The president of Keystone Agricultural Producers likes to compare the endless discussion about greenhouse gas emissions to an environmental threat from 30 years ago.
Ian Wishart says the public debate and dark clouds surrounding acid rain are similar to today’s concerns about greenhouse gas.
“We’re talking about the same kind of situation,” Wishart told the Manitoba Special Crops Symposium held in Winnipeg in late February.
Sulfur dioxide pouring out of smokestacks was environmental enemy No. 1 in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The public blamed coal-burning plants for the acid rain falling on Cleveland, Windsor and Hamilton.
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To mitigate the damage and the public outrage, governments designed a cap and trade system for sulfur dioxide in the 1990s. The program encouraged the industry to adopt new technology, reduce emissions and cut costs.
In comparison, the market for greenhouse gas is like sulfur dioxide in the 1980s. The trading systems for carbon are still malleable in certain jurisdictions, which makes it an important time for those who can offset carbon such as western Canadian farmers.
“We (producers) are significant players in this marketplace. They need us. It’s not the other way around,” Wishart said.
“We need to be part of the process of designing a system that works for us.”
Wishart said farmers need to act, and soon, because carbon offset policies are already in place on the Prairies.
Alberta was the first province in Canada to legislate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Last year it passed legislation affecting industries that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas per year. The province’s coal-burning generating stations and oilsand upgraders must cut the intensity of their greenhouse gas emissions 12 percent annually until 2014. The legislation, which took effect July 1, 2007, features three methods of reduction: installing new technology; paying $15 per tonne into a technology fund and buying carbon offsets within Alberta.
Nine of the 15 offset protocols are in the agriculture sector, including credits for reduced tillage and energy efficiency in farm buildings. In addition, the program will benefit early adopters because credits will be given for greenhouse gas reductions, such as zero tillage, going back to 2002.
Although the legislation took effect last summer, the carbon credit program won’t begin until this spring.
“The first six month period … this was really a developmental, commitment period,” said Karen Haugen-Kozyra of Climate Change Central, the agency responsible for the offset program. Despite the slow start, it is nearly ready.
Haugen-Kozyra said 11 companies have positioned themselves to become aggregators of carbon credits, and the program will soon launch an offset registry.
“Once we get the registry up, you’ll probably see … five or six projects registered,” she said.
“There likely will be agricultural tonnes being bought by companies, for compliance, before March 31.”
She said the registry will help farmers develop offset projects, learn if they have something of value and provide transparency for the market.
So far, she said, farmers are most curious about the no-till credits. However, curiosity doesn’t mean producers are satisfied with the compensation. After crunching the statistics and analyzing the science, the program came up with numbers that did not meet expectations.
“Yeah, there’s interest, but it’s hard to gauge how strong it is,” said Peter Gamache, team leader of the Alberta Reduced Tillage Linkages program.
“Our figures that we were dangling out there (for carbon credits for zero tillage), we’re quite a bit higher than the actual coefficients that developed in the protocol.”
For example, Gamache said a farmer practising zero till on 1,000 acres in the Parkland region around Edmonton would receive $1,640 according to the protocols, assuming a price of $10 per tonne.
However, the farmer wouldn’t see all of that because the aggregator would on average take 25 percent, leaving the farmer with $1,230.
“That’s basically about $1.23 per acre,” said Gamache.
“Now you know why we’re sort of saying there’s not a lot of profit in here.”
He does concede that backing up to 2002 provides an incentive to participate in the program. A claim for the last five years of zero till would produce a cheque for $6,000.
While rates for carbon could rise in the future, Gamache said the biggest drag on the market is the option for emitters to pay $15 per tonne into the technology fund.
Essentially, that caps the price for all offsets because polluters would choose to pay into the technology fund instead of paying more for an offset.
The discrepancy between what off-setters are asking for in Alberta and what they’re getting is symptomatic of protocols “focused on the emitter side of things,” Wishart said.
Haugen-Kozyra chose not to comment directly on Wishart’s position because she’s “not the regulator” of the Alberta program.
From Wishart’s perspective, it comes back to the issue of finding a policy that works for the industry and off-setters. His role is to defend the farmer.
“I’m here to represent the off-setters. And that’s those of us in primary agriculture,” Wishart said.
“I want to put something in place that maximizes the value to us.”
He said that is why he’s been talking to other farm groups and government officials to design a framework that’s bigger than just carbon credits. Farmers need to be recognized for their overall contributions to the environment, he added.
“We’re more than just producers of food and fibre. We’re actually managers of the landscape. But strangely enough, when you look around the developed world, we are the last country to move in this direction.”
