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Canada sends huge delegations to UN global summits; pledges not met
Gary Park for Petroleum News
It has been said that if Canada’s noise about tackling climate change was music it would be a big brass band.
Instead, it has become a global laughingstock for showing up at United Nations climate change conferences with overwhelming delegations, while underwhelming the events with its plodding progress towards targets set at previous global summits.
The exact size of the team for Glasgow on Nov. 1-12 has yet to be disclosed, but there is little reason to expect that Canada will show modesty having set benchmark attendances of more than 300 at the 2015 COP24 gathering in Paris and at least 200 at the COP25 assembly in Madrid two years ago.
In contrast, Germany sent a team of 100 to Madrid in 2019, while China confined itself to 76 and the United States to 71.
At both Paris and Madrid, Canada became a target for international ridicule after years of declaring lofty goals for shrinking greenhouse gas emissions, then putting itself at risk of missing the 2030 Paris goal by a wide margin.
Collaborative investigation In 2016 Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial auditors general launched a collaborative investigation into the country’s progress on climate change action and released their findings in 2018 which detailed a lack of cohesion and implementation, with several of the jurisdictions having failed to even set goals.
The report said Canada was on track to be nearly 20% above the UN targets of lowering GHG emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. And that did not take into account the federal government’s revised pledge to reduce emissions by 40% to 45% over the next decade.
In response, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is leading the delegation to Glasgow, and his environment ministers (Catherine McKenna and now Jonathan Wilkinson) have insisted they were “absolutely committed” to the 2030 target, despite the resolve among Canada’s fossil-fuel producing provinces to fight any federally imposed carbon tax, currently set at C$100 per metric ton by 2030.
Newly released study A newly released study by the Institute for Sustainable Finance at Ontario’s Queen’s University said Canada will need to spend about C$201 billion to achieve the revised target, almost C$73 billion more than the institute’s previous estimate.
The findings are based on average historical costs estimated by industrial sectors and calculations that Canada has to cut 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 a year from the production of energy sources and equivalent emissions from atmospheric output by energy users by 2030.
Although it is among dozens of countries that pledged to eliminate emissions by 2050, Canada has failed to disclose the details of how it plans to reach that target.
A year ago, while committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to keep its economy afloat through COVID-19, the Trudeau administration unveiled a C$15 billion plan to incentivize reducing emissions through a bundle of new programs and strategies.
Meanwhile, the government had projected a 2% reduction in CO2 for 2020, when emissions actually edged up by 0.28%.
The Queen’s institute report said that although the rise “may seem trivial, it highlights the difficulty in projecting GHG growth rates and how hard actually reducing emissions is in Canada.”
The institute’s projected spending of C$201 billion is the most pessimistic among several estimates outlined in the report.
It assumes the price to cut carbon will remain unchanged until 2030, doubting that even new technologies and efforts to invest in new abatement methods, alongside system changes in consumption behavior, will reduce the amount of capital required to cut emissions.
Report co-author Ryan Riordan said “technology is going to help us a lot, but I don’t think it’s going to cut down the cost dramatically in the next nine years.”
However, he said the C$201 billion estimate will be only 1.3% of gross domestic product, which “should be pretty easy for us to mobilize.”
The Queen’s co-authors, Riordan and Simon Martin, said Canada has to spend double that of other developed nations relative to GDP to meet its goal, with Alberta needing to fork over C$68 billion in the process.
The report estimates transportation faces the highest cost of about C$86 billion to eliminate 305 million metric tons of CO2 this decade, while the oil and natural gas industries would face a cost of C$39.5 billion to cut carbon by 314 million mt.
Whether Glasgow will be the turning-point experts insist is vital and whether Canada will be an active participant will be the test of the 12-day summit.
- GARY PARK
Collaborative investigation In 2016 Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial auditors general launched a collaborative investigation into the country’s progress on climate change action and released their findings in 2018 which detailed a lack of cohesion and implementation, with several of the jurisdictions having failed to even set goals.
The report said Canada was on track to be nearly 20% above the UN targets of lowering GHG emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. And that did not take into account the federal government’s revised pledge to reduce emissions by 40% to 45% over the next decade.
In response, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is leading the delegation to Glasgow, and his environment ministers (Catherine McKenna and now Jonathan Wilkinson) have insisted they were “absolutely committed” to the 2030 target, despite the resolve among Canada’s fossil-fuel producing provinces to fight any federally imposed carbon tax, currently set at C$100 per metric ton by 2030.
Newly released study A newly released study by the Institute for Sustainable Finance at Ontario’s Queen’s University said Canada will need to spend about C$201 billion to achieve the revised target, almost C$73 billion more than the institute’s previous estimate.
The findings are based on average historical costs estimated by industrial sectors and calculations that Canada has to cut 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 a year from the production of energy sources and equivalent emissions from atmospheric output by energy users by 2030.
Although it is among dozens of countries that pledged to eliminate emissions by 2050, Canada has failed to disclose the details of how it plans to reach that target.
A year ago, while committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to keep its economy afloat through COVID-19, the Trudeau administration unveiled a C$15 billion plan to incentivize reducing emissions through a bundle of new programs and strategies.
Meanwhile, the government had projected a 2% reduction in CO2 for 2020, when emissions actually edged up by 0.28%.
The Queen’s institute report said that although the rise “may seem trivial, it highlights the difficulty in projecting GHG growth rates and how hard actually reducing emissions is in Canada.”
The institute’s projected spending of C$201 billion is the most pessimistic among several estimates outlined in the report.
It assumes the price to cut carbon will remain unchanged until 2030, doubting that even new technologies and efforts to invest in new abatement methods, alongside system changes in consumption behavior, will reduce the amount of capital required to cut emissions.
Report co-author Ryan Riordan said “technology is going to help us a lot, but I don’t think it’s going to cut down the cost dramatically in the next nine years.”
However, he said the C$201 billion estimate will be only 1.3% of gross domestic product, which “should be pretty easy for us to mobilize.”
The Queen’s co-authors, Riordan and Simon Martin, said Canada has to spend double that of other developed nations relative to GDP to meet its goal, with Alberta needing to fork over C$68 billion in the process.
The report estimates transportation faces the highest cost of about C$86 billion to eliminate 305 million metric tons of CO2 this decade, while the oil and natural gas industries would face a cost of C$39.5 billion to cut carbon by 314 million mt.
Whether Glasgow will be the turning-point experts insist is vital and whether Canada will be an active participant will be the test of the 12-day summit.
- GARY PARK
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