The environment minister would prefer to scold other countries, rather than do anything about it
Canadians like the fact that we usually punch above our weight in global affairs. But the truth is that, somehow, when it comes to climate action, where we can and should be making a huge difference, we seem more intent on virtue signalling at home and abroad than actually reducing global emissions.
This was on full display during COP28, the UN climate conference which wrapped up this past weekend. Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault was quoted by the Financial Times last week aggressively calling out the growth of global emissions from coal use in developing nations, stating that:
" The time for half-measures and gradual change has passed. The time to act is now. We must significantly accelerate action on coal. It is now critical that we immediately stop approvals and construction of new coal power plants and radically accelerate the coal-to-clean transition.”
Canada is lucky. We have so much natural hydro and gas, we only depend on coal for seven per cent of the grid that lights and heats our cities. Other nations aren’t as lucky. India and China depend on coal for 72 per cent and 63 per cent of their fast-growing grids, respectively. Those nations govern 3 billion people. They’re focused on helping several hundred million people move out of poverty and into a sustainable middle class urban existence in the next decade, putting enormous pressure on finding affordable, reliable energy. Being lectured by a Canadian with 38 million people and an already clean grid isn’t easy to take. It’s especially hard when its just a lecture, with no practical offer to partner or help.
This is a huge missed opportunity for Canada given our natural advantages, our trade proximity to Asia – and the broad failure of our domestic climate initiatives to remove emissions in a meaningful way.
With such aggressive language pointed at Asia, Canadians might be forgiven for being largely unaware of how poorly our own federal climate strategy is performing. Since federal websites make it hard to track our underperformance (ie; Guilbeault’s 2030 plan bizarrely starts with a 2019 baseline on the federal website); here’s the math:
In 2015, Canada made a commitment to remove 30 per cent of its 2005 annual emissions by 2030 as part of its nationally defined contribution (NDC) under the Paris Accord. That 2005 baseline was 732 megatons (mt) of carbon. After 2015, our annual domestic emissions actually rose back up to 724 megatons (mt) by 2019, the last normal economic year before the pandemic. So, by 2019, Canada had removed only 8mt of its annual emissions. To put that in perspective, the U.S. removed over 800mt and Europe removed over 700mt in the same time period. How did they do that, and why can’t Canada?
It’s important to note a central truth in Guilbeault’s comments. Coal has indeed been the greatest source of emissions growth the past two decades as the global electrical grid has doubled. But it is equally important to note that the most effective reduction of carbon emissions globally has been retrofitting coal-fired grids to natural gas. This is what has driven the outsized success of the U.S. and Europe in cutting emissions. While renewables are important, when it comes to the grid, they are intermittent, do not provide baseload power, and use 200-300 times the land mass of a single coal or gas generation plant.
Canada hasn’t achieved its emissions goals in part because we already had a mostly clean grid. But also, because we are a very unique country: only half a per cent of humanity lives in the world’s second largest national landmass, vast and cold, with dozens of cities distributed across the country, linked by extensive air, rail, and transport networks. In spite of having some of the worlds largest boreal forest carbon sinks, Canada also holds huge hydrocarbon, mineral and agricultural resources that the rest of the world depends on for their energy and food security.
These features, combined with population growth, make it hard to achieve domestic emissions reduction without economically self-defeating policies. But these are completely unnecessary, the result of a short-sighted federal domestic-only emissions strategy that focuses only on the 1.5 per cent of global emissions that originate in Canada at the expense of also looking at what we can do to mitigate the other 98.5 per cent of emissions.
A global emissions strategy would look at what we can do in Canada and the rest of the world. First using our gas to mitigate coal emissions immediately, and then using our advanced carbon capture and growing modular nuclear expertise to solve for emissions where they are worst, and we can do the most – particularly in India and China.
Even the Paris Accord accounts for this global strategic scope; acknowledging in Articles 4 and 9 the obviously unequal dispersion of the human population, resources, wealth, and trade between nations. It allows and wants to see incentives between nations to use trade and technology transfer to mitigate global emissions across and between nations.
In light of this, why is Canada’s climate strategy focused only on domestic emissions? This insularity not only fails to produce results, it divides Canadians on domestic climate initiatives, forcing political and legal battles that pit us against each other on the trade-offs between energy, economy and the environment.
These battles might be meaningful if the stakes were high, but in a world where a single years increase in emissions from coal use in China is greater than Canada’s most aggressive total 25 year reduction target, our failure to take a global perspective fails the planet as much as it fails Canadians.
According to IHS Markit, Canada’s gas has the quality, proximity and cost advantages that make it a natural contender to decarbonize the grid in China and across Asia. Trading into just 20 per cent of the Asian grid would remove more emissions from the planet than Canada’s entire carbon footprint. This is not just hypothetical. When the new Shell LNG port is fully operational, according to analysts, it will annually displace between 70-80 mt. This is already an order of magnitude more emissions reduction than our federal climate strategy has accomplished since inception.
Global emissions are borderless.
Canada’s climate strategy doesn’t have to scold other nations for coal, or create domestic political drama over minor emissions objectives at home. We have the people, resources, technology, diplomacy and trade capacity to do much more in the world to deliver significant global emissions reductions, especially in Asia. By COP29, Guilbeault should ditch the current insular, domestic, politicized strategy. When it comes to coal, the world doesn’t need another letter saying its bad. It needs Canadian resources, trade, technology transfer and diplomacy to partner with the developing world to remove more emissions than our entire national carbon footprint.
