 Welcome to Dalhousie University in the College of Sustainabilities, Environment, Sustainability and Society Lectures. I'm Steve Menal, Director of the College. Before we begin tonight, I would acknowledge first that we gather here on the unceded and traditional territory of the MiGMAW people and remind us that we are all treaty people. I would also acknowledge that at Dalhousie University, we work in an unreconciled relationship to the activities of our founder, Lord Dalhousie, in the promotion and the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade, and that in our founding endowments at Dalhousie, we are the beneficiaries of profits from the labors of enslaved African bodies, and these are issues that we will need to reconcile ourselves to in the pursuit of sustainability. Our lecture is a joint venture. We are hosting with the Marine and Environmental Law program of the Schulich School of Law, the Douglas M. Johnston Lecture, and I will introduce Dr. Camille Cameron, who is the Dean of the Schulich School of Law, who will give us a little bit about the lecture and also introduce our lecturer, Camille. Thanks very much, Steve. As Dr. Menal said, my name is Camille Cameron. I'm the Dean at the Schulich School of Law, and it's a real pleasure to be here this evening and to see such a packed room, and a packed room, it should be for the quality of the speaker we have here this evening. We're very fortunate to have her, and if I can just get this again, here we go. Our speaker of the evening is Dr. Diane Sacks. Many of you will know her by reputation. She's one of Canada's most respected environmental lawyers and was the environmental commissioner of Ontario from 2015 to 2019. And for any of you who have ever heard her being interviewed, as I have done, it's really a pleasure to listen to. Dr. Sacks was appointed unanimously by all MPPs to report to the legislature on Ontario's environmental energy and climate performance and to be the guardian of the Environmental Bill of Rights. He's now heading Sacks Facts, a business providing strategic advice and presentations on climate, energy and environment. Given the discussion, if you can call it, that's been going on around our current election. It's good to know that there's somebody who's providing facts and scientific information. There's a need for it. It's fitting that Dr. Sacks is here as our guest for this lecture. As Douglas Johnson, you'll see his picture here, was also a leading light in the field of environmental law and practice. He initiated the program in marine and environmental law at Dalhousie, to which Dr. Manel has just referred. That program was groundbreaking in its time. This lecture was set up and funded by the friends of Douglas Johnson and for some years now has been a joint initiative of the faculty of law at Dalhousie and the College of Sustainability. So on behalf of the law school, on behalf of the Marine and Environmental Law Institute at the law school and the College of Sustainability, if I can extend that far, it's a pleasure to welcome our speaker. Pleasure. Nice to meet you. I do love your interviews. Okay, hello everybody. Hopefully, can you hear at the back? Yes? Okay. Great. That's good. Thank you very much for coming out tonight and let's see if I can see that in this. I've been asked to talk about carbon pricing. Yes, it's an important issue in the election, it's an important issue generally, but three things I want to talk about, why we need it, how it works and what else we need. The short answer is why we need it. I don't know how much of this you folks already know, but I talk to a lot of audiences and it's still amazing how many people think that the climate crisis is somehow about polar bears or people in other places later. And it is going to be very bad for people in other places later. What is here now? And much worse is ahead. The mechanism is pretty straightforward. We have greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere, what do they do? Well, as you can see on the left hand side of the slide, the sun's rays come to the earth every day as it has for millions of years. And until the industrial revolution, until we started burning fossil fuels, most of that heat went right back into outer space. So the metaphor I guess you could use for this is you can think about a bathtub. If there is a drip from the tap and there's a leak from the drain, if they're both going at the same speed, what happens to the level of the water? It stays the same. But if you get some hairs in the drain and the water keeps dripping, what happens to the level of the water? Gradually it's going to build up. And greenhouse gases are like hairs in the drain. They don't do anything dramatic right away, but they build up. And the greenhouse gases that we're putting in the atmosphere every time we burn fossil fuels, they close the windows where the sun's heat used to escape. So we end up with more heat. Now Canada is a big part of the problem. We tend to tell each other that, well, there's only 37 million of us, what we do doesn't really matter, let the other people do the work. There are nearly 200 countries in the world. And Canada is one of the top 10 climate polluters in the world as a country. It's not just that we're big per capita polluters that we are, but we are also enormous polluters as a country, both what we're doing now and what we've done cumulatively, which is building up in the atmosphere. And so, yes, we're giving the world a fever. We're blowing away temperature records, we're blowing away records for how many records we blow away and by how much we blow them away. Every month, the last four months have been at or very close to world record temperature. World record is breaking all-time temperature records. And it's not just the temperature, so all the different features we can look at in terms of measuring the climate crisis, the GHG is greenhouse gases. How fast are we putting climate pollution in the air? The answer is faster than ever. How high are greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Answer, faster than ever in millions of years. How where are temperatures? Building records everywhere. We're also, carbon dioxide also dissolves into the ocean making it acidic. Now where is all the heat going that has built up from closing those windows? Well, people tend to pay attention only to what's in the outside air. Those of you with sharp eyes, I don't know if you can see at the back, but there's, you look on the left-hand side of the graph, there's a tiny little red line at the bottom, at the back, can you see that? Okay, that's how much of the heat is in the air, about one percent. Now you can also see from this figure that the extra heat that's built up, this is pretty much all happened in my lifetime. One percent in the air, three percent, the green line is in soil and vegetation, about three percent has warmed up some of the ice. Where is all the rest of the heat? It's in the water, mostly in the oceans. Most of that in the southern oceans, close to Antarctica. Now a lot of things happen when you warm up water. And I hope most of you learned in elementary school. First thing is, when you warm up water, it takes up more space, right? Same way, warmer air takes up more space, warmer water takes up more space. What does that do to sea level? Does it matter if you believe in it? Second thing that changes when you warm up water. Are any people here like to fish? So you know, one of the things that fish really need is oxygen in the water. When you warm up water, it holds less oxygen, which matters for anything that breathes in the ocean. Third big thing that happens when you warm up water, there's a clue on the slide. Storms are heat engines. What drives storms are how much heat they can take from the surface of the ocean. The more we heat the surface of the ocean, the faster, the more explosively, the more powerful the storms grow. And I'm meant to take a picture of that crane down in downtown. I'll use that for my next presentation, I guess. But my experience has been that when people get bad news, what they normally, what they want to do is wait for normal to come back. Have you ever observed that? And what do we mean by normal? Well, the laws of this country, by and large, the engineering standards, the insurance standards, the crop species, they're all based generally on the average of the 20th century. And that is that zero line. And I hope you can tell that we do not live there anymore. And I can tell you that they cannot come back. The average of the 20th century cannot come back because it takes about a generation between the time that we put climate pollution into the atmosphere and the time that we really start to experience the effects. This chart only shows you what has happened already. We've locked in about another generation's more climate heating from what we have emitted today and for the last generation. So we know that the old normal can't come back. You sometimes hear people say on the radio, isn't the weather really weird? And they talk about normal, or sometimes they talk about new normal. But we've reached, and this is nonsense. We have not reached a new normal. A new normal happens when you gain 10 pounds and you have to buy a new pair of pants. And you don't buy the new pair of pants unless you expect you're going to stay at that new weight for a while. The climate crisis, we have no new normal in sight. It's more accurate to say, we're beginning to see the end of normal. We are beginning to see the impacts of the climate crisis become more visible because there's a huge natural variation in the climate of the world. And it's taken all this time, while all that extra heat built up, for the impact of the climate to become visible. In the middle of all that noise. And we are just at the point where the impact of the climate crisis is starting to take off and become more and more and more visible. Now, Canada is one of the places that's heating up twice as fast as the global average and even more so in the north and the west. And it's having all kinds of impacts here already. Life changing infections for one. I know Lyme disease is really well established in Nova Scotia. It's starting to appear everywhere. This really changes how people can go outside. When I was a little kid and I went to the woods, I mean, I could burn my fingers and fall out of the boat, but as long as I knew how to swim, I wasn't going to change my life. And when my kids were little and I took them on canoe trips, they could fall out of the boat and they could burn their fingers and they did. But they weren't going to change their lives and as long as they could swim. And now when I take my grandchildren to the woods, I have to be terrified if they get a tiny tick, which can change their whole life. The first epidemic of climate change, but many more coming, we're told that the mosquitoes that carry Zika will be able to over winter in Ontario within the next 10 to 15 years. All kinds of other things. Now, most of the things I've talked to you about so far are averages. Most of the data that we get are all about averages, but averages don't tell us very much. So the old joke is if your head is in the oven and you have third degree burns and you're in the freezer and you've got frostbite, on average you are fine. But in fact, you've got frostbite and burns. It's the extremes that do most of the damage. And so it's useful to ask, well, how much have the extremes increased already? Remembering the climate crisis is just starting to be visible outside the normal variation. Well, so we can ask these wild and crazy people the actuaries. Now they don't go back. How far do they go back for this? They don't go back to 1948. They don't go back to 1850. Most of the international numbers go back from 1850. So the actuaries don't have really good data for Canada back to 1850. So they went to 1960. And they said, how much worse are our climate extremes now than they were in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, basically when I was a young warrior? And the answer is, even here in Canada, the United States, where we are basically the luckiest people in the world, we already have four times as many climate extremes as we did when I was a young warrior. And it wasn't that long ago. So we know it's not a question of if anymore. It's a question of where, it's a question of when. All the things that the climate scientists have been telling us for a generation, they're starting to happen. And it's worth remembering. So the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992 based on signs collected in the 1980s. And I was at the Earth Summit. And we knew then, all the countries in the world signed the convention because we knew then that if we continued to burn fossil fuels, if we continued to alter the world's climate as we were, we were putting at risk our ability to grow food, the basis for all elements of modern society. And since that time, since we got that knowledge, what did we do to the level of climate pollution in the atmosphere? We doubled it. Half of the climate pollution in the atmosphere right now, which is starting to make itself so visible, was we put there in the last 30 years after we knew what the consequences would be. After we knew, and I say this to all the young people here, after we knew that it would steal your future, we knew that and we did it anyway. So what's ahead? Well, it's pretty grim. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So when the governments of the world signed this convention, an international treaty, they realized that they weren't sure enough about the science and they wanted to have reliable science that all the countries of the world could accept so that we could work together on that basis to make public policy. And so that's why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created. And if anybody ever says to you, I don't know who to believe, the answer is really simple. You believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is largest scientific collaboration in human history. It is the best science we have. That's why it was created. And what they're telling us is getting more and more terrifying with each report. So they were set up originally to do these series of large assessment reports every six or eight years and the most recent one was in 2014. But they were also asked to do a series of special reports as it became more and more obvious what deep trouble we're in. And we've now had three big special assessment reports in the last year, all of them terrifying. One on 1.5 degrees worth is two. This is important because when the UNFCC was signed in 1992, the treaty says we all agree, all of us, all the countries, we are going to do everything we can to keep the average temperature of the world from going over two degrees. Why did we pick two degrees? It was the best guess at the time that everybody could agree with that it would be really, really, really disastrously bad to get beyond two degrees. But what's become clear in the 30 years since then is that that doesn't mean it's safe to go to two degrees. So that was the first report is what's the difference between Boeing Pass 1.5 degrees and two degrees? The second report is what is this all going to mean for land and food? And the third report, which we got, I think, just last week, maybe the week before I'm losing track, was on the effect on the ocean and what's called the cryosphere. That's everything frozen. So here are our three reports. So the Paris Agreement in 2015, which is the closest thing to a miracle we've seen, the countries of the world agreed, OK, we're going to stay well below two degrees, and we're going to try for 1.5. So the special report said, OK, what's the difference? And the answer was a two degree world is going to be much worse than 1.5 degrees. Large, widespread, robust differences in scientific language, including big differences in sea level, big differences in precipitation, and heat, and drought, and more generally in the ability of all natural and human systems to adapt. If we could stay at 1.5 degrees, we would have a world that's tougher than the one I grew up in, but still mostly manageable, mostly safe. By the time we get to two degrees, we've already got big damage. Second report, what does all this mean for land and food? Well, the climate crisis is already affecting the nutritional value of food. It is already affecting accessibility of food. And if we blow past 1.5 degrees, we've got high risks to the food supply. And if we blow past 2.5, or 2 degrees rather, we've got very high risks. And if we keep delaying, because we know what to do, but mostly we're not doing it, then we can expect rapid, irreversible declines in food productivity in large parts of the world, especially the warmer parts of the world, irreversible damage to land and ecosystems, more wildfire, more conflict, and much more migration as people around the world have to leave where they are. And we're seeing this already. We've seen it in Syria. We've seen it in Central America. We're seeing it other places. And then we have the third report, the newest report about the cryosphere. And the news here is that even since 2014, the last major world assessment report, everything frozen is melting at a truly astonishing rate. And it's melting everywhere. And it's melting even the Bering Sea last year, 1 third of the ice melted in the dark in February before the sun even came up in eight days. Alaska was over average annual temperature this year. It was over zero. The coast of Alaska was ice free this summer. We didn't expect to see that for many decades. And all of this is bringing soaring flood damage and likely expecting dire water shortages. And we can expect hundreds of millions of people to be displaced. And all of this is caused by human activity. This is all of it caused by people. A lot of it caused after we knew the consequences. Then we've got the World Health Organization saying this is the biggest health crisis of this century. And also pointing out that it will cost us in health damage and economic damage from that more than twice as much as it would have cost us or would cost us now to reduce our climate pollution. For every dollar we refuse to pay now to reduce our climate pollution, we're going to pay two in health damages. Come back to Canada, short-term risks. Remember, it takes about a generation between the time that we emit climate pollution and really see the impacts. What that means also is that most of what's going to happen in the next 20 years in terms of the climate chaos is already baked in. It's not baked in yet how we'll respond to it. But we know it's going to be harder and wetter and wilder and weirder. So the federal government commissioned an expert panel to look at, well, what are the bigger risks here in Canada? Again, the luckiest people in the world, just in the next 20 years, just in what we've already locked in, this was their best take. That they estimated an 85% chance that within the next 20 years here in Canada we're going to see catastrophic damage to physical infrastructure, getting a lot worse after that. And what do they mean by that? Billions of dollars in annual costs, thousands of square kilometers lost or re-retrievably damaged, millions of people affected, and so on. We're talking about really big impacts even to us, even here, even soon. You can see why Bill Nye set the globe on fire. I mean, our home is on fire. I don't know how much more I can say that the situation is really, really urgent. And here you are by the ocean. So one of the things I say to audiences in Ontario is we're really lucky. We're a long way from the equator and we're a long way from sea level and the only coast we have is arising faster than the ocean. You guys are by the ocean. And you're by the ocean in a part of the ocean where the sea level is going to rise more here than the world average, as well as the subsidence you're having in Halifax. So Councilor Canadian Academy said, all right, you're expecting at special risk, at high risk of all of these different kinds of damage even in just the next 20 years. How many of you care about what happens in the next 20 years? Okay, this is soon. One of the challenges we have with things when people talk about 2100, honestly, I have never found a politician who cares about 2100 because none of them expect to still be in power in 2100. Anybody here care about a small person? I mean, a young small person? I mean, I do. We talk about 2100. We're talking about things that are likely to happen in the lifetime of today's children. We're talking about damage to people we care about. But anyway, at least in the next 20 years, there you go. And this is their best estimate that sea level rising storm surges are expected to impose over $50 billion in present day costs over the next few decades. And it's going to rise more here than most other places in the world. So there's really, really tough choices. There is nothing that is going to make this go away by magic. There is no one who's going to swoop in with a chapbook and a magic wand and make this go away. We all have tough choices and it's going to get tougher. And the longer we wait, the more we put off the tough decisions, the harder it's going to get. And when they say two or three orders of magnitude, you know, they're saying thousands of times worse than today is what we're talking about. And we can think about it on a broader social scale if it wasn't scary enough. So we had the special rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Council gave the clearest, most explicit presentation I've heard yet from any of the international organizations and he said this. We have now reached the point where the best case result this century that is in the lifetime of today's children is widespread death and suffering. That's the best case and the worst case as humanity on the brink of extinction. The BBC put it this way. They said, what are the factors that lead to the collapse of advanced societies? High and growing complexity, do we have that? High and growing social division or inequality, do we have that? High and growing environmental degradation. And we have that. So we're playing with the biggest stakes there are. We talk about adaptation and mitigation. We want to be, there are many changes coming that we cannot avoid. We have baked in big changes. We have to manage what is already unavoidable. But if we don't slash our climate pollution, the changes will accelerate greater and greater until they become unmanageable. If we want to manage what's unavoidable, we must slash our emissions. We cannot choose, we must do both. Selfishness, greed and apathy aren't problems that scientists can solve. Frankly, they're not problems that lawyers can solve. They take an overall cultural effort. It's gonna take everybody. If we're going to make the transformation that we need to make in the window that's left, it's gonna take everybody. And everyone always thinks that their own issues are the most important, and I do see it a little silly, but yes, this is the most important. This is the most important, because if we get this wrong, nothing else is gonna matter. And the crazy thing is, we've also have so many opportunities to make things better. We know, we've already heard from the World Health Organization, if we reduce our use of fossil fuels, we've got better air quality, we've got better public health. If we spend less money on fossil fuels, we have much more money to spend in the economy doing other things. We've had the new finding from Clean Energy Canada that, yes, moving rapidly to a green economy will lose 50,000 jobs in fossil fuels, but will gain 160,000 jobs, better jobs, that we can keep here. We have enormous amount to gain, but we don't do it, why not? Well, two big reasons. Number one, fossil fuels are cheap, or at least they look cheap. And number two, when pollution is free, we get more of it. When we burn fossil fuels and put pollution in the atmosphere, the whole public pays, but the person who burns the fuels doesn't. So why are fossil fuels so cheap? Is this God-given, or is this a result of the decisions of human societies? Anybody wanna vote for God here? This is the result of a century of public money. A century of subsidies, a century of innovations paid for by the public, a century in which the costs have been borne by the public and the profits have been reaped by the private sector. And so we have created, as a result of enormous amount of public subsidy, the largest, most powerful industry ever in human history, the fossil fuel industries, and they use their power to buy policies, laws, that serve them. Which is part of why we just had another report showing that for the last eight years, the fossil fuel industries have lobbied the government approximately four times a day to get the rules that they want. Yes, it's a surprise that they get the rules that they want. So what's a carbon price for? Well, we in Ontario tore up our carbon price, or at least I should say, the government that was elected tore up our carbon price, our cap and trade system just before the Nobel Prize in Economics was given to William Thorhouse for proving what? That if you're an economist, if what you care about is money, then the best, cheapest, most effective tool in the world to get us a green economy, a chance of surviving the climate crisis is a carbon price. And that's if you only care about money. Why? Well, it levels the playing field. It gets over a little bit of this century of infrastructure and innovation and subsidies have gone into fossil fuels. It rewards innovation, provides money for solutions. And we know that there are only three big tools that actually change pollution. Number one is pollution has to have a cost. It has to be polluter pay. Number two, you have to invest in solutions and generally governments feel too strapped to invest in solutions unless there's new money which can come from a carbon price. And number three, there are things we have to do with regulation. Those are the only three that do big jobs. Well, I don't know enough of what's happening in Nova Scotia right now, but I can tell you in Ontario we're not doing any of them. So how does a carbon price work? Well, we know that price influences behavior. There's lots, any economists in the group? Well, anyway, economists have been telling us this for a long time, people buy fossil fuel when it costs more, they buy less of it. When it costs more, they buy a more efficient furnace, a more efficient car, maybe they don't buy a car. And we know that the market will not increase the price of fossil fuel as the way we need it to because there is an enormous amount of fossil fuel reserves already proven, already trading on the stock exchanges of the world several times more than we could burn and still have a stable future. So if we just allow the market to do it, they will flood us with more and more and more fossil fuels and below was well past, not just 1.5 degrees, well past two degrees. So we can't rely on the market to increase the price. They will not do it. It has to be done with a carbon price and that's the job of government. So we know what happens when a government's put a price on pollution. There's lots of examples of this. The short answer is companies find a way to innovate. We saw this with sulfur dioxide trading in the United States. The companies yelled and screamed that they would be put out of business. We had the same thing in Ontario with countdown acid rain. And once they actually had to do it, they found, what really? It was much less expensive. And INCO, for example, in Ontario, after complaining, complaining, complaining, they couldn't stop spreading sulfur dioxide acid rain over the entire middle of the continent. And now instead they capture the sulfur and they sell it for a profit. So we know this works. You can see it also if you compare the economic growth in the provinces that had carbon pricing against the ones that didn't. And as you can see, the ones that had carbon pricing all had the strongest growth. We've seen it around the world that carbon pricing is a feature of many thriving economies. It rewards innovation. There's a lot of bright young people who got good ideas and they don't get a hearing if the old system can just keep going, keep going, keep going. But they do get a hearing when there's a chance to build something new. And we've seen that around the world. And certainly California has had extraordinary economic growth since they brought in their carbon pricing in 2008. Canada has a federal requirement for carbon price in the Pan-Canadian framework. This is something that was agreed to between the federal government and essentially all of the provinces and territories in 2015 part of the run up to the Paris Agreement. It's got four big pillars. And one of them is that every part of Canada will have a price on carbon pollution. We almost had a federal price tent in 2005 under Paul Martin. But anyway, that got kicked aside by Mr. Harper. So under the Pan-Canadian framework, the deal was every province could choose their own method of pricing as long as it was roughly equivalent to Canada's existing commitment to the Paris Agreement. And if a province refuses to price carbon pollution, then the federal government will do it as a backstop. And so that's what we got. It's done under this federal statute called the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act. And both Saskatchewan and the Ontario government challenged this in court. And both of the courts of appeal have upheld the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act to say, yes, this is a perfectly legitimate federal statute that's going on to the Supreme Court in January. Just so you know, you hear people talking about carbon tax. How many of you are lawyers or law students? OK, well, for lawyers, it is important to at least know there is a legal meaning to tax. The federal carbon price is not a tax. The Court of Appeal has said so very explicitly, a tax by law is a method of collecting revenue for the government. The carbon price collects how much revenue for the government? Actually, less than zero, because they don't even collect the amount of money it takes them to manage the money. They, 90% of the money goes back directly to households in each province where it's collected, and the other 10% goes to institutions and small businesses. So just so you know, it's not a tax. There is a separate system for large polluters. And if anybody wants to ask me, you can ask me. Canada has varied different emission profiles in the different provinces, and they're changing in different ways. For sure, you can see who the big polluters are. Ontario, we used to be number one. We're now proudly number two. Alberta has beaten us out. Nova Scotia is not a big contributor, and you can see that your emissions have gone down some. So congratulations for that. But different provinces have different challenges. So this is the idea under the Pan-Canadian framework that every province can choose its own design and there are two big buckets of types of questions you have to ask about a carbon price. One bucket, where do you get the money from? Who do you collect it from? And also across the question of how the price should be. And another whole different set of buckets, what do you do with the money? And we've seen very different answers across the country in both of those kinds of questions. So we used to get very excited about the difference between cap and trade and the carbon price. I don't get as excited anymore. Any method of price and carbon is better than no method of price and carbon, but different ways we've done it. So I thought I'd tell you a little bit about Ontario, although I know people outside Ontario hate me to talk about Ontario because you're just developing a cap and trade program, but we had one. And it was my personal job to provide oversight and to check how the money was being used. Because under our climate law, every penny of the money that was collected under the cap and trade system had to be used to move us to a green economy. It had to be used to reduce our climate pollution. And that's different. Nobody else has that rule. You don't have that in Nova Scotia, but we had that as our rule. So, but we don't have that anymore because when the conservatives were elected in Ontario, they promptly canceled basically every program we had for doing anything about climate pollution, and most other things for doing anything else environmental have all been trashed or slashed or burned or something. And so, we also have stickers. So you probably know our premier made his money in a business selling sticky labels. So they ordered, they passed a law requiring every gas station in Ontario to post stickers on the gas pumps that mislead the public about the gas price because 80%, I think I explained that everybody gets a refund from the federal carbon tax. The average family got $300. 80% of families end up ahead. They get more money from the refund than they pay in the gas tax. So this is misleading and it would be illegal for any business to post this if it weren't required by law, but because they ordered the wrong kind of labels, they keep falling off. So I don't know, maybe there's some points there. But it's a trade-off because families, if 80% of the families in the province are getting more money than they're paying, that tells you something, somebody else is paying, right? Well, yes, but if 80% of the families are getting more money, the money's coming somewhere else. And basically it's coming from institutions, it's coming from small businesses. That's where all that extra money is coming from. We have, oh yes, we have a counter sticker campaign for people who want to put up pro-carbon tax stickers. There you go. And we also get these questions, well, how does it work if you get it back anyway? But I suppose that's not so important here. Before we had the conservative government, we had cap-and-trade, we had it for 18 months. It's very hard to change the direction of an economy. We have an $800 billion a year economy and cap-and-trade was only a $2 billion a year program. We only had it for 18 months. You can't change the direction of an $800 billion economy very much in 18 months. But there are a lot of similarities to the cap-and-trade system that you're about to have. And one of the things that's very similar is who needs allowances. So, I mean, is this helpful to you to talk about who needs allowances? Anybody interested in this? A few people, maybe? Okay, well, so there's... A lot of people think that most of the pollution comes from a small number of industries with smokestacks. People like to blame the guys with the smokestacks. And there is some truth. The places with big smokestacks, some of them have a lot of pollution in one place. There's about 20 of those in Nova Scotia. Big industry is often called large, final limiters. They are gonna have to get their own allowances, although under your system, they get all their allowances free at the beginning, so they don't have to buy anything. Then there's everybody else. Now, everybody else who buys fossil fuels, natural gas, gasoline, diesel, oil, well, we're also creating climate pollution. And certainly in Ontario, by far more of the climate pollution comes from individuals than comes from industry. But it would be ridiculously expensive to make every single one of you register and participate in the auction. So the companies that sell the gasoline, the diesel, the natural gas, they're the ones that have to buy the allowances. So they're in that second group. They have to buy allowances at the auction. And it's interesting because they don't get to control how much you drive. So there's some very interesting problems for particularly the gasoline distributors as to how they get enough allowances because they are required to pay those allowances back to the government for all the gasoline they sell and they don't get to say how much gasoline they sell. And then there's a few over on the right hand side. You can see, hopefully it says uncapped sectors. So about 20% of your economy isn't covered by your cap and trade system at all. Generally, agriculture waste a few others are just not covered. And so you're supposed to have an offset system eventually and this might give those folks some kind of financial incentives to use their emissions. But basically the plan, as far as I can tell here is for the emission reductions to come mostly from all of you. Because remember, the large industries are getting 100% of their allowances for free. That'll go down slowly, but they start not having to pay. It's also a question of what you do with the money. As I say in Ontario, we had to use all of the money to try to move us to a low carbon economy. And we saw that combination. A carbon price plus investment in the economy really produced rapid responses, particularly from industry, not so much from the general public. And the combination worked really well. We saw, we got the world's first all electric gold mine, for example, because we had cap and trade and some capital funds available. We had 550 examples. We saw hospitals, for example, finally got access to capital to make their buildings more efficient. So they were on track to save $60 million a year in operating costs that they were gonna be allowed to put back into their patient care. What we saw, in fact, was that three quarters of the cap and trade money was being spent on publicly funded institutions. Municipalities, universities, schools, hospitals, library, public transit, all organizations that use a lot of fossil fuels and are generally starved for capital to upgrade their systems. And so wanted to have a more efficient furnace, a more efficient building, more efficient vehicles and just couldn't afford to buy them, got the money because of the funding from cap and trade. But it did make a big difference and you can try to see here under the left-hand side, under the cap and trade system, households paid a lot and industries got a lot of money back to upgrade their equipment. Under the federal carbon price, households are getting three quarters of a billion dollars a year and everybody else is paying. So these choices matter a lot. You can have a carbon price and still have big differences in who wins and who loses around the province. Now, then I'll try to look at, okay, well, what we learned in Ontario to help you in Nova Scotia. And the answer is, well, we don't know how much because your market's going to be very different. Although the operating structure is the same. We had a large liquid market. We had a whole group of people who came in specifically to make the market work. Market participants provided liquidity, made a living doing it. Smaller organizations like municipalities could opt in. And so we had lots of people buying allowances and the market's almost every auction sold out and the prices gradually rose. You're gonna have, I'm raised nearly $2 billion a year. You're gonna have a very different system. You're having a very small market, very few participants. Most of the allowance is going to the power company. And no one else allowed to play. No market participants, no opt-ins, no municipalities and no links with anybody else. So that's a really high-risk market. It may work. It may take a while to work. It may not work at all. It may, you know, it's very hard to make predictions because you're doing something that most other folks have not tried to do. And then the idea, there seem to be a lot of promises in this green fund. So the green fund under your statute is going to do everything. It's gonna reduce greenhouse gases and it's gonna pay compensation to the poor who have to pay extra for their energy costs. And it's gonna pay for technology. And it's gonna allow you to, I don't know, prepare for the sea rising and it's gonna pay for people to fly around to international meetings and anything else they prescribe. That's a really big shopping list. What we found in Ontario was that 2 billion a year didn't go very far if all we tried to do was to focus on reducing emissions. And we didn't let the money go anywhere else because otherwise it would all be sucked away. And you're gonna have a fairly small amount of money coming in and being expected to do many, many, many things. So if I was gonna bet, I would bet there's gonna be a vigorous debates over that money. But I guess you guys can tell me. Now, even if we have carbon pricing, we have to have carbon pricing, but it isn't enough. We know it isn't enough. Now your carbon price, according to the government website that I saw, is supposed to be only about one eighth as high as the federal carbon price. But we know that the federal carbon price isn't high enough anyway. So the parliamentary budget officer looked at the federal carbon price and said, well, will that take us to our existing Paris commitment? So Canada has made a commitment. This is the same commitment that Mr. Harper said he would make. So we said, all right, we're gonna still meet the target that Harper said we were gonna make by 2030. So the parliamentary budget officer said, all right, given everything else the government is doing, are they gonna get there with this carbon price? And the answer is no. It's more than half too low for us to meet our existing Paris commitment with the price. And there's a whole batch of things that the federal carbon price doesn't apply to and a lot of those aren't covered by the Nova Scotia system either. Agriculture's not covered, methane's not covered. Soot, the dirt that comes up from the back of these vehicles isn't covered, refrigerants. I hope anyone who's interested in climate action do you know about drawdown, drawdown.org, really good website, excellent program to look at what are the world's best, most cost effective, most environmentally effective actions that we could take now. And number one in the world is don't leak any more refrigerants. If you've got an air conditioning system, you've got a refrigeration system, even if you've got a home refrigerator. Number one most important thing is do not inflate any of that refrigerant leak into the outside air anymore because it can be tens of thousands of times worse than carbon dioxide and it can stay in the atmosphere indefinitely because these are artificial chemicals. So anyway, that's another one that is not covered by the current system. So there's a lot of gaps and there are other public policies. We do know kinds of things that can help make prices more effective. And if the federal carbon price survives a selection and yes, I am on record, we really need a carbon price and I don't think anybody should vote for anybody who doesn't support a carbon price. There's all kinds of different carbon prices. I don't care anymore, but we have to have a carbon price. Anyway, if we still have a carbon price after the federal election, then there's lots of things we need to make it better. It was a good first step. It can be fixed a lot, but there's things we can do. But let's just sort of put it into perspective. So this is a slide from the federal government's description of the pan-Canadian framework. It's not a very good slide, which is why I put a line through it because it's not up to date, but they won't make a new one. This was their picture of all the things they have to do to meet the current Canadian commitment. They thought they were gonna get 80 to 90 tons from the carbon price. Well, they now admit that that was too high. Maybe they'll get 50 or 60 tons from the carbon price. But they've got three other kinds of things which are regulations, very important regulations that also we may or may not have, depending on what happens in this election. One is the coal phase out. Hugely important to shut down the coal-fired electricity plants in Alberta. Number two, methane capture. Methane is natural gas, basically. It is a very useful fuel if you burn it. But if you just leak it into the atmosphere, it's about 100 times worse than carbon dioxide while it's in the atmosphere. And it reacts with other compounds to make ground-level ozone, which is a human health hazard, as well as being itself a greenhouse gas. Leaking methane is really, really bad. And we leak an enormous amount of methane. We leak some of it from sewage treatment plants. We leak an enormous amount from oil and gas infrastructure. And so one of the pieces also is to have a regulation to make companies reduce the amount of methane that they leak in Alberta alone. They know of 400,000 places where they leak methane. I shouldn't say leak. A lot of those are deliberately designed. So there's a lot of work to be done in methane. And the third thing is the clean fuel standard, which is another thing that Mr. Shear has said he will tear up if he gets elected. But I'll show you this just to say that even on the federal government's own imagination of what they're doing, the carbon price is only one piece. It seems to be the only one we talk about. And it is one thing we have to have, but it's only one of the pieces. Now they have, remember there were four pillars to the pan-Canadian framework. So one was pricing, two is complementary actions. And no, you can't read this slide, it's ridiculous. They don't make a legible copy of it anywhere. It's just we're doing a whole batch of other stuff, they say, to reduce carbon dioxide, use fuel use. If people want to get a copy of these slides, fill up how do they get them? Steve. Okay, they'll be on the website if anyone wants to see them. You can also get them from the federal government because I know you can't see that from the back. I can't even see it from here. Some of that is regulations. There definitely are things we need to do with regulations. The single largest reduction, well actually, let's ask. Who knows, what's been the single largest reduction climate pollution in Canada ever? Anybody know? Want to guess? It was in regulation, shutting down the coal plants, our coal-fired power plants in Ontario. In fact, the largest single reduction in North America so far. Sometimes there are things you can do with regulations and it's generally when there's a really clear answer and you can do it in a simple straightforward way. Regulations are not really good for very complicated things. Let me tell you, I was a tax lawyer first and it used to be my job to write regulations and I can assure you that I did not know more about furnaces than people who run furnaces when I was drafting regulations. So anyway, two other pillars. One is adaptation, of course, which is getting ready for the craziness is coming, which is hugely important, but I don't know who needs to talk about that. And then the fourth thing is innovation. We need new technology. We need people to develop new ideas. We've already got some that help a lot. Electric cars, LED bulbs. There's all kinds of things that work better than the stuff we used to have but we need a lot more of that. And we have one of the most highly educated populations in the world. We've got a lot of people who could generate and develop these technologies. And again, as I traveled the country, as commissioner, people everywhere were telling me about the great things they were working on but they only make sense. They will only go forward if there's a price on the pollution and some money available to get us from the old system to the new system. So, okay, you put all of that together. Does that get us to Canada's current and not very ambitious target, our commitment to the Paris Agreement? How many people think, yes, hands up? Yeah, nowhere near, right? Now we're near. Everything in the pan-Canadian framework gets us nowhere near our existing commitment which is the one that Harper made. And you can see that even in the graph that the federal government put out which is obsolete. They said, okay, 79 megatons of what they call unmodeled, which means we don't know how to get there yet. Now, on top of all of that, that's what would it take to get to our current commitment? And this is not a good slide. I apologize, I'm still looking for a better one. But what it's trying to show is if we wanted to make a commitment about our emissions, that was consistent with Paris. Remember, the agreement in Paris was that the world would keep global temperature well below two degrees and a possible 1.5. So if we wanted to do our part for that, remembering we're one of the top 10 climate polluters in the world, we would have to be in the green or the yellow. Are we anywhere near that? We are nowhere near that. The pan-Canadian, you see that sort of blue handkerchief-like thing at the top? That's what the pan-Canadian framework will get us if we do everything in it. If we tear them all up after this election, we're not even gonna be there. But as you can see, that puts us nowhere near the kind of reductions we would have to have if we want a world that is only two degrees warmer than pre-industrial, which as you remember, already means very high risks to things like food. If we want a two-degree world, which is less stable and safe than today, but still survival for most people, we might even still have property insurance globally if we stayed to two degrees. Then we can only emit, we've got to cut our emissions a quarter during the working lifetime of my car and the boiler for this building or whatever is used to keep this building. Like right now, we've got to be cutting by a quarter. We've got to be net zero in half a century. If we want a 1.5-degree world where there are still coral reefs and mountain glaciers and low-lying island states and fairly predictable weather, we've got to be cutting our pollution in half by 2030. We've got to be cutting it well over 5% a year, starting today every year. So how close are we already to 1.5 degrees? I invite you to watch and see how much of the space to 1.5 degrees has already been used up in your lifetime and that's just to 2017. So is it too late? And I have to say, too late for what? Is it too late for today's young people to have the same kind of world that I had when I grew up? Nancy's, yes, we threw that away. But is it too late to make a difference in what's coming? Not yet, not quite yet. We have a small handful of years left to make big choices about what's coming. And that's including what we do in this election. So I ask everyone at every level, there's three things you've got to do. We have to reduce our carbon footprints, at least 5% a year, individuals, families, communities, institutions, cities, countries. We've got to be getting ready for the wild or wacky or weird or weather that's coming. And we have to do the very un-Canadian thing of speaking up. And how do you speak up? A lot of people, especially Canadians, seem to find this really high. So I'm going to ask you to memorize these 11 words. Repeat them after me. Simple, clear messages. Repeated often by a variety of trusted voices. This is how you change hearts and minds. Simple, say it with me, simple, clear messages. Repeated often by a variety of trusted voices. Now all of you are trusted voices for some people. Maybe your friends, your families, your coworkers, your bowling league, your students, your teachers. You've got to talk to them. Everyone needs to be talking about the climate crisis. Most people feel helpless and most people feel alone. They feel nobody else is doing this. Nobody else cares about this. Nobody understands it. Actually most other people now are frightened and are concerned. And if one person starts talking about it, other people are more willing to talk about it. So here are three big topics to talk about. We need to price climate pollution. We need to stop sprawl, which drives our consumption of fossil fuels. And we need to protect nature, which is going to be our best friend and the craziness that's coming. Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something. Question is, what will you do? Thank you. That is working. So we'll take some questions now and our habit is always to begin with a few questions from students. So we'll ask any students in the audience if you've got a question for Dan or comment or a simple clear message you want to repeat often. Yes. So why is sea level rising more in Canada and particularly Atlantic Canada than in other areas? So there are several things I think are happening. And this is not an area of my expertise. One is that the continental plate is tilting. So central Canada used to have a lot of ice on it 10,000 years ago and is still slowly rebounding. And the other end of that plate is over here. Second thing is that as the ice melts in Antarctica, the water redistributes around the globe and more of it ends up in the North Atlantic than anywhere else. And I did have that explained to me once but I can't remember. But anyway, it wasn't me who had to came up with that. It was from the expert panel on climate risks. And on top of that, you do have subsidence here that actually Halifax is going down at the same time that the sea is coming up. So gives you extra chances. Okay, that's the answer. Okay, another question. Yes. So I think the question was how do I start? Yeah, so and I again, I'm apologized because I was commissioned in Ontario, I studied Ontario. In Ontario, the average individual got half their carbon footprint from four things. Anybody wanna guess what they are? Vehicles, absolutely, number one is vehicles. And this is an all Canada figure. We always like to be number one. Which country in the world drives the worst most climate polluting vehicles in the entire world? Canada. Yep, we have beaten out the United States. We drive the worst vehicles in the world. You can be proud. Yeah, well, it's good to be number one. So driving is a big thing. We drive much too much and we drive big vehicles and we tend to drive with not many people in them. The second thing is home heating. We tend to have an awful lot of leaky houses that leak heat and aren't maintained properly. So home heating, we use a huge amount of fuel. The third one is and the fourth one. Who knows, beef. Sorry. Those are the four big ones. So the kind of things people wanna think about plastic shopping bags. I mean, sure, plastic shopping bags are a problem. They are primarily a problem because they choke the oceans. They choke rivers. They're not primarily a climate problem. So the easiest way to start is look at what are your big things? What are the big things you do that you can change? And for some people it's food and for some people it's how you get around and for some people it's your home. Everybody can do something. There are a lot of government programs and I know Halifax has some very good programs to help people figure out how to be more efficient and there's lots of stuff online as well. I don't know, is there anything like that specific for Nova Scotia? There are some programs. I think we generally, one of the things students have done in the last week or so is to do a footprint calculation using an online calculator that gives a sense of where are your emissions, where are your carbon emissions coming from and that's the starting point for where you can change them. The big thing that would be different in Ontario is we don't use coal for power. So electricity has a much bigger carbon footprint here than it does there. So things like changing your light bulbs, being much more efficient when you use electricity that's a more valuable thing here than it is in Ontario. It's interesting that those four big sources of carbon emissions for Canadians are for heavily subsidized industries as well. They are. So we're paying ourselves or we're spending a lot of money to keep it cheap to do the worst things. Exactly. Which is why we could move that same money to do the good things. So what methods of energy production are in Ontario now that coal is not there? Okay, so first I'm gonna give you a bit of a hard time. A lot of people say energy meaning electricity. Electricity and energy are different. Most energy comes from petroleum products or natural gas. But you're gonna ask me, I think about electricity. Okay, so Ontario gets 63% of its electricity roughly from nuclear, about 22% roughly from hydropower. I'm not gonna have all the numbers in my head anymore. I think we're now about 9% wind. It's hard to tell about solar because it's not measured in the same way but maybe two, 3% solar. And I forget what I'm missing. When that legislation was passed, coal was a relatively minor player compared to Ontario. Well, coal was 21% of our electricity. Still fairly substantial, yeah. Still substantial, it used also for peaking. So that's another challenge we've really had in Ontario is the nukes have to run all the time. Basically you can't ramp up and down the nuclear plant very well. Well, you can't. And so closing the coal plant, oh yes, when we burn natural gas and we're burning more natural gas now because we got rid of cap and trade. So the question of how to provide peaking loads or how to make match the supply and demand is really challenging in a system that's mostly renewables and nuclear. And I did a whole report on that. So all of my reports, by the way, are available on my website, which is there since the government broke the links to all. I did 17 reports as environmental commissioner and some of them are relevant to other places in the country and I certainly encourage you to go and look at them. Well, because the Canadians Civil Liabilities Association has brought a lawsuit to challenge it, but lawsuits are really slow and in the meantime the government passes whatever laws it likes. So the question was about basically providing what other people in political office might call fake news on gas pumps. Oh no, it clearly is false and misleading. There's no question about it. It is false for most people, but anyway. Yeah, okay. And did Ford's company do the stickers? Is that where they all fell out? I don't know why they ordered the wrong kind of stickers. Apparently they ordered indoor stickers. Maybe they were cheaper. Okay, so the question is about the kind of public presence and the presence in leaders' comments and in the election generally in the current federal election. Are there things that are heartening that comments suggest that leaders feel the environment is on people's mind and climate is on people's mind? Well the most heartening, exciting thing that's happened during this campaign is the climate strikes. The hundreds of thousands of people who are in the streets marching for their future because the leaders are not taking it very seriously. The leaders spend most of their time talking about other stuff. The degree of public understanding of the urgency and of the options is not very good. So I do find it really hard to listen to the yammering. My focus is not on who can sling mud to whom. My focus is on public policy. So I'm a policy walk, so I reviewed the public policies particularly on the issues of which I personally have studied and reported on. So for example, each of the parties claims, well, I didn't read the block and I didn't read the people's party. I read the other four policies on home energy retrofits, for example. And that's a topic on which I reported in detail to the Interior Legislature six months ago. So I know that my information's up to date. I scored the Liberals a sort of an A minus that conserves it a D and the others in a B-ish because anyway, I mean I can go with details you like, I mean I just did this detailed analysis and the conservatives chose the only policy that's been absolutely proven not to work. So the question's about, without minimizing the personal and responsibilities and the responsibility of individual action, a relatively few number, small number of companies are responsible by some accounts for a large amount of carbon emissions. So how do we square individual action against that there was just yesterday in the Guardian there was discussion of the 20 fossil fuel companies that are directly and indirectly responsible for 60% of world emissions. So I mean, you already saw a lot of slides. I had other slides about that. Individual action is essential but not anywhere near enough. It's a good place to start, it's a terrible place to stop. The climate crisis is a collective problem. It cannot be solved without collective solutions and that's what government was invented for. They're supposed to lead us to collective solutions but we also just can't leave it to government. The governments find big changes really, really, really hard. I mean maybe the best way of thinking about this is an old story supposed to be true about Roosevelt and a group of leaders came in to tell him about some important new thing he had to do and they told him all about it and how wonderful he was, it was. And at the end he said, that sounds great. Now go make me do it. Because that's how democracies work. And so one of the reasons for taking personal action is the, first of all, the impact you have yourself, which is small but not zero, then the signal you send to others. So the other people, the people you travel with, the people you eat with, the people you, in your family, they observe what you do. People of social animals, they're very interested in what other people do, they're more likely to do it if you do it. The people who are selling, you see this with the growth of vegan restaurants now everywhere, I can now go anywhere in the country just about and get something to eat. This was not possible 40 years ago because more and more people do it and so more and more people sell it and then more and more people can do it and so it grows that way. But the biggest single factor is it creates the conditions that then allow the political class to do something different. They're being lobbied really hard by the fossil fuel industries and the others who profit from business as usual. What's going to be the counterbalance? Well, it's got to be public will or we're not gonna get there. So do it and tell people about it, I think is part of the story. And get someone else to do it with you. I suppose one thought I would add to that too is how do those big companies do their business? Who's doing business with them? Just other big companies? If we're buying their products, we are enabling them. How many people have bought something from Amazon in the last year? Come on, admit it. You're part of the problem, right? But I bought a hybrid car 17 years ago, something like that and it was a ridiculous car to buy, right? I mean it was very expensive, it wasn't very good and there were no options, right? It came in one color. But because people like me bought the not very good hybrid cars, the car companies kept making better and now there's wonderful cars. So it makes a difference. So there is a kind of interesting intersection there. Okay, so the question says you're advocating implementing a carbon tax, which I'm not sure that I heard. Carbon price, actually. Carbon price. But the question is really about the effects of that carbon price on Canadian economy. Right, so we could have a long conversation about that. There's a couple of different answers, a couple of things you can start with. Number one is if we don't get serious about the climate crisis, believe me, the economic damage is going to be enormous. The best estimates are for every dollar we don't spend now we're gonna spend, I don't know, 10 times as much in your lifetime because we didn't take action. So it's a really bad, bad economic decision to refuse to act. Second thing is that there's a lot to gain and I had one slide about that. There's trillions of dollars sloshing around the world right now looking for ways to invest in the transition to the green economy because they know that's where the money's going to be made. We can be part of that future or we can be sticking behind. We've seen that with a study from Clean Energy Canada that yes, if we move dramatically towards a green economy we will lose 50,000 jobs in the fossil fuel industry and gain 160,000 jobs in green industries. We're seeing that in, I showed you the provinces that had carbon tax always had carbon pricing of some kind all had stronger economic growth in the other provinces. In Vancouver they're tracking the green economy industries are all growing faster than the average, they're increasing jobs much more quickly than the other economies that they have. So it's not that it's going to be smooth but I think it's going to be much, the longer we wait the harder it'll be the more it'll cost. The quicker we get started the easier it'll turn out to be probably just the way it was for cap and trade for sulfur dioxide. The companies yelled and screamed and yelled and screamed and yelled and screamed and when they actually had to do it, they were fine. We've seen the same kind of thing in the nine U.S. states which are in the cap and trade system for the regional greenhouse gas initiative. Their best estimate is for the billion dollars that has been collected in cap and trade revenue they got $1.3 billion back in direct economic benefits from increased efficiency and $5.7 billion of benefits back in better public health. That sounds pretty good to me. Think of it more of a carbon investment than a carbon tax. So the question is about talk in Alberta about secession from Canada because of carbon regimes and others and is this a serious issue from a kind of environmental perspective if this were to go in that direction? Well, I mean the question about national unity and how to balance the benefits and burdens of any major national challenge, these are real questions and this is part of why I don't dump on the Liberals for buying the stupid pipeline for a ridiculous price. It was part of their pan Canadian framework to try to provide a route forward that the whole country could live with recognizing that provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan depend very, very heavily on oil and gas production and that the kind of changes we're talking about are gonna be hard on them and Saskatchewan also has a big coal production. It is really legitimate to think about how is this going to be for people who are differently situated than us? How can we make the route forward together as good as we can? Recognizing that places like Quebec have lots and lots of hydropower, they do okay in this kind of calculus because we kind of ignore all the economic consequences of environmental consequences of hydropower. So yes, compromise is necessary. The pan Canadian framework was an attempt to do that and it might have worked if Trudeau had been able to actually get that pipeline started, but as you know, there were many other reasons why that didn't happen. Can we pull all of these different things together as the climate hammers is harder and harder and harder? I don't know. All I know is it's probably going to get harder the longer we wait, the tougher it's going to be. Look at, just think about the Bahamas for a minute. Whatever challenges they had six weeks ago are harder now and they've got less money to do it with and the climate crisis is just getting going. That will happen to us too. The sooner we get at it, the easier it'll be, the longer we wait, the harder it'll be. But it isn't going to be easy. It's still possible though and the stakes are big, it's worth trying. Okay, well I think we've come to the end of our time so I'd like to acknowledge support of the Schulich School of Law and the Marine Environmental Law Program and thank you Diane. A little, a little bag of college swag. Thank you everybody.