Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s proposed “medicare model” for climate action, offering Canadian provinces the flexibility to devise their own plans for meeting a national greenhouse gas emissions target, appears to have a lot in common with the Clean Power Plan unveiled last year by the Obama Administration, Energy Mix Curator Mitchell Beer writes in this iPolitics op ed.
“Trudeau’s plan will rise or fall on the numbers—the actual emission reductions the feds would require and the deadlines for achieving them,” Beer writes. “But the Liberal policy team may be drawing inspiration from one of the more promising carbon reduction efforts anywhere.”
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However, to move beyond a focus on carbon pricing and begin building the foundations of a low-carbon economy, Trudeau and his advisors “will have to get comfortable confronting a Problem That Shall Not Be Named,” acknowledging that a low-carbon economy means using less oil.
“Those are not words that any federal politician will want to speak in the run-up to the next election,” he writes. But “this is exactly the moment for at least one of the federal opposition parties to find the courage and the data to introduce a climate plan that begins with carbon pricing, but goes far deeper into the nuts and bolts of the clean energy transition.”
