"You’d have to say parts of the G7 have really been taking this seriously and have put actions behind their 'commitments.' Even Japan and the U.S. have made progress. Canada, not so much."

Think back a few short weeks, before the collapse of the NAFTA talks, before the Mike Pence demand to Justin Trudeau for a NAFTA sunset clause, before Justin became “our guy” for finally saying something to Trump. Think back before all that, back when Trudeau had just bought an old pipeline and a new mess but was going to try and re-claim his supposed green credentials at the G7 meeting.

Well how did that reclamation go? In all the Trump chaos on the weekend you may have missed that there actually was a communique put out by the G7-1. Let’s take a look at what the leading economies of the free world said about climate change action, specifically their commitment to the Paris accord.

“Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the European Union reaffirm their strong commitment to implement the Paris Agreement, through ambitious climate action.” It deliberately doesn’t put the United States in that camp, which is a problem of course. Other than that missing it sounds pretty good. But I’ve discussed before how Canada’s “strong commitment” won’t even get us close to the Harper target of a 30 per cent reduction by 2030. So lets explore what a strong commitment without specifics actually mean.

“We reaffirm the commitment that we have made to our citizens to reduce air and water pollution and our greenhouse gas emissions to reach a global carbon-neutral economy over the course of the second half of the century.” Okay, that’s an actual specific commitment, sometime in the last half of the century we’ll have a carbon-neutral global economy.

Is that actually consistent with the no more than 2C temperature rise? As it turns out, no. It’s not even close.

There was an article in the journal Science last year by a group of European researchers outlining a roadmap of what had to happen to hit the Paris target of no more than 2C increase by 2100. It requires a lot more to be done and done a lot earlier. They were concerned that they were hearing a lot of rhetoric around that goal but no specifics on milestones to reach it, specifically they said “alarming inconsistencies remain between science-based targets and national commitments.”

Here’s what they say has to happen. First the world’s carbon emissions must peak and start coming down by 2020. Then the hard lifting has to start. Global carbon emissions in their base case must drop from 40 billion tonnes per year in 2020 to 24 by 2030 to 14 by 2040 to five billion tonnes by 2050. In addition the world can’t just at a zero carbon after that, it has to go negative likely through the use of biomass energy coupled with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

That is growing plants and trees to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, consuming them and stuffing the carbon emissions into the ground. So even with that aggressive schedule for reduction it isn’t enough, the world overshoots the target and has to come back.

In the paper, the scientists were concerned about the implementation of BECSS in time and at the level required. So they also outlined a scenario where the world built up some contingency by getting off carbon faster. They said that we should be targeting halving our carbon use each decade or even faster.

Oil is essentially eliminated before 2040 and possibly earlier. Carbon neutral in the second half of the century doesn’t do it, we have to be carbon negative. And we have to go beyond what the scientists called Herculean efforts to reduce carbon emissions in the 2020-2030 period.

Let’s look at the various country’s GHG records compared to 1990. The U.K. is down 40 per cent, Germany down 30 per cent, France and Italy down 20 per cent each. Japan and the U.S. up around five per cent, and Canada the climate “leader” is up almost 20 per cent. That was over more than 25 years.

We were so bad against the Kyoto 1990 reference year that Stephen Harper changed our reference to 2005. How does everybody look that way? The U.K. and Italy are down almost 30 per cent, France down almost 20 per cent. Germany and the U.S. down around 10 per cent. Japan about five per cent, Canada the worst again, down four per cent.

You’d have to say parts of the G7 have really been taking this seriously and have put actions behind their “commitments.” Even Japan and the U.S. have made progress. Canada, not so much. And the reason Canada is a laggard is primarily the growth in emissions due to oil sands development. Oil sands development our prime minister tells us his pipeline will help goose. (It won’t but that’s a different story.)

If we are trying to meet the roadmap in the G7 there are some countries that might actually do it based on historical performance. Canada is not one of them. Reaffirm all you want prime minister, your lack of firm plans and analysis don’t match your “commitment.”

And if the rest of the world does follow that roadmap the oil sands will be out of business. For a fossil fuel producing nation like Canada, isn’t it about time we actually say what Paris means to Canada’s future? Mr. Prime Minister, when does the world have to get off oil to meet the Paris target and how long a lifespan will your new pipeline have? Or was Trump not the only one posturing in Charlevoix?

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