It all started so well. There was that letter from Prime Minister Trudeau stating that he was adding the words “climate change” to the Ministry of the Environment’s title to point to “the economic cost and catastrophic impact that a greater-than-two-degree increase in average global temperatures would represent, as well as the need for Canada to do its part to prevent that from happening.”

And Environment Minister Catherine McKenna hit the ground running, declaring that the Harper government’s target of a 30 per cent reduction in carbon emissions would be the floor and vowing to help lead the way in Paris towards an agreement pushing for the more aggressive goal of a 1.5 C average temperature increase. Canada was “back”, we were told — no longer a roadblock in the path of success, now actually helping the world save itself from itself. Minister McKenna was rightly proud of Canada and her part in trying to solve the most difficult and pressing problem facing humanity.

Fast forward to last week, when McKenna said she was now sticking with the Harper target, fending off critics by dismissing it as “a fake target, because they did nothing.”

So how fake is her 30 per cent target? Fake enough. What McKenna didn’t say was that even that less ambitious target will be virtually impossible to meet because 60 per cent of the country’s emissions come from Western Canada — where emissions might be, at best, stabilized to 2005 levels, but not reduced.

That means the rest of the country has to make a 75 per cent reduction by 2030. Which is impossible. Ontario is planning a 30 per cent reduction through aggressive plans to move to electric vehicles and zero-emission buildings. Which means the real target is more like 15 per cent, not 30 per cent — but the minister can’t actually say that out loud yet.

Matters just got worse for McKenna. Her announcement of the government’s approval of the Pacific Northwest LNG project amounts to greenwashing what could be the single largest point-source of carbon emissions in the country. When you take into account both the LNG facility (5.3 million CO2 tonnes per year) and the production and gathering system (up to 8.7 million tonnes per year), Pacific Northwest will single-handedly increase B.C.’s emissions by 23 per cent and national emissions by almost 2 per cent, according to an assessment released in February.

When you consider the fact that the 30 per cent goal is already fake, trying to make it sound as if you’re doing the planet a favour by increasing a province’s emissions by 23 per cent is pretty tough. When you consider the fact that the 30 per cent goal is already fake, trying to make it sound as if you’re doing the planet a favour bya province’s emissions by 23 per cent is pretty tough.

So how could McKenna put a shine on those numbers? “As the prime minister has emphasized, the only way to get resources to market in the 21st century is if it can be done sustainably and responsibly,” she said, with a straight face.

McKenna’s task was an unenviable one. When you consider the fact that the 30 per cent goal is already fake, trying to make it sound as if you’re doing the planet a favour by increasing a province’s emissions by 23 per cent is pretty tough.

Truth is, Trudeau and McKenna never really had much of a choice on this file. The project’s backer, Petronas, has been spending billions of dollars to develop the project in good faith. The government has no basis in law for withholding approval, as long the company meets the requirements the government placed on it. It’s still legal to emit carbon, after all.

What they do have is a choice in how they explain the decision to Canadians. But in both the announcement of the target and the announcement of the LNG green light, the Trudeau government has chosen to continue to spin their commitment to climate change as if they’re authentic eco-warriors.

They aren’t. They’re a government of a country that is attempting to grow the sale of fossil fuels that emit large amounts of carbon in the extraction and refining stages. And that means they are promoting projects that run completely counter to their environmental branding.

There’s a good chance this project won’t go ahead, for business reasons. The LNG market is oversupplied and prices are historically low. Worse, more capacity is coming on in the U.S. and Australia to aggravate that situation — a more than 45 per cent increase in global supply over the next five years, coupled with a limited increase in demand, according to the International Energy Agency.

So now Petronas has to decide whether to proceed with a $36 billion bet in an economically unattractive environment. Would you?

Next up, the pipelines. Expect approval for those. The NEB is pushing hard, testifying to a Senate committee about a scary crude-by-rail forecast — a forecast they neglected to mention was based on much higher prices than we are likely to see and a horizon of 2040, well past our ability to really predict world oil demand. The NEB is supposed to be impartial; that doesn’t seem to be the case these days. And the people questioning them at committee were Liberal and Conservative appointees, who tend to be friendly to resource development and pipelines.

This is the Canadian reality. The government has to deal with that reality. We are producers of fossil fuels and we generate a lot of carbon doing it. As long as that is what we do, as long as we want to do more of it, we shouldn’t pretend to be a big part of the solution to climate change. We’ll just keep disappointing ourselves and the rest of the world.

And the Prime Minister Trudeau should give Catherine McKenna a break and not put her behind the podium when his government approves those new pipelines. She’s had to eat enough crow already.

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