Back in 1992, the province did something to make retailers and anti-tax advocates angry: they slapped a recycling levy on tires. Your friendly tire retailer became a tax collector, and critics of recycling programs predicted multimillion-dollar boondoggles on grants that take real money for projects that only work on paper.
For a long time, the critics looked like they had it right. Mountains of unrecycled tires grew, as did a multimillion-dollar fund of money that wasn’t being used, while yet another government committee collected salaries to document the numbers.
This column was among the many critics wondering what it was we were all being forced to pay for.
Then, slowly, good things started to happen. Good ideas (beyond burning the tires as fuel) came forward — and there was a fund of real cash ready to help those ideas succeed.
Today, you can go on the government website and see that the six million tires a year going into the recycling program have so far saved taxpayers more than $200 million in landfill costs. There’s 172 km of Alberta roads at last count, containing recycled tire crumb to make the pavement smoother, and help it last longer. More than 300 municipal projects were given $6.6 million in grants, to build things like playgrounds using recycled tires.
In short, we’ve seen you need to be careful not to jump the gun in declaring government projects a failure, just because they’re government projects and because they cost money.
Based on that, there’s a case to be made for patience in judging the province’s carbon emission penalty program.
So far, we’ve seen a lot of money being taken by the government, and not a large change in the amount of greenhouse gases we produce. About $187 million has been paid into the Climate Change and Emissions Management Fund so far. The last year-over-year comparison in 2008 showed Alberta achieved a one per cent drop in carbon emissions — and you’d be hard-pressed to prove it was the tax that really achieved the change.
Given the current political atmosphere, both the fund and the tax are easy targets. Especially since much of the money collected will be used to finance carbon capture and storage, which hasn’t been successful on a large scale anywhere else in world.
There’s a sort of cynical irony in paying a whole lot of money to pump carbon dioxide into oil and gas formations, to produce more fossil fuels to burn and create pollution with — while calling the process green. But there you are.
Maybe the threshold at which levies are collected needs to be lowered from the current 100,000-tonne annual emission levels. So far about 100 Alberta companies exceed that and pay a levy. Some have suggested the threshold be cut in half, others say we need more progress on assisting green technologies using the fund. Others say the whole program should be scrapped.
It seems too early to pass that kind of judgment. Remember, it took time for the tire recycling program to work.
It’s easy to see playgrounds made with tire crumb and highways paved with crumb-enhanced asphalt. It’s much harder to see pollution going away.
Alberta companies are investing in green energy projects like wind power and renewables — something they would never have done without the emissions penalty program — to offset their carbon debt. That’s hopeful, but it’s slow progress.
For the time being, let’s just keep this honest. The long-term goal is reduced pollution — make that significantly reduced pollution. Dropping pollution rates one per cent a year or more every year for a decade, would that add up to something significant?
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.