Having admitted in April that it blew past its 2020 target for reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by a country mile, the Trudeau government Monday released part of its plan for achieving its 2030 target, which is even more unrealistic.
This is consistent with the fact no Canadian government of any political stripe has ever come close to achieving an emission target going back to 1988, when the first one was set by the then Conservative government.
Global efforts to hit United Nations’ emission targets call for cutting current emissions in half by 2030. In the real world, they reached their highest level ever last year.
The reality is that climate change policies are not environmental policies and they are not going to impact the weather either in the next eight years or far beyond that.
They are economic policies which increase the cost of living for Canadians, contributing to an annual inflation rate poised to rise to “a little over 8%” this week, according to Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem — the highest level since 1982.
Not even the massive economic downturn caused by the first year of the pandemic in 2020, which dramatically lowered global emissions that year, enabled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to come close to meeting his 2020 target of cutting emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by that year.
That meant his target for 2020 was 615 million tonnes of emissions, whereas his government reported in April that actual emissions in 2020 were 672 million tonnes.
Trudeau missed his target by 57 million tonnes, the equivalent of all emissions from Canada’s electricity sector that year.
But 2020 was an outlier because of the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. A one-year drop in that context is irrelevant to reducing emissions, which to be credible must occur year after year for decades.
That has never happened.
The more realistic figure to weigh against Trudeau’s 2020 target was Canada’s emissions in 2019, which were consistent with historical norms.
In 2019, Canada emitted 738 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, meaning Trudeau missed his 2020 target by 123 million tonnes — the equivalent of almost all emissions from Canada’s electricity and agricultural sectors that year.
On Monday, the Trudeau government provided more detail on its plans to cap emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector — which contributes the most emissions of any sector — to at least 42% below 2019 levels by 2030, meaning to 118 million tonnes, although ideally the plan is to reduce them to 110 million tonnes.
It intends to use either a cap-and-trade system or a modified carbon pricing system (both carbon taxes by another name) to achieve this.
Given that in 2019 Canada’s oil and gas sector emitted 203.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, that means the Trudeau government’s target is to reduce them by between 85.5 and 93.5 million tonnes annually by 2030, the equivalent of removing all annual emissions from Canada’s building sector in less than eight years.
When the feds first announced this plan in March, Alberta’s then environment minister called it “insane” with “devastating economic consequences.”
NDP leader Rachel Notley called it “a fantasy … we’re not going to get there.” Of course, if the Liberals are still in power in 2030 when they blow past their 2030 target of reducing emissions to 40% to 45% below 2005 levels, they will announce an even more unrealistic plan to cut them to net zero by 2050.
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