Alberta Budget 2024 missed opportunity to plan for a clean economy

This article was published by the Pembina Institute on Feb. 29, 2024.

EDMONTON — Simon Dyer, deputy executive director of the Pembina Institute, made the following statement in response to the Alberta budget today:

“This was the first Alberta budget since the release of the province’s Emissions Reduction and Energy Development Plan in April 2023, and so represented the best opportunity to make progress by investing in reducing emissions and building the clean economy that Albertans will need to be ready for future economic prosperity. Regrettably, the government’s budget missed this opportunity almost completely.

Since the implementation of the province’s industrial carbon pricing and emissions trading system – TIER (Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction) – in 2020, Alberta has collected from $400M to over $750M annually. We are pleased to see Budget 2024 allocate a lower proportion of TIER revenue to debt reduction. However, we believe that 100 per cent of TIER revenue must be directed toward emissions reductions projects that help the province diversify its economy to become less reliant on non-renewable resource revenue; that did not happen today. Considering that investment in the province is being driven by large-scale emissions reduction projects that span multiple industries, we advocate for TIER revenue investments in the full range of emissions reduction opportunities for Albertans that do not narrowly focus on carbon capture and storage subsidies.

Given the need for affordable, reliable and clean electricity that Albertans can depend on, we hoped for investments in modernizing our electricity grid in the form of interties with neighbouring province’s grids, storage, and demand-side management to enable the lowest possible cost for delivering electricity.

The Government of Alberta is not adequately preparing for the net-zero future. This is not a budget that will help move Alberta – as Canada’s largest emitting province – toward its own stated aspirations of achieving a 2050 carbon neutral goal let alone short-term targets, which have not yet been set.”