Alberta Carbon Capture Opportunity Cost Calculator

Frontier’s Alberta Carbon Capture Opportunity Cost Calculator is designed to show that policy choices involve opportunity costs.

The view that climate change is a man-made phenomena, particularly caused by human carbon dioxide emissions is rejected by many of the world's top scientists. Recent temperature data show that the world is in fact cooling.

In a 2008 interview, environmentalist Lawrence Solomon suggests that rushed, politically driven, policies to reduce carbon dioxide, through the Kyoto process are harming our environment. Regarding expensive and experimental schemes to bury CO2 into the ground he says in a Frontier interview "Not only might you be burying billions in the ground but these carbon sequestration schemes, according to a recent study at Columbia University, could be inducing earthquakes. So we could actually be doing a great deal of harm to our cities because these carbon sequestration schemes are often located near cities.

Effective public policy is about the smart use of scarce resources. Rushed schemes based on questionable computer models, like carbon capture, come at real costs of, for example, fewer needed public housing units, other spending that more effectively benefits our environment like better water and sewer systems, more spending on education or healthcare, and lower taxes.

In September 2012, the governments of Canada and Alberta agreed to spend $845 million into the world's first carbon and capture storage project  in the Alberta Oils Sands. This comes from a $2 billion fund for CCS designed to fight climate change.

Click here to re-allocate opportunity cost of spending $845 million to burying carbon dioxide in the ground . . .

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Related Items:

• George Gilder on carbon capture
• Climate Change Quiz

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The Frontier Centre for Public Policy

is an independent public policy think tank whose mission is "to broaden the debate on our future through public policy research and education and to explore positive changes within our public institutions that support economic growth and opportunity."