LET’S CELEBRATE THAT CANADA IS LIKELY A ‘NET ZERO’ POLLUTER

I was reading through quotes from former prime minister Pierre Trudeau to see if I could get some clue as to why his son appears to be sleepwalking into a national unity crisis. One of the quotes described our current national unity problem well: “Canada will be a strong country when Canadians of all provinces feel at home in all parts of the country, and when they feel that all Canada belongs to them.”

Increasingly, Albertans do not feel at home in Canada or that Canada belongs to us. If I were to pinpoint the one issue that has driven the biggest wedge, it is the issue of greenhouse gas emissions.

I’ve been watching the climate change debate become increasingly extreme since Canada first signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The practice of our political leaders has been to sign an agreement with overly aggressive targets, fail to achieve them, then sign on to even more aggressive targets.

The Paris Accord marked peak absurdity, where the government agreed to reduce our emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Since signing the Paris Accord, the rhetoric has become even more alarming with environmentalists claiming we actually need to reduce emissions to 80 per cent below 2005 levels by 2050, and others saying we need to be off fossil fuels completely within 10 years if we are to survive.

The extremists may believe it, but no one else does.

No one is switching en masse to wind and solar power to heat and power their homes. These two sources continue to make up less than three per cent of the grid.

No one is dumping their combustion engine car for electric: of the 25 million cars registered in Canada, only 100,000 of them are electric.

Consumers clearly don’t believe the predictions of catastrophe. Why would they?

More than 22,000 delegates flew to Poland for the latest COP 24 meeting. If environmentalists were genuinely worried about impending doom, they’d start having their meetings on FaceTime.

What is really happening is Alberta’s energy industry is a convenient scapegoat, and we’ve just sat back and taken a pummelling without even trying to fight back.

When the LEAP Manifesto was first launched, which declared that the only way to save the planet was to stop building energy infrastructure, no one in the industry took it seriously.

Yet we are living it today. Northern Gateway was cancelled without a peep. Energy East was pulled with the federal government characterizing it as just a “business decision.” Whether it is Trans Mountain, Keystone XL, Line 3 or the Coastal GasLink pipeline, Canada can’t get anything built. The LEAPers have won.

There is no other nation that is destroying its fossil fuel industry in order to meet unachievable emissions reduction targets.

Other jurisdictions, notably the European Union, have said they are going to be “net zero” by 2050. We should make that our objective too.

What does it mean?

Well, rather than absurdly trying to reduce emissions from 700 megatonnes down to 200 megatonnes by 2050, we would develop strategies to capture or offset 700 megatonnes and declare Canada carbon neutral.

Ecowatch identified eight ways to sequester carbon dioxide, including reforestation, trapping it in farmed soils, coastal plant growth, biofuels, biochar, fertilizing the ocean, capturing it in rocks, and direct air capture like the project started by

Bill Gates and Murray Edwards.

Taking just one example: Canada has one of the highest number of trees on the planet at 318 billion (8,953 trees per person) compared to 139 billion in China (102 trees per person). A tree can sequester up to 23 kilograms of CO2 a year and one tonne over its life cycle. That means one million trees sequester one megatonne, one billion trees sequester 1,000 megatonnes, and Canada’s 318 billion trees sequester 318,000 megatonnes of CO2.

Why don’t we get any credit for that?

If we are all to feel like we belong in Canada, we need a common strategy that doesn’t pit one province against the other, one industry against the other, and one Canadian against the other. Canada could very well be the first net zero, carbonneutral country. In fact, we probably already are.

Let’s confirm it, celebrate it, tell the world about it, and get on with building pipelines.