Article content

Breathing easier? Edmonton’s air is already cleaner thanks to less mercury, sulphur and tiny air pollutants spewing from power plant smokestacks upwind last year.

Credit goes to the NDP carbon tax. Forced to pay for pollution, electricity companies started running gas plants instead of coal plants whenever possible, reducing emissions even before they invested in upgrades or phased out the worst plants.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Elise Stolte: Carbon tax already pays dividends in cleaner Edmonton air Back to video

It’s simple economics, and fortunately, one part of the carbon plan that the UCP platform largely promises to keep.

That wasn’t discussed much during the election campaign but here’s how it works.

Enmax’s Shepard Energy Centre near Calgary is the cleanest electricity plant in the province, so that’s the baseline. It burns natural gas. Starting last year, the NDP charged power companies $30 per tonne of carbon emissions for anything more than Shepard emits.

That’s the “good-as-best-gas” standard, referenced in the UCP platform and different from the Stelmach-era rules that measured dirty plants only against themselves.