Sierra Club blasts Wall over remarks

The Sierra Club of Canada blasted Premier Brad Wall's call for a "tech fund'' to invest in carbon reduction technologies, like carbon capture and storage (CCS), as a waste of time and money.

"It might have made sense 20 years ago when there was time to take a long-term approach," said John Bennett, executive director of the Ottawa-based environmental group.

"Today, we are facing the tipping point of catastrophic climate change, which will be absolutely devastating to Saskatchewan,'' Bennett said in e-mail message to the Leader-Post.

"You can't negotiate with the atmosphere."

Bennett was responding to a speech Wall made to the Energy Council of Canada last week in Regina in which he criticized cap-and-trade policies as economically harmful programs that don't reduce carbon emissions.

Instead, Wall advocated establishing a "tech fund'' that would be used to fund research and development of alternative energy and carbon reduction technologies, like CCS.

Bennett said the premier is engaged in "wishful thinking'' if he thinks expensive, unproven technologies, like CCS, are the solution to man-made climate change.

"All the research on carbon capture and storage says that it's really expensive, it's unproven and we don't know yet whether it's feasible.''

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In contrast to the government-funded CCS projects, cap and trade "makes the polluter pay for the cost of their pollution,'' Bennett said.

"The (Saskatchewan and Alberta) governments are putting the money into solutions for the pollution, instead of the companies that are profiting from making the pollution.''

Bennett said SaskPower should be putting its money into energy efficiency programs and demand side management, renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, and even natural gas-fired generation.

"(Natural gas generation) would be preferable to putting the money into a tech fund or putting the money into a technology that doesn't exist,'' Bennett said, referring to CCS.

Bennett said the tech funds and CCS are questionable long-term solutions to a problem that is facing the world in the next five to 10 years

"These ideas about tech funds and CCS all came about when we thought we had 20 or 30 years to act on climate change. We no longer have that time.''

However, Bennett did applaud the Wall government for pulling the plug on a proposed nuclear power plant last fall. "I think they made one right decision.''