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These are strange days, indeed.

Our federal government, which has signed on to the Paris Agreement, has also come out swinging in support of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. And we continue to be told that increasing oil and gas production and meeting emissions reduction targets are mutually compatible goals.

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This thinking is also reflected in Alberta’s ‘climate leadership plan,’ which allows oil sands emissions to grow by 40 per cent and places no restrictions on oil and gas production outside of the oil sands.

Even with that cap in place, National Energy Board oil and gas production projections show that upstream emission will increase enough that a 49 per-cent reduction in emissions from the rest of Canada’s economy will be required to meet our Paris targets.

Notwithstanding the difficulty in making such radical reductions in a short timeframe, Justin Trudeau and Rachel Notley have both dug in on the “need” to build the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, going so far as to threaten that a failure to build the pipeline could result in Alberta’s extremely modest ‘climate leadership plan’ being cancelled.