Remember peak oil? Just a few short years ago, everyone was ruminating about oil’s looming scarcity. Had we peaked? What kind of chaos would unfold in the decades after we did? Well, the authors of a new report published last week in the journal Nature say fretting over the end of oil is irrelevant. If we want to avoid climate catastrophe, we can’t go anywhere near the end of oil – especially here in Canada.

Numerous reports and sources, including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have already warned us that if we want even a 50 per cent chance of keeping global warming below 2 degrees, we can’t put more than 1,100 gigatons of climate-choking CO2 into the atmosphere over the next 35 years. What’s new about this latest report is that it actually maps out what that would mean for global oil production.

As a global baseline, a third of all oil reserves, half of all natural gas reserves and 80 per cent of coal reserves need to remain unused. Breaking this down regionally, the authors found that China and India have to leave about a quarter of their reserves in the ground, the Middle East about 60 per cent and Russia 50 per cent.

But of all the world’s oil-producing countries, Canada has to leave the most reserves unburned to stave off catastrophic warming: some 74 per cent of our overall oil reserves and 85 per cent of tar sands reserves. Drilling in the Arctic has to be avoided altogether.

The warning to Canada has never been clearer: pump more tar sands crude and the whole planet gets screwed.

SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY SEAL NOT SO CLEAR-CUT

Shopping for greener paper or flooring products and think you’re out of the woods when you see a sustainable forestry seal? It all depends.

ForestEthics dug through 10 years of publicly available audit reports from the Forest Stewardship Council and Sustainable Forestry Initiative and found some glaring differences.

FSC auditors spent nearly four times as long in the field per audit. An impressive 92 per cent of FSC audits were peer-reviewed, and most of them included at least one biologist or First Nations person.

Not so for industry-run SFI. The initiative “rarely required logging companies to take any additional action to improve operations.”

SFI countered by publishing a set of updated standards the same day ForestEthics issued its report. The certifier now promises to tighten up protection for wildlife and waterways while cracking down on illegal logging and “recognizing and respecting” aboriginal rights.

Forest Ethics, however, says SFI’s revised standards are still woefully lacking.

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