A Price for Carbon Working on a national strategy for pricing carbon emissions BIOMASS CANADIAN Volume 16 No. 2 Editor -Andrew Macklin (905) 713-4358 [email protected] Editor -Andrew Snook (905) 713-4301 [email protected] Contributors -Gordon Murray, Murray McLaughlin, Gabri-elle Bauer, Thomas Sullivan, Taylor Fredericks Editorial Director/Group Publisher -Scott Jamieson (519) 429-3966 ext 244 [email protected] Market Production Manager Josée Crevier Ph: (514) 425-0025 Fax: (514) 425-0068 [email protected] National Sales Manager Ross Anderson Ph: (519) 429-5188 Fax: (519) 429-3094 [email protected] Quebec Sales Josée Crevier Ph: (514) 425-0025 Fax: (514) 425-0068 [email protected] Western Sales Manager Tim Shaddick [email protected] Ph: (604) 264-1158 Fax: (604) 264-1367 Media Designer -Emily Sun Circulation Manager Carol Nixon – [email protected] 450-458-0461 Canadian Biomass is published six times a year: February, April, June, August, October, and December. Published and printed by Annex Business Media. Publication Mail Agreement # 40065710 Printed in Canada ISSN 2290-3097 Subscription Rates: Canada -1 Yr $49.50; 2 Yr $87.50; 3 Yr $118.50 Single Copy -$9.00 (Canadian prices do not include applicable taxes) USA – 1 Yr $60 US; Foreign – 1 Yr $77 US CIRCULATION Tel: (416) 442-5600 ext 3552 Fax: (416) 510-5170 [email protected] 80 Valleybrook Drive, Toronto, ON M3B 2S9 Occasionally, Canadian Biomass magazine will mail information on behalf of industry-related groups whose products and services we believe may be of interest to you. If you prefer not to receive this information, please contact our circulation department in any of the four ways listed above. No part of the editorial content of this publication may be reprinted without the publisher’ s written permission ©2016 Annex Business Media, All rights reserved. Opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher. No liability is assumed for errors or omissions. All advertising is subject to the publisher’ s approval. Such approval does not imply any endorsement of the products or services advertised. Publisher reserves the right to refuse advertising that does not meet the standards of the publication. www.canadianbiomassmagazine.ca T he Canadian government is target-ing September of 2016 to have a plan in place for a national carbon tax strategy. To get there, the government wants to create small working groups of stakeholders to discuss how much the tax should be, and its implementation across Canada. This would establish a baseline price that all prov-inces must adhere to, with the flexibility to establish an even higher price if a provincial government wanted to do so. Without surprise, the starting place for the dis-cussion sits at $15/tonne, the lowest cost of all of the existing carbon taxes currently in place in Canada. B.C., Alberta, Ontario and Quebec already have carbon tax plans either implemeneted or in place, so the introduction of a carbon tax at the federal level won’t directly im-pact them. So where does that leave the rest of the country? A few others have flirted with the idea before, but none had taken the initiative to implement a strategy. Saskatchewan, which goes to the polls just as this mag-azine is arriving in your mailbox, decided that it would wait for guidance from the federal government. Manitoba, which heads to the polls on April 19th, has a current NDP government suggesting a cap-and-trade system. But the Green Party has attempted to bring the carbon tax issue to the forefront of its issues campaign, suggesting a $50/tonne tax. You would have to think that, on the heels of a collective meeting of the pro-vincial energy ministers in January, indi-vidual provincial plans are likely going to be put on hold until after the federal standard is established. So where does that put the role of bio-mass and biofuels? One of the sectors that will have to be targeted for a serious push to control emissions is transportation. Renew-able biofuels offer far lower carbon emissions than their gasoline and diesel coun-terparts, so there should be an opportunity to push for an increase to the provin-cial and national mandates for renewable fuel. The Canadian Renewable Fuels Association has been push-ing hard on this issue, and hopefully it can become part of the small group discussion being had to help set up the national carbon tax. On the biomass side, the push for do-mestic growth should be part of this na-tional carbon tax push. There are three natural places where biomass can be im-mediately implemented to help reduce carbon emissions: replacing remote heat generation with biomass (versus trucked/ flown in diesel), grants to allow residents to replace heating units with pellet stoves, and pellets as a replacement for coal. With the pending implementation of a nationwide carbon tax, the federal gov-ernment is ready to listen to strategies to permanently reduce carbon emissions in Canada. There is no better time than now for the industry to do its best to reach out to government officials to talk about the solutions that biomass and biofuels can offer. • 4 Canadian BIOMASS FEBRUARY 2016
Canadian Biomass March April 2016: Page 4
