Today's environmental imperatives are propelling us into an era where we must rethink our approach to environmental protection. We are challenged to examine what protecting the environment means and to rigourously scrutinize the tools we use to ensure that protection. The need to achieve the greatest possible environmental benefits from environmental protection measures, such as the industrial permitting process, has never been greater.

In the words of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development,

Developed countries will have to cut their use of energy and other raw materials -- and their impact on the environment -- more than 10 times over in little more than a generation, if the needs of the world's growing population are to be met without destroying the planet.²

Perhaps this stark conclusion would be less surprising if it had come from a deep ecology group. But today it is clear that addressing our grave environmental problems has become a priority for every quarter of society. We are even beginning to see that solving environmental problems can unearth significant economic opportunities.

For some time we have known that pollution prevention is a powerful concept which, when properly implemented, can dramatically shift the way we use resources and significantly limit our impact on the environment. To translate this opportunity into reality involves finding ways to transform permit system mechanisms to achieve pollution prevention more quickly and effectively.

This paper focuses on several themes essential to this transformation:

1. The importance of an appropriate legal framework to encourage preventing pollution rather than simply controlling it after it occurs
2. The need for tough standards that protect the environment, rooted in the principles of precautionary, preventative action, even if the technology does not yet exist to achieve the standards
3. The need to set legally enforceable standards far in advance of the date for compliance and phase them in where appropriate
4. The necessity of clear, accurate monitoring and compliance information that is routinely made available to all interested parties
5. The importance of meaningful public participation
6. The need to recognize and ambitiously pursue the economic benefits associated with pollution prevention

To illustrate these themes, the pulp mill effluent regulations in effect in British Columbia will be examined. These regulations have contributed substantially to moving the industry from being a heavily polluting industry to one achieving significant improvements in environmental performance.

Every year over one million passengers board a cruise ship to travel north to Alaska, along BC’s famed Inside Passage. Cruise ship travel on the Vancouver to Alaska route grew at a rate of over 5% a year over the past decade. By 2000, there were 336 cruise trips from BC to Alaska carrying 1,053,000 passengers and over 12,000 crewmembers. And each year those passengers and crew members generate more waste than a small town the size of Courtenay or Penticton. This report looks at the effectiveness of the regulations controlling cruise ship pollution. It also reviews the standards set in the US and Alaska to deal with the same problem

market mechanisms, credit trading, greenhouse gas emission reductions, climate change, carbon tax, carbon allowance trading system.

These proceedings are the summary of Selling Clean Air: Market Instruments for Climate Protection, a two-day workshop on market instruments for climate change organized by West Coast Environmental Law Research Foundation. The workshop was held October 15 and 16, 1998, in Vancouver. This workshop brought together approximately 100 participants. The first day examined market instruments and the pros and cons of using different market instruments for reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. The second day was aimed at improving the capacity of municipalities, environmental groups, small businesses, and community groups to develop projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a quantifiable way that achieves other social benefits and can generate gas emissions reduction credits.

Credit for Early Action allows firms that take early action to reduce emissions to be rewarded with credit against future regulatory standards or carbon taxes. Is Credit for Early Action an inherently flawed concept, with questionable environmental effectiveness, high economic cost, and inequitable impacts on distribution of wealth? We recommend announcement of policies to remove existing disincentives to early action, combined with the phase in of either emission limits and trading or a carbon tax

Two trends -- increased political interest in ecological tax reform and the increasing urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions -- could see ecological tax reform being the next major trend in environmental law in Canada. The auctioning of allowances to emit greenhouse gases or sell fossil fuels for combustion could be used to encourage lowest cost greenhouse gas emissions. It is likely the most environmentally effective, economically efficient and equitable way of implementing an emissions trading system. Combined with ecological tax reform -- i.e. using revenue from auction allowances to reduce taxes -- it could help move Canada toward a healthier, cleaner economy with fuller employment.

This series of briefing notes provides an overview of the issues to be decided at CoP6, where, from November 13 to 24, 2000, the nations of the world will meet in The Hague to decide the fate of the Kyoto Protocol. The series is intended to provide an environmental perspective to negotiators and educate other participants attending at the Hague or following the negotiations at home.

ENGOs perspectives on emissions trading are increasingly dependent on the details of individual emissions trading programs and judgments of whether a program's particular environmental pros and cons outweigh the pros and cons of "command and control" alternatives. On the "pro" side of the emissions trading ledger, trading may help reduce costs of achieving a particular goal. This may, in turn, make more stringent environmental pollution goals more politically achievable, or may allow agencies to shift their attention to other problems. On the "con" side of the emissions trading ledger, there are many aspects of trading programs that need to be assessed. In particular, environmentalists are likely to pay particular attention to the following:

• the monitoring and enforcement regime under a trading program must be sufficiently strong to withstand new opportunities and incentives for non-compliance created by a trading program;
• a trading program must be accompanied by regulatory and planning changes which will help to ensure the correction of "market failures";
• the political difficulties in developing an emission allowance trading program, in particular, the politically sensitive issue of allowance allocation, may lead to a situation where real emission reductions are delayed;
• poorly designed trading programs may not safeguard environmentally sensitive areas or particular communities.

I was asked to provide environmentalists' perspective on U.S. proposals for greenhouse gas emission trading between nations. To begin with it should be pointed out that there is no single defined position of environmentalists, but instead a range of opinions. In the U.S., the Environmental Defence Fund has wholeheartedly supported the U.S. proposal; other organizations have been equally adamantly opposed. Environmentalists' divided attitude toward joint implementation and international greenhouse gas trading reflect different assessments of a myriad of concerns. Some of the concerns go to the very core of trading; others are dependent on design of a program.

The US proposal for greenhouse gas emissions trading has two aspects:

1. trading of allowable emissions, or allocations, among countries with binding emission reduction commitments (international allocation trading);and

2. countries subject to binding commitments meeting such commitments by supporting or undertaking emission reductions projects in countries not subject to binding emission reduction commitments (joint implementation).

Although the US proposal is couced in terms of trading between national governments, the ability to participate in trading is likely to devolve to the private sector. Despite the difficulty of making generalizations, environmentalists generally have less concern regarding a program involving international allocation trading and greater concerns regarding joint implementation. Support for either form of international emissions trading is greater if it is in the context of more significant emission reduction commitments.
 

Response to the Department of Transport's December 21, 1996 Canada Gazette request for submissions on motor vehicle emission regulation for Canada. West Coast Environmental Law proposes a unique Canadian vehicle emission program which supports various environmental objectives, is compatible with a North American vehicle market, has economic spin offs in Canada and eliminates incentives to purchase and sell larger vehicles. Our next preference would be for a program based on California certification of light and medium duty vehicles and the California NMOG fleet averages.