The National Round Table on Nonsense

As the life span of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) ends, hopefully we will not see a future reincarnation of a similarly wasteful enterprise at Canadian taxpayer's expense.

The NRTEE was created following the release of the infamous Brundtland Report, and between 1988 and 2013 it produced a number of reports on sustainable development initiatives -- most, if not all, of them were seriously flawed from a range of perspectives. In order to avoid repeating this mistake, we need to remind ourselves of the NRTEE nonsense. We'll start with the public statements made by NRTEE supporters and members when news broke last year that the NRTEE would be cancelled. In the ensuing media melee, CBC News reported on May 16, 2012 that "the head of a federal advisory group on the environment says his group never suggested that the federal government adopt a carbon tax." Similarly, the Globe and Mail editorial board claimed on May 21, 2012 that "the group has never promoted a carbon tax." Jeffrey Simpson from the Globe and Mail also got into the action, stating that "Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird lashed out at the NRTEE, saying it had repeatedly called for a carbon tax that Canadians had rejected. That statement, typically partisan given the source, was completely false." What astonishingly ridiculous statements. Simpson's claims are the ones that are "completely false." Here is a direct quote from the NRTEE report entitled Achieving 2050: A Carbon Pricing Policy for Canada:

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"In January 2008, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE or Round Table) released a report entitled Getting to 2050: Canada's Transition to a Low-emission Future, recommending that the government implement a strong, clear, consistent, and certain carbon price signal across the entire Canadian economy as soon as possible in order to successfully shift to a lower GHG emissions pathway. We determined that market-based instruments -- either a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade system, or a combination of the two -- were necessary, with complementary policies in certain sectors, to achieve the government's targets."

Nope. Sure doesn't look like the NRTEE ever "suggested" or "promoted" a carbon tax, does it? Wrong. The NRTEE most certainly promoted a carbon tax. Any organization that publicly denies statements made in its own publicly available reports has no credibility, and appears incompetent and corrupt. Of greater concern were the scientific problems with the NRTEE's work. For example, in its report on Paying the Price: The Economic Impacts of Climate Change for Canada, the NRTEE claimed the following:

"Climate change will be expensive for Canada and Canadians. Increasing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide will exert a growing economic impact on our own country, exacting a rising price from Canadians as climate change impacts occur here at home. This report by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) -- the fourth in our Climate Prosperity series -- sets out what those costs could be. It makes clear that while there is an environmental cost to climate change, there is an economic cost too: a cost of letting climate impacts occur and a cost to adapting to protect ourselves from these impacts ... Climate change costs for Canada could escalate from roughly $5 billion per year in 2020 -- less than 10 years away -- to between $21 billion and $43 billion per year by the 2050s."

These are predictions with high precision. The NRTEE claimed the capacity to predict the costs of climate change for the entire nation of Canada (one of the world's largest and most complex economies with one of the largest and most complex geographies and climatic regimes) within a factor of two, and with two significant figures, in the year 2050. Based on such claims, one would reasonably anticipate a multi-volume report comprising -- at minimum -- tens of thousands of pages of analyses. Is this the approach the NRTEE employed? No. Instead, the NRTEE "used the well-established model PAGE (Policy Analysis of the Greenhouse Effect) to explore the costs of climate change for Canada." The PAGE model purports to conduct its futuristic economic modeling linked to climate change out to the year 2200 using a limited series of polynomial equations. A reliable economic model of the world out to the year 2200? What a ridiculous concept on its own, nevermind when coupled to climate predictions out to the year 2200. Let us think back 190 years as to the nature of the global economy in the year 1820 and the technologies that existed at that time. Would some economic model in the year 1820 have accurately predicted (or even reasonably guess-timated) the nature of the global economy -- and particularly that of specific countries -- in the year 2010? Clearly not. Any useful predictions regarding the costs of anthropogenic climate change to Canada would need to use fine spatial and temporal resolution, working from smaller to larger scales at representative points in the future and then integrating with synergistic and antagonistic inter-regional effects. To reliably predict the costs of climate change, one needs to predict the nature of an economy in the future in the absence of climate change, and then predict the nature of the same economy in the future in the presence of climate change. The costs of climate change are the integrated differences between the two predictions. So the PAGE model can accurately predict the economy of Canada out to the year 2200? Amazing. Someone is going to get very rich making bets and playing the stock market with this futuristic knowledge. Here in Canada, many of our leading economists cannot agree on relatively basic questions such as whether or not Canada has a petrodollar -- and if so, to what degree -- and whether or not Canada is experiencing the Dutch Disease linked to natural resource development -- and if so, to what degree. Yet, we apparently have a model that can accurately predict the costs of climate change across our diverse nation out into the future nearly two centuries. Rubbish. Current climate models make poor predictions of large regional climates, and their capacity to downscale to smaller regions is essentially non-existent. Do we need that level of spatial (and temporal) resolution in order to make any useful economic predictions regarding the costs of climate change to Canada? Absolutely. The economy of each and every region in the country must also be analyzed separately. We must look at the current climate and any natural cycles, and what impacts climate change may have on such cycles, and then investigate the differences. We need anticipated alterations to building heating and cooling costs for all individual regions (i.e., city-by-city, town-by-town, hamlet-by-hamlet) of Canada under both the control (e.g., no climate change) and treatment (e.g., with climate change) scenarios. We need the same site-specific analyses for the detailed effects on agriculture and forestry, infrastructure construction, operations, and maintenance costs (e.g., roads, buildings, etc.), and on it goes. One's mind reels at the necessary complexity of such a reliable national model. In short, it is not currently available, or otherwise governments and private sector players would be using such economic models to reliably predict our future economy. As can be attested by all, our local, regional, and national economies are not presently amenable to reliable prediction in the absence of any climate effects. Add in the unpredictability of climate on any and all of these scales, and we have an intractable situation. Just consider heating and cooling costs alone. To reliably predict the effects of climate change on building heating and cooling costs, we not only need to reliably predict the control and treatment climates at some point in the future at high temporal resolution, but we also need to predict future building designs (i.e., energy amounts needed to heat/cool a building by a specific amount) as well as energy costs. Energy costs (and the type of energy used for heating/cooling) vary widely already across Canada, and future energy prices have poor predictability. This single component of climate change costs is impossible to reliably project into the future. Add up all the other economic costs and benefits of climate change and consider our predictive capacities for them ... we arrive at a hopeless situation very quickly. There appears to be no useful policy guidance that could have been obtained from this NRTEE report. There is just as good a chance that Canada will economically benefit from climate change as there is that Canada will suffer economic damage from climate change. The NRTEE report did not enlighten us in any form as to whether the net economic costs of climate change on Canada will be positive or negative, and certainly provides no reliable guidance on the magnitude of such effects. In short, it should have been ignored in its entirety. Better yet, the report should not have been written using government funding. Given the problems in NRTEE's reporting (and this report is but one representative example), why would we want to go down this road again? But as the saying goes, its hard to kill a really bad idea. And so we see with the revelation that Environment Canada is funding a new Economics and Environmental Policy Research Network. Bizarre to say the least. After the federal government successfully cancelled the NRTEE because of its advocations for carbon pricing and equally nonsensical environmental policies, why is the same federal government creating a new network comprised of research groups that have a history of advocating for the exact same policies as the NRTEE? Explanation needed.

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