Which nation shows greater hypocrisy in the struggle to limit climate change – the United States or Canada?

The US President, of course, misses no opportunity to dismiss scientific consensus, downplay the dangers of climate change, and promote fossil fuel use.

Canada’s Prime Minister, on the other hand, has been consistent in stating that the scientific consensus is undeniable, the danger is clear, and Canada must step up to the challenge of drastic carbon emissions reductions.

It was within the first few weeks of the Justin Trudeau administration that Canada surprised most observers by backing a call from island nations to hold global warming to 1.5°C, as opposed to the 2°C warming threshold that had been a more widely accepted official goal.1

Yet according to a new peer-reviewed study2 of countries’ pledged emissions reduction commitments following the Paris Agreement, Canada’s level of commitment would result in 5.1°C of global warming if all countries followed the same approach to carbon emissions. In this tally of the potential effects of national climate commitments, Canada ranks with the worst of the worst, a select club that also includes Russia, China, New Zealand and Argentina.

The actual carbon emissions policies of the US would result in a lesser degree of total calamity – 4°C of warming – if followed by all countries.

Behind this discrepancy between Canada’s professed goals and its actual policy is the lack of a global agreement on a fair method for allocating the remaining carbon emissions budget.

The Paris Agreement set a target for the limitation of global warming, and it was (relatively) straightforward to calculate how much more carbon can be emitted without blowing through that warming target. But countries remained free to decide for themselves what principles to follow in determining their fare share of emissions reductions.

The result?

“Developed countries who committed to take the lead in reducing emissions and mobilizing finance for developing countries often submitted NDCs [Nationally Determined Contributions] that do not match the concepts of equity that they publicly supported.” (du Pont and Meinshausen, “Warming assessment of the bottom-up Paris Agreement emissions pledges”, Nature Communications.)

A fair way to count to 10

An old joke provides a good analogy for the slipperiness inherent in divvying up the global carbon budget. (My apologies to accountants everywhere, especially the one who first told me this joke.)

You ask a mathematician, “how much is 3 + 3 + 4?” She punches the numbers into her calculator, and tells you “3 + 3 + 4 is 10”.

But when you ask an accountant “how much is 3 + 3 + 4?” he sidles up and whispers in your ear, “How much do you want it to be?”

Though climate scientists can provide a simple number for how much additional carbon can be emitted globally before we hit our agreed-on warming threshold, each country’s ruling party decides for themselves how much they want their share of that carbon budget to be.

And the radically different circumstances of countries has resulted in radically different positions on what is fair.

A 2016 study published in Nature gives us insight into Canada’s position.

Entitled “Global mismatch between greenhouse gas emissions and the burden of climate change”, the study categorizes countries into how drastically and immediately they are hit by the effects of climate change. While all countries are already being impacted, the study found that Canada is among the 20% of countries who are suffering least from climate change.

Countries are also categorized according to their responsibility for climate change, and Canada is among the 20% who have contributed the most (on a per capita basis) in causing climate change.

In economic terms, those who do most to cause climate change while suffering the least damage from climate change are “free riders”. Those who do the least to cause climate change, but suffer the most from it, are “forced riders”.

The study shows that Canada is among the 20 “free riders” now, and will still be one of 16 “free riders” in 2030. The “forced riders” in both 2010 and 2030 include many African countries and small island nations. (Yes, that would be the same island nations that Canada claimed to be backing in 2015 in the call to adopt a 1.5°C warming threshold.)

Is there evidence that the “free riders” are trying to maintain their free-riding status as long as possible? According to du Pont, Meinshausen and their research colleagues, the answer is yes: most countries have set carbon emissions commitments that reflect their immediate self-interests. In the case of the major fossil fuel producers and consumers, that means the sum of their commitments adds up to a woefully inadequate global carbon emissions reduction.

An equity framework that dares not speak its name

In their discussion of the emissions reductions pledges made by nations following the Paris Agreement, du Pont and Meinshausen try to match these pledges with various approaches to equity. They note that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has listed five major equity frameworks. These frameworks are summarized in this table from an earlier paper:

Of particular interest for our purposes is the final entry, CER or “Constant emissions ratio”. This has been defined as

“[maintaining] current emissions ratios (‘constant emissions ratio’, or CER), so that each country continues to emit the same share of global emissions as it does at the moment, even as the total volume is cranked down.”3

In other words, those who have emitted an outsize share of carbon in the past get to preserve an outsize share of a shrinking pie in future, while those who have emitted very little carbon to date are restricted even more drastically in future.

If that sounds anything but fair to you, you are not alone. Du Pont and Meinshausen say the Constant Emissions Ratio “is considered unfair and not openly supported by any country.”

Yet when they looked at the Nationally Determined Contributions following the Paris Agreement, they found that the Constant Emissions Ratio “implicitly matches many developed countries’ targets”.

The Constant Emissions Ratio framework for these countries would be the least stringent of the IPCC’s equity frameworks – that is, it would impose the smallest and slowest cuts in carbon emissions.

In the case of Canada and other members of the climate rogues gallery, their post-Paris commitments turn out to be even weaker than commitments calculated by the Constant Emissions Ratio method.

Follow the money

Let’s take a closer look at some of the Nationally Determined Contributions – individual nations’ commitments towards the global goal of rapid decarbonization.

Canada’s commitment ranks among the weakest of this lot for three reasons. First, the Reduction Target of 30% is near the low end of the scale, with several other industrial economies pledged to Reduction Targets of 40% or more. Second, the Target Year for achievement of the Reduction, 2030, is five years beyond the US and Brazil Target Dates of 2025. This matters, because every year that we continue to emit high amounts of carbon makes it that much more difficult to forestall catastrophic climate change.

Third, the Base Year is also very significant, and on this measure Canada also ranks with the poorest commitments. The European Union, for example, pledges to reduce from a Base Year of 1990, while Canada will work from a Base Year of 2005.

Between 1990 and 2005, Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions rose 25%,4 and so if Canada’s emissions in 2030 are 30% lower than in 2005, that is only about a 12% reduction compared to 1990.

Canada’s national government claims to understand that swift and dramatic action must be taken to reduce carbon emissions. So why would this government then commit to only a 12% emissions reduction, compared to 1990, as a target for 2030? Let’s follow the money, with a quick look at the relative influence of the fossil fuel industry in Canada.

Radoslav Dimitrov writes

“the energy sector (oil, gas and electricity) is important to the Canadian economy, accounting for approximately 10% of national GDP in 2016, more than a quarter of public and private investment, and approximately 29% of exports.”5

Notably absent in the above paragraph is employment. Natural Resources Canada says that in 2017, only 5% of employment was either directly or indirectly within the energy sector, and that includes the electricity sector.6

Both of Canada’s traditional ruling parties like to talk about their commitment to “good middle-class jobs”. But given the scale of the environmental crisis we face, how big a challenge would it be to fund an immediate job retraining and investment program to start replacing fossil fuel jobs with renewable energy jobs? Couldn’t a committed government-and-industry program find new “middle-class jobs” for 3% or 4% of the working-age population?

I think the answer is yes … but as for capital investment, that’s another story. The fossil fuel industry accounts for closer to 25% of Canadian investment, and an immediate and sustained push to reduce the output of carbon-intensive fuels would result in a dramatic and immediate drop in the stock-market value of fossil-fuel corporations. Those stocks are a big part of the portfolios of most people in Canada’s stock-owning class.

A two-pronged strategy which starts with “dig the hole deeper”

Since before his election as national leader, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has proclaimed the need to “balance the environment and the economy”. What has this meant in practice?

As the industry-friendly Financial Post put in in 2015,

“The encouraging news — at least from the perspective of the energy sector — is that Mr. Trudeau seems onside with continued oil industry expansion and that his climate change program aims to support it rather than contain it.”7

Part of Trudeau’s program was a commitment to establishing a modest national price on carbon. He found a prominent early ally in an unlikely location, Alberta. There the NDP Premier Rachel Notley not only implemented a carbon price, but also announced a cap on carbon emissions from Alberta’s oil and gas sector.

Notably, however, that cap will start to reduce tar sands emissions only in 2030, and in the meantime emissions from that sector are projected to rise 50%, from 66 megatonnes/year to 100 megatonnes.

The Alberta plan thus mirrors Trudeau’s national policy. While championing a modest carbon tax, the Prime Minister has consistently pushed for the construction of major new pipelines – and the business case for these pipelines is that they are essential in the expansion of tar sands extraction.

On this front, at least, Trudeau is willing to put our money where his mouth is. Last summer, the Trudeau government invested $4.5 billion to buy the TransMountain Pipeline, with the prospect of spending at least several billion more in a much delayed project designed to almost triple the line’s bitumen-carrying capacity.

Meanwhile a national price on carbon emissions of $20/tonne is scheduled to be implemented in January 2019, rising to $50/tonne in 2022. While most environmentalists see this as a positive step, they also believe the price needs to be much higher if it is to result in dramatic emission reductions.

Setting a low bar and failing to clear it

As we have seen, the Nationally Determined Contribution that Canada has offered in response to the Paris Agreement is one of the world’s weakest.

The evidence to date suggests that Canada is on track to miss its own low target. Canada’s Environment Commissioner Julie Gelfand concluded in March 2018 that Canada is making little progress and will miss its 2030 targets unless both the federal and provincial governments step up the pace.8 And just this week, the UN Environment Program said that Canada is on track to miss its emissions targets for both 2020 and 2030.9

That should come as no surprise: it’s hard to cut national emissions by 30%, when you’re also fully committed to the continued rapid expansion of the country’s most carbon-intensive industrial sector – tar sands extraction.

Photo credits: all photos are publicity photos released by the Prime Minister’s Office, Canada, taken by Adam Scotti, accessed at https://pm.gc.ca/eng/photos.

References

1 “Catherine McKenna pushes for 1.5 C target in Paris climate talks”, Globe & Mail, December 6, 2015

2 “Warming assessment of the bottom-up Paris Agreement emissions pledges”, by Yann Roubiou du Pont and Malte Meinshausen, Nature Communications, accessed at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07223-9.pdf

3 In “US trying harder on climate change than ‘unambitious’ China, says study”, CarbonBrief, 20 December 2016

4 “Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions rose sharply between 1990 and 2005: study”, April 22, 2008, accessed at CBC News.

5 “Selected Country Pledges Under the Paris Agreement and GHG Emissions”, from “The Paris Agreement on Climate Change”, by Radoslav Dimitrov, published by University of Western Ontario, March 2018.

6 “Energy and the economy”, on the Natural Resources Canada website, accessed Nov 28 2018.

7 “Justin Trudeau aims to strike balance between environment, economy with carbon policy”, Financial Post, February 6, 2015

8 “Canada, provinces lack clear plan to adapt to climate change, auditors say”, by Mia Rabson, Canadian Press, 27 March 2018

9 “Canada set to miss C02 emissions target, UN says,” in Toronto Star, 28 November 2018, accessed in Pressreader.