Home > News > 2009 > News Release

For release: January 21, 2009

Nova Scotia latest to cap emissions from major industry

Ottawa / Halifax – Climate Action Network Canada– Réseau action climat Canada, a coalition of leading Canadian environmental groups, is pleased that Nova Scotia has become the latest province to decline the federal government’s intensity-based approach to regulating greenhouse gases (GHG) from large emitters. Though implementation details are absent, the first action in the Government of Nova Scotia’s recently released climate plan is to: “Impose increasingly stringent absolute caps on NSPI’s GHG emissions for 2010, 2015, and 2020.” Nova Scotia Power Inc. (NSPI) is the province’s largest utility.

“Nova Scotia Power accounts for approximately half of the province’s total GHG emissions,” said Cheryl Ratchford, Energy Coordinator with the Halifax-based Ecology Action Center. “The fact that the Province will regulate the electric sector using a hard cap is an important first step.”

A hard cap sets an absolute limit on the amount of emissions that can be released. The federal government is proposing an alternative emission-intensity approach where emissions are limited per unit of output, such as per barrel of oil, but overall emissions can increase. Although more details on Nova Scotia’s climate plan will be announced in the coming months, this initial commitment signals that the province is moving in-step with other, more progressive jurisdictions when it comes to climate regulation.

“We see British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Québec embracing cap-and-trade. We see the U.S. moving to cap-and-trade. And now on the east coast we see Nova Scotia taking the first steps toward cap-and-trade. The Canadian federal government’s intensity approach is becoming irrelevant,” said Dale Marshall, Policy Analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation.

Nova Scotia will also seek observer status in the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), a regional climate initiative that is currently developing an economy-wide cap-and-trade program. The WCI is composed of eleven state and provincial partners and thirteen observers. British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Québec currently have full WCI partner status.

Nova Scotia’s climate plan and the accompanying energy strategy contain a number of other welcomed goals and action items to advance the Province’s commitment to sustainable prosperity. However, there are also areas of concern, specifically the absence of funding commitments for the proposed programs and the lack of implementation timelines. These are necessary to successfully reduce GHG emissions and address global warming.

For more information, see the Ecology Action Center’s summary:
www.ecologyaction.ca/content/press-releases

- 30 -