| | | Trudeau's climate plan has become a farce
Lorrie Goldstein
April 18, 2020
Toronto SUN News Canada
While people understandably have other things on their minds these days, government figures released last week show Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate change plan has been a complete bust.
Canada’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions for 2018 — the reporting of these numbers is always two years behind the current one — totalled 729 million tonnes (729 Mt).
That’s an increase of 15 Mt from 714 Mt in 2017 and 23 Mt from 706 Mt in 2016, the three years for which the Trudeau government is responsible, since coming to power in 2015.
So despite the billions of dollars the Trudeau government, meaning all of us, have spent on his climate change plan, the centrepiece of which is his national carbon tax/price, Canada’s emissions in 2018 were 1 Mt lower than in 2005, at 729 Mt.
That’s key because to meet Trudeau’s target under the Paris climate accord he agreed to in 2015, Canada’s emissions have to be 30% below 2005 levels of 730 Mt by 2030.
That means cutting our emissions to 511 Mt, a reduction of 218 Mt from current levels, in a decade.
This would require the equivalent of shutting down Canada’s entire oil and gas sector (193 Mt in 2018) in 10 years, plus 34% of Canada’s agricultural sector (73 Mt in 2018).
Or the entire transportation sector (186 Mt) in 10 years, plus 50% of the electricity sector (64 Mt in 2018).
This is the stuff of fantasy.
Flying in the face of reality and math, Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said he remains confident the government is on track to meet its 2030 target and its 2050 target of reducing emissions to net zero.
That’s what his predecessor, Catherine McKenna, used to say.
But repeating nonsense doesn’t make it true.
To reach Trudeau’s 2030 target, our emissions have to decrease by 30%, or 218 Mt below 2005 levels by 2030.
To date, they’re 0.14%, or 1 Mt, below 2005 levels.
Even the Trudeau government’s eternally rosy projections show that if it implemented every emission reduction program it promised, including ones not started, we’ll still miss his 2030 target by a mile.
How much longer are we going to maintain the fiction that it’s possible to lower emissions to the levels federal governments of all stripes have been promising for 30 years going back to the Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and now, Trudeau eras.
They all set unrealistic targets. They all failed to meet them.
In 1990, Canada’s emissions were 603 Mt. After three decades of promises to lower them, they’re 126 Mt higher, up 21%.
How much longer will we cut our own economic throats, pretending we can achieve these ridiculous promises in a big, cold, northern, sparsely populated country with major oil and gas resources?
How much longer before we stop pretending anything Canada does — at 1.5% of global emissions — is significant when global emissions keep rising because of major emitters like China.
The only time emissions decrease significantly is during global recessions, as occurred in 2008, when Canada’s fell by 62 Mt, or 8.4%, between 2007 and 2009, before starting to rise again as the economy recovered.
The same thing is going to happen this year because of the economic crash caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, although we won’t know the numbers until 2022.
That because the only thing that cuts emissions is devastating recessions, making the cure far worse than the disease. |
|
