As the premier who </strong>launched the province’s modern industrial era, Alberta political icon Peter Lougheed set its tone by often dividing humanity into two classes – “doers” and “critics,” he called them.

Most Albertans, he repeatedly told the legislature and election rallies, are doers as opposed to a critic minority that he branded “the Toronto-NDP crowd.”

Nearly a quarter-century after Lougheed left politics on Halloween 1985, a spiritual heir serves as the province’s greenhouse gas czar, crafting ways to make its $2-billion industrial carbon emissions reduction strategy work. Former Syncrude Canada president Jim Carter fits the mold of true-blue Alberta as described by the founder of its 37-year-old Conservative government.

In his role as chairman of the Alberta Carbon Capture and Storage Development Council, Carter makes it plain that he is a builder above all else. He wastes no time on hairsplitting science debates when asked about the global warming theory that spawned his agency.

Is the ex-operations chief of the world’s biggest oil sands complex a green convert? Is he a believer that carbon dioxide exhaust from making and burning fossil fuels is heating up the globe and jeopardizing life on earth?

“The time for that debate has passed now,” Carter says. “The majority of people in the world are really of the belief that this is coming. Now we’ve got these expectations we have to deal with, whether we like it or not.”

Provincial Auditor-General Fred Dunn identified Carter’s share of the Alberta Tory green plan as the only part that sets targets clearly enough to measure progress and, eventually, the value obtained for taxpayers’ dollars. The plan says industrial waste carbon collection and disposal systems, developed with the province’s $2 billion as seed money, will deliver 139 million tonnes of annual greenhouse gas emissions reductions, or 70 per cent of Alberta’s total cleanup commitment of 200 million tonnes, by 2050.

Carter’s core environmental belief is intertwined with economic values. He is convinced Alberta risks severely stunting its growth if the province misses its waste gas cleanup target.

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