Our Perspective on Climate Change
Our commitment to environmental responsibility includes working to reduce our carbon footprint and taking a lead role in helping our customers manage energy efficiently.
Our role is to:
- Develop infrastructure to provide natural gas as a clean-burning energy source,
- Operate our facilities safely, reliably and efficiently,
- Enhance the services we provide to our customers that increase efficiency and/or reduce GHG emissions (CCS, DSM), and
- Take an active and constructive role in climate change policy development in the United States and Canada, including our participation in industry groups as well as governmental and non-governmental partnerships.
Climate Change Policy Development and Regulation
We strongly prefer a uniform, federally crafted, economy-wide, market driven, continental climate change program rather than an assortment of state, provincial and regional measures.
As natural gas is significantly less carbon intensive than other fossil fuels, it is a critical part of the solution for fueling our economies now and in the future. An effective climate change program should recognize the positive role of natural gas in a carbon-constrained economy as a reliable, domestically abundant, and cleaner choice. Such a program should recognize and allow for the likelihood that companies that help meet growing demand by producing, processing and transporting more natural gas may increase their direct emissions while serving to reduce overall regional and national emissions, thereby providing a net benefit to the environment.
At a federal level, market-based incentives should advance emissions reductions on many fronts, including encouraging increased efficiency, technological innovation and energy conservation. We believe that a workable federal climate change program should:
- Implement programs and requirements gradually and in conjunction with existing energy regulatory frameworks to avoid undue economic dislocations, leakage or industry movement to unregulated regions,
- Utilize existing, established and approved GHG quantification and reporting methodologies, particularly those accepted in current mandatory government reporting,
- Recognize combustion as the point of regulation for major emission sources in the natural gas sector and incorporate efficiency standards and incentives for smaller sources of emissions, such as residential and commercial users,
- Support development of a variety of technologies to increase efficiency of end-use consumption, and
- Provide certainty about costs of compliance, preferably through a simple, efficient, revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Although a revenue-neutral carbon tax is our preferred policy approach, a cap-and-trade scheme could prove workable as a primary regulatory mechanism, if the program includes a price cap on allowance prices, recognizes offsets – as long as they are real, quantified, verified, surplus and have clear ownership – as an important tool to encourage lower cost emission reductions, and supports development and investment in CCS projects, providing incentives such as bonus carbon allowances.
