"The UCP is running its election campaign on jobs, pipelines and the economy — promising Albertans better times ahead. But when it comes to tackling climate change, the UCP is moving backwards."

UCP leader Jason Kenney talks to media on Scotsman's Hill, in Calgary on March 21, 2019. (Christina Ryan/Star Calgay)

Here are four words you don’t want to hear from a politician who’s offering to fight climate change: carbon capture and sequestration.

But that’s what Albertans are hearing from United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney on the election campaign trail.

Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is the process of capturing the carbon dioxide emissions from an industrial smokestack, compressing them into a fluid and pumping them deep underground.

The process is complicated, controversial and terribly expensive — as Alberta’s billion-dollar experience with the process the past decade has proven.

When it comes to solving Alberta’s emissions problem, CCS is a failed legacy of the old Progressive Conservatives governments.

And now Kenney seems interested in reviving it.

“We’re open to it,” he said during a campaign stop in Edmonton Monday. “We’re open to supporting any viable technology that can reduce carbon output and intensity and hopefully in the future being able to share that kind of technology with the developing world.”

The last time Alberta heard a politician promoting CCS as a solution to human-induced climate change was in 2008 when then-premier Ed Stelmach announced his Progressive Conservative government was committing $2 billion to CCS experiments. The goal was to keep burning coal to produce power and simply bury the emissions.

Stelmach also slapped a symbolic carbon tax on heavy industrial emitters.

He confidently predicted a half-dozen companies would have CCS projects up and running with the goal of reducing Alberta’s emissions by 140 million tonnes a year by 2050.

He was also hoping to score points on the world stage, help Alberta’s oil industry prepare for the future, and position the province as a world leader in a technology that could be shared with others.

That’s not what happened.

Companies that had expressed interest began dropping out. CCS was just too expensive, even with government subsidies.

Politicians from all stripes criticized CCS as a waste of resources and money. Over time even the PCs began to have second thoughts. In 2014, then-premier Jim Prentice dismissed CCS as a “science experiment.”

But by then the Alberta government had signed contracts worth $1.25 billion and the newly elected NDP government in 2015 was stuck with two projects — one of which captures about one million tonnes of emissions a year; the other has faced a series of delays. The NDP does its best to ignore them. Its climate leadership plan is focused on stiffer guidelines on heavy industrial emitters, phasing out coal-fired power plants, a cap on oilsands emissions, while also greening the economy and financing public transportation projects via a provincial carbon tax.

Kenney’s plan, on the other hand, involves scrapping the carbon tax, ending the phaseout of coal-fired plants, lifting the cap on oilsands emissions, ending subsidies for renewable energy sources and pretty much obliterating the NDP’s Climate Leadership Plan.

The one bright spot: a UCP government would make sure coal-fired plants ramp down emissions so they’re on a par with plants that burn cleaner natural gas.

Kenney’s overall strategy seems to be a huge step back to Stelmach’s plan from 2007-08.

When asked how he could justify promoting CCS, Kenney said he would leave the final decision to a panel of experts. He seemed to suggest Saskatchewan’s CCS project at the Boundary Dam coal fired plant near Estevan might be worth emulating.

But that project has cost taxpayers $1.6 billion. SaskPower said last year it doesn’t plan to expand CCS to any more coal-fired plants.

The technology is simply too expensive.

But CCS is politically attractive to those who want to claim they are fighting climate change but really aren’t. It is a way for politicians to decry a carbon tax while simultaneously spending billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on CCS projects.

Yes, CCS can work on a small to moderate level — and Alberta’s CCS project at the Scotford upgrader near Edmonton is an example of how to do a project properly. But it will cost Alberta $745 million to subsidize a project that will sequester a million or so tonnes of C02 underground each year.

To scale CCS up to the level necessary to make a significant dent in C02 emissions would require pumping tens of millions of tonnes underground in Alberta each year — and billions of tonnes around the world.

Politicians who seriously promote CCS as a long-term, big-picture solution to climate change are not taking climate change seriously.

That certainly seems to be the case with Alberta’s UCP. The party has held daily news conferences to talk about a range of major issues from education to health care to job creation, but not on climate change. Instead, the UCP bundled the issue into its 117-page policy platform released last Saturday, with just two pages focused on emissions reduction.

The UCP is running its election campaign on jobs, pipelines and the economy — promising Albertans better times ahead.

But when it comes to tackling climate change, the UCP is moving backwards.

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