Ontario jumps on the greenwashing bandwagon

You would think selling “Clean Energy Credits” would be a way of driving the development of new renewable energy sources.

But in Ontario, the Ford government’s new credit scheme is little more than an exercise in corporate greenwashing. Companies such as Volkswagen, that are eligible to buy credits, get to claim they only take power from the province’s existing “clean” energy sources, including hydro projects built decades ago.

The problem is, despite these corporate claims, nothing has fundamentally changed with Ontario’s electricity system. There is no clear commitment to use all the revenue from credit sales to develop new renewable energy projects, and the money may be wasted on things like slow and costly new nuclear reactor projects or some dubious carbon capture or fossil hydrogen project instead.

Meanwhile, our electricity system is still getting dirtier by the day with gas plant emissions soaring. Last year this province used fossil gas power plants twice as often as it did five years ago, and will use them three times as much this year. For a province that is on track to increase greenhouse gas emissions from its electricity system by 700% to be selling “clean energy credits” is jaw dropping.

But, sadly, this is all too typical of the kinds of greenwashing schemes that Catherine McKenna, chair of the UN’s High-Level Expert Group on Net-Zero Commitments, has been warning us about. Volkswagen may like being able to say it is tapping into clean power for its new battery plant in St. Thomas, but that only works if the rest of us are tapping into the remaining pool of increasingly dirty power. A far better solution is to make our electricity supply clean and green for everyone.

If Volkswagen or any other company really wants to power their facilities with clean energy, they should directly support the development of renewable energy projects that can meet their needs instead of watching the province use gas plants to meet growing electricity demand. There is plenty of low-cost renewable energy potential in Ontario if the Ford government wants to stop blocking it.

Selling credits is not going to get Ontario any closer to reaching its weak climate targets and is just another distraction from the real story: Our electricity system is becoming more polluting, not less.