Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

Net zero climate targets

In the lead-up to the Canadian federal election in October, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals promised legally binding targets for Canada to be at net zero emissions by 2050. Specifically, they promised:

  • “We will set legally-binding, five-year milestones, based on the advice of the experts and consultations with Canadians, to reach net-zero emissions by 2050”
  • “We will exceed Canada’s 2030 emissions goal”

Ignoring for now how we’re not on track for the 2030 target, let’s consider what “net zero” means. Essentially, the idea is that through a combination of emission reductions, carbon offsets, and negative emissions through CO2 removal (through air capture or bio-energy with carbon capture) Canada will no longer produce a net positive contribution to the accumulation of greenhouse gases including CO2 into the atmosphere.

The most credible way to reach net zero is to actually end fossil fuel production, import, and use. That we could call “true zero” and it would be a better kind of target for ambitious organizations. It would be focusing because of the long-lived character of infrastructure. If the University of Toronto, for instance, was to be true zero by 2050 then it would need to stop putting natural gas boilers into new buildings wherever they would be expected to run past that date. Similarly, they would need to stop buying gasoline-powered vehicles and everything else that depends on fossil fuels for energy, and do so early enough for everything they operate to be replaced with a climate-safe alternative before the deadline. This is a much more radical and demanding idea. When I promoted a “true zero” promise as a plank in the new “Beyond Divestment” campaign at U of T, which was planning to offer the administration the same easy escape of net zero by hoping to fund reductions elsewhere and hoping for carbon removal at scale, the idea was rejected by the campaign organizers as too demanding and incompatible with pledges being made elsewhere.

The reason to promise “net zero” instead — as a country or a university — is in the optimistic case a sincere belief that offsets and negative emissions can be meaningful and significant. In what’s perhaps a more plausible case, it’s a way of avoiding the politically intolerable suggestion that we’re actually going to stop using fossil fuels to combat climate change. That avoids antagonizing the industry and its supporters, while placating those who may not be paying much attention with the belief that this is equivalent to true decarbonization. It is telling that fossil fuel corporations also like net zero targets, since they allow the current leadership to continue with expanding production and emissions while leaving the problem for someone else to fix later. That position is delusional because every year of delay in starting with true decarbonization makes it far harder to stabilize at any temperature limit while raising the cost of doing so by requiring the projects we built to be shut down before the end of their economic lifespans and increasing how quickly emissions must be cut when we finally get serious.

In the case of the Canadian promise, it seems like another manifestation of Trudeau’s determination to promise action to protect the climate in the long term as a way to legitimize and justify actions that worsen the problem while they actually hold power. While in office, you approve major new fossil fuel infrastructure projects, while saying with no authority to do so that future governments will counteract those choices. This proposition doesn’t even make sense in the short term because of that long-lived infrastructure problem. No oil pipeline, LNG facility, or bitumen sands mine that is built in 2020 is intended to be shut down before 2050. And so, today’s pro-fossil expansion policies directly and immediately contradict the net zero target. It’s another sense in which we have been drawn toward shadow solutions by our unwillingness to take the actions really required to stabilize the climate. It’s a sign of how little Canadians understand the problem, and how much they choose to believe what they prefer over what is supported by evidence, that many have accepted such promises as evidence of commitment and seriousness on the issue.

Potential leadership in fossil fuel communities

Fossil fuel-endowed regions would benefit if some of their trusted leaders questioned the prudence of doubling-down on coal, oil, and even natural gas. Such visionaries would argue that fossil fuel expansion increases the region’s economic vulnerability to the future time when humanity finally accelerates on the decarbonization path. Unfortunately, such regions tend to produce political and corporate leaders who perpetuate the myth that they can thrive indefinitely on the fossil fuel path, simply by repelling attacks from environmentalists, foreign billionaires, Hollywood celebrities, and neighbouring jurisdictions. That is why, sadly, sudden economic decline is the more likely future for the most fossil fuel-dependent regions.

Jaccard, Mark. The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success: Overcoming Myths that Hinder Progress. Cambridge University Press, 2020. p. 244

Jason Kenney and the end of oil

Don Braid is reporting on recent comments from Alberta premier Jason Kenney, presumably uttered in the hope of bolstering the chances the Trudeau cabinet will approve the Teck Frontier mine:

“Over the next decades as we go through the energy transition, we all know that there will be a continued demand for crude,” he told a panel at Washington’s Wilson Center last Friday.

Kenney added: “It is preferable that the last barrel in that transition period comes from a stable, reliable liberal democracy with among the highest environmental, human-rights and labour standards on earth.”

Energy transition. Last barrel. Transition period. Six not-so-little words we’ve never heard clearly from Kenney before.

“I have a firm grasp of the obvious,” Kenney said in a later interview. “There is no reasonable person that can deny that in the decades to come we will see a gradual shift from hydrocarbon-based energy to other forms of energy.”

There is still a lot to criticize, of course, and Canadian oil is far less positive from an environmental and human rights stance than industry boosters admit.

Still, there is cause to see these comments as significant. Even for a politician that defines their political programme in terms of support to the oil and gas industry it has become necessary to acknowledge that there is a limit to total permissible global production because of climate change, even if Kenney talks about it here in the impersonal and indirect language of a ‘change in demand’.

Kenney is setting out the logic of the bitumen industry’s downfall here, even though he is trying to do the opposite. Once you accept that oil production can’t continue forever or until all reserves are exhausted, and then you start deciding which oil to produce or not produce on economic and environmental grounds, unless you have motivated reasoning and a set conclusion all along, few people are going to conclude that it makes sense for that oil to come from the bitumen sands.

Police and intelligence services as defenders of the status quo

In Victoria today, about ten young Indigenous protestors were arrested after occupying the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources building.

Meanwhile, British security authorities have categorized Greenpeace and the Extinction Rebellion with far-right groups and neo-Nazis.

Today’s George Monbiot column calls out how government security forces have often been more focused on threats to the political and economic order than on genuine threats to security:

The police have always protected established power against those who challenge it, regardless of the nature of that challenge. And they have long sought to criminalise peaceful dissent. Part of the reason is ideological: illiberal and undemocratic attitudes infest policing in this country. Part of it is empire-building: if police units can convince the government and the media of imminent threats that only they can contain, they can argue for more funding.

But there’s another reason, which is arguably even more dangerous: the nexus of state and corporate power. All over the world, corporate lobbyists seek to brand opponents of their industries as extremists and terrorists, and some governments and police forces are prepared to listen. A recent article in the Intercept seeks to discover why the US Justice Department and the FBI had put much more effort into chasing mythical “ecoterrorists” than pursuing real, far-right terrorism. A former official explained, “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying ‘I wish you’d do something about these rightwing extremists’.” By contrast, there is constant corporate pressure to “do something” about environmental campaigners and animal rights activists.

Decarbonization is going to be a huge political fight, and it’s clear that the fossil fuel industry has the support of the security and surveillance states which have exploded since the September 11th, 2001 attacks. At the societal level we need to reconceptualize the threats which we face and the appropriate means for dealing with them. Armed force in defence of economic interests which hope and plan to keep fossil fuel use going as long as possible is the opposite.

Scholarly perspective on the U of T divestment campaign

Professor Joe Curnow, now at the University of Manitoba, studied the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org divestment campaign at the University of Toronto, in part using multi-angle video recordings of campaign planning meetings.

Her dissertation is now available on TSpace: Politicization in Practice: Learning the Politics of Racialization, Patriarchy, and Settler Colonialism in the Youth Climate Movement.

Related:

The Teck Frontier mine

Not only is the Trudeau government calling into question its seriousness about decarbonization by allowing the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, they are considering allowing Teck to build another open-pit bitumen sands mine which will produce 6 million tonnes of CO2 per year in its operations and far more when the fuel it produces is burned.

Every Canadian government must live in fear of being the ones in power when the markets and Canadians finally realize that developing the bitumen sands has been a mistake and the industry has no future. Since every government wants to avoid the blame when that happens, they each do what they can to maintain the illusion of a future for the industry which will justify the tens of billions that have been invested. In so doing, they inadvertently tell Canadians and the world that they are willing to create a permanently destabilized global climate in exchange for as many more years of oil profits as they can get away with.

Concordia and UBC commit to full divestment

It complicates the process of completing my PhD dissertation, but there has been highly encouraging movement from administrations targeted by fossil fuel divestment campaigns. While McGill has again said no, Concordia and UBC have pledged to go beyond their prior partial commitments and entirely divest from fossil fuels:

The movement has generally had a hard time in Canada, perhaps because of the size and influence of the fossil fuel industry.

I’m working this week on finishing my NVivo coding of interviews, then moving on next week to finishing the literature review. Spending the rest of the month working on a finalized and complete manuscript, I will need to make sure to mention new developments without expressing false confidence about my ability to explain something which happened so recently and which I don’t have independent data about.

The Ford government’s climate change efforts

Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysysk’s 2019 report says that the Ontario government’s proposed climate policies are insufficient to meet their (inadequate) target for reducing greenhouse gas pollution:

The province estimates that its new approach will still meet federal reduction targets of 30 per cent below 2005 emission levels, or the equivalent of 17.6 megatonnes by 2030.

But that estimate is based on an older forecast that accounted for initiatives around electricity conservation, renewable energy and cap-and-trade — programs that have all been cancelled by the Ford government.

Lysyk estimates the new plan will only reduce emissions by between 6.3 and 13 megatonnes by 2030.

Page 147 of the report says:

Emissions Estimates Underlying Plan Not Supported by Sound Evidence

The Plan projects that Ontario’s greenhouse gas emissions will be 160.9 Mt in 2030 if no further climate initiatives are taken. To reduce Ontario’s emissions by 17.6 Mt to meet the 2030 target, the Plan outlines eight areas where the Ministry expects emissions reductions to occur. We reviewed the evidence and assumptions the Ministry used to estimate the emissions projected for 2030, as well as the reductions for each area. Based on our review, several of the estimates are not supported by sound evidence. Our assessment of the assumptions and double counting of initiatives found that the Plan overestimates the emissions reductions expected. Overall, our analysis found that the initiatives in the Plan have the potential to achieve between 6.3 Mt to 13.0 Mt of the 17.6 Mt emission-reduction goal.

This reinforces how many Canadian provincial and federal governments see climate change as a public relations issue: an area of criticism where they need a rhetorical answer to manage the level of criticism they get in the press.

Waiting for 2019 election results

Canada’s 2019 election has been another frustrating one for those who think climate change is the most urgent and important political challenge we face – with Canada’s electoral system and party structure working against us on one hand and the practical effect that the Liberals and Conservatives are controlled by oil-linked industries including finance and the auto sector on the other.

Nobody is proposing a plan for Canada to do a fair share in controlling the problem and overcoming fossil fuel dependence, except maybe the Greens who cannot form a government.

The expectation for my riding is that Liberal minister Chrystia Freeland will win, followed by NDP, Conservative, and Green candidates. That leaves me pretty free to vote as I wish. I do feel there is some purpose in rewarding the Liberals for their inadequate but still somewhat serious climate policy, in contrast with the rollback to Harper-era delay with the Conservatives plan. At the same time, the party has been incoherent on the issue (like all the others parties) vaguely supporting the general aim of decarbonization and planetary stability but making near-term economic choices that show only a superficial interest in overcoming fossil fuel dependence. The NDP may be theoretically better on the issue, but their positions in recent years have been inconsistent to the degree that they don’t seem likely to be much better than the Liberals.

In the end I’ll probably vote Liberal or Green: the former as a way of saying that the minimum standard of a rising carbon tax is crucial and must be maintained, or the latter as a way of saying climate change is much more important than the other issues being contested.

I just hope we don’t end up with a Scheer government. Living through the Harper years was painful enough for anyone who can see that we’re squandering our chance for a cheap and low-conflict route to climatic stability, guaranteeing a at a minimum that we will need to pay far more to solve the problem after industry-backed delay than we would have needed to if we really got started after the UN climate convention in 1992.