Achieving the Right Balance

Event Details

  • Thursday, June 8, 2017
  • 1:00 pm EST
  • Free
  • Online

Achieving the Right Balance

Live Panel Discussion

Carbon pricing is one of the main policy tools being used in Canada to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and this is great news. As the Ecofiscal Commission has shown in previous work, carbon pricing is the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions. But what other policies might also make sense? What is the right balance between carbon pricing and other, complementary climate policies?

Join us for a live discussion where our panellists will debate the right role for complementary climate polices. Some will argue that carbon pricing should do all the work, and that we should get rid of other policies. Others will argue that there’s a big role to be played by complementary policies. And somewhere in the middle will be the argument that some additional policies—but not all—can truly complement carbon pricing.

Moderator

Member

Shawn McCarthy

Global Energy Reporter, The Globe and Mail
Shawn McCarthy is an Ottawa-based, national business correspondent for The Globe and Mail, covering a global energy beat. He writes on various aspects of the international energy industry, from oil and gas production and refining, to the development of new technologies, to the business implications of climate-change regulations. Recent coverage includes how the energy industry is coping with the climate change challenge; international energy supply and demand; the development of massive shale gas deposits in North America, and the renewable energy technology. Mr. McCarthy took up the role of global energy reporter after a three-year stint as Globe and Mail correspondent in New York City. There, he covered U.S. corporate stories, including the collapse of Enron and Martha Stewart’s insider trading trial, as well as general U.S. news and features. He also covered international political stories at the United Nations, and contributed to The Globe and Mail’s U.S. coverage, including the 2004 presidential election. Prior to his assignment in New York, Mr. McCarthy was The Globe’s parliamentary bureau chief, serving as chief political writer and leading a team of 10 reporters. He joined The Globe in 1997 as a senior writer on government finances and economic policy. Before joining The Globe, he worked at The Toronto Star and Canadian Press as a business reporter, and at the Alberta Report magazine as a senior editor and reporter. He completed a master’s degree in journalism at Carleton University, and a bachelor of arts in English at the University of Alberta.

Expert Panel

Member

Erin Flanagan

Program Director, Federal Policy, Pembina Institute

Erin Flanagan is the director of the Pembina Institute’s federal policy program. In this role she spearheads national advocacy campaigns on climate and energy issues and supports the Institute’s regional staff to advance their policy priorities in Ottawa. Erin is the co-author of more than 10 publications and frequently represents the Institute at regulatory and multi-stakeholder processes.

Day-to-day Erin researches and promotes public policy solutions that reduce the environmental impact of fossil fuel development and that support Canada’s transition to clean energy. As a technical analyst at the Institute, she contributed to public- and private-sector projects on a range of issues in the oilsands, including greenhouse gas and water management, tailings treatment, and land reclamation. Her technical and opinion work has been published in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and PostMedia newspapers across Canada. As a frequent spokesperson for the Institute, she appears regularly on national current affairs television programs, including CBC’s Power and Politics.

Erin holds a bachelor of science in chemical engineering with a minor in public policy from the University of New Brunswick. Her contributions to technical and humanitarian issues have been highlighted by organizations including the Canadian Engineering Memorial Foundation, the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of New Brunswick and the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering. In 2016 she was named one of Canada’s top 30 under 30 in sustainability by Corporate Knights magazine, and has twice been named one of Ottawa’s “Top 100 lobbyists” by The Hill Times.

Member

Ken Green

Senior Director, Center for Natural Resource Studies, Fraser Institute

Kenneth P. Green is Senior Director of the Center for Natural Resource Studies at the Fraser Institute. He received his doctorate in Environmental Science and Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an M.S. in Molecular Genetics from San Diego State University, and a B.S. in Biology from UCLA. Mr. Green has studied public policy involving energy, risk, regulation, and the environment for nearly 20 years at public policy research institutions across North America including the Reason Foundation, the Environmental Literacy Council and the American Enterprise Institute. He has an extensive publication list of policy studies, magazine articles, opinion columns, book and encyclopedia chapters, and two supplementary textbooks on climate change and energy policy intended for middle-school and collegiate audiences respectively. Mr. Green’s writing has appeared in major newspapers across the US and Canada, and he is a regular presence on both Canadian and American radio and television. Mr. Green has testified before several state legislatures and regulatory agencies, as well as giving testimony to a variety of committees of the US House, US Senate and the House of Commons.

Member

Mark Jaccard

Economist and professor in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University
Mark has been a professor since 1986 in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University. The only exception is 1992 to 1997, when he took a leave of absence to serve as Chair and CEO of the British Columbia Utilities Commission. His PhD is from the Energy Economics and Policy Institute at the University of Grenoble. He has published over 100 academic papers, most of these related to his principal research focus: the design and application of energy-economy models that assess the effectiveness of sustainable energy and climate policies. For his career research, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009 and British Columbia’s Academic of the Year in 2008. He has contributed to several major processes and assessments, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (93-96 and 2010-2012), the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (1995-2001 and 2007-2009), Canada’s National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy (2006-2009), British Columbia’s Climate Action Team (2007-2009), and the Global Energy Assessment (2008-2012). In 2006, his book, Sustainable Fossil Fuels, won the Donner Prize for top policy book in Canada. At Simon Fraser University he teaches graduate and undergraduate versions of an interdisciplinary course in energy and materials sustainability, covering basic physics, technologies, economics, policy and human cognition and behavior.

Member

Chris Ragan

Chair, Canada's Ecofiscal Commission
McGill University, Department of Economics
Christopher Ragan has been teaching economics at McGill University since 1989. He is also a Research Fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute where from 2010 through 2013 he held the Institute’s David Dodge Chair in Monetary Policy, and for many years was a member of the Institute’s Monetary Policy Council. From January 2009 through June 2010, he was the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at the Department of Finance in Ottawa, where he served as a senior advisor to the Minister and other senior Finance officials. During 2004-05, he served as the Special Advisor to the Governor of the Bank of Canada. Ragan is the author of Economics (formerly co-authored with Richard Lipsey), which after fourteen editions is still the most widely used introductory economics textbook in Canada. Ragan also has a regular column in The Globe and Mail. During the mid-1990s he was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Economic Affairs. Chris Ragan received his B. A. (Honours) in economics in 1984 from the University of Victoria and his Master’s degree in economics from Queen’s University in 1985. He then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he completed his Ph.D. in economics at M.I.T. in 1989.

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