jurisdiction.
Aaron Cosbey, an economist with the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said with emissions from extraction, shipping and leakage of gas factored in, “it’s not as clear-cut that you’re getting huge global benefits from replacing coal with LNG.”
Besides, Cosbey said, the appetite for gas in Europe is declining.
From 2022 to 2023, natural gas use in the EU for electricity generation declined by 15 per cent, while coal went down 26 per cent.
Wind and solar were up 23 per cent, Cosbey said. And energy efficiency efforts are reducing overall demand.
“Europe is getting off gas and it’s getting off coal,” he said. “So there’s not really a case that if we export our gas to the EU, it will somehow displace coal use.”
Assume, though, a European buyer imports New Brunswick natural gas.
The next problem is how to verify and measure that “our” gas is actually reducing coal use — assuming the country buying the gas is willing to let us have the credit.
For now, the question is moot because parties to the Paris agreement haven’t figured out how a global-emissions accounting system would work.
But if they do, Cosbey said other questions arise.
“I drive a Hyundai electric vehicle. By doing that, I reduced the amount of emissions that take place in Canada,” he said.
“According to the logic of the proposal from the premier, South Korea would own those emissions reductions. Do we really want to go there?”
Canada might also then be expected to take responsibility for emissions from Alberta crude oil sold — and burned — overseas.
“That’s a slippery slope that I don’t think we want to go down,” Cosbey said
Underlying Higgs’s frustration with the carbon tax, and his preference for taking action on emissions elsewhere, is his view that Canada’s targets are too aggressive and unachievable.
The country accounts for only 1.8 per cent of global emissions, so reductions here will cause economic pain for Canadians without achieving much globally, he argues.
Meanwhile, China is adding the equivalent of one to two new coal plants a week.
Cosbey said 36 per cent of all emissions globally come from countries like Canada that each emit two per cent or less of the total.
Higgs’s argument “is like me saying it doesn’t matter if I don’t pay my taxes in Canada because I’m only one citizen and it doesn’t make any difference to the federal budget,” Cosbey said.
“I would love that logic to be extended to my tax payments, but it doesn’t work that way. If everybody doesn’t pull their weight, it doesn’t happen.”
He also argues that the portrayal of China as a coal-emitting climate villain is simplistic.
The country is also the leading manufacturer of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles.
“They are doing an incredible job of it. They are also building coal but as a total percentage, they’re on track in a way that a lot of developed countries are not,” Cosbey said.
Those issues aside, Higgs’s LNG export idea clearly doesn’t comply with the federal pricing standard, so it’s not an acceptable alternative while Trudeau remains in power.
“I would love to see if they’ve got better plans,” Atwin said of the Higgs PC government.
“All I want to see is emissions go down. However we get there, I’m on board for that.”
New Brunswick could craft a provincial pricing system that meets the federal requirements but doesn’t hit consumers at the gas pump.
But Higgs said other pricing regimes still cost the economy, unlike his LNG idea.
Qureshi said Higgs’s “big picture” is really a short-term perspective.
“Fossil fuels is a slowly dying industry, and he wants to milk it as much as possible in my opinion.”
Qureshi points out the impacts of warming temperatures and extreme weather linked to climate change, from flooding to wildfires to this year’s cancellation of the World Pond Hockey tournament because of a lack of enough ice.
“I think the bigger picture is looking at our way of life,” Qureshi says. “Our quality and way of life is changing because the climate is changing.”
