Backing Paris climate accord has left Canada badly behind
The inconvenient truth about the Kyoto-paris Agreement on climate change is that the 1997 deal has been a major flop because it was flawed from the beginning.
It should be scrapped and completely overhauled and Canada’s Liberals should have realized this before they embarked on their ruinous attack against the country’s resource base.
The failure of the agreement, evidenced by emissions that are climbing alarmingly fast, reveal how the Trudeau government’s holier-than-thou approach on climate change is naive and completely misguided.
The facts are that Canada should have been building lots of pipelines, approving many LNG export projects, and leading an international movement to scrap and try to redo the Paris agreement.
The agreement has been dramatically counterproductive because targets were not applied equally and globally.
Of the 192 countries that signed on in 1997, only the 37 developed countries had to agree to reduce emissions.
The undeveloped nations — notably China and India
— had no restrictions placed on them.
They argued that restrictions on emissions would hold back their economic development.
That’s fine, but targets should have been phased in and applied to all countries.
This benefit should not have been permanently baked in.
The result was predictable and noted by the Americans, Canadians and Australians at the time.
Today, the developing countries’ emissions have soared, which has allowed them to keep their costs low based on the burning of cheap local coal as their principal energy source.
Naturally, this patchwork quilt of regulation has resulted in a gigantic global arbitrage — companies from countries with restrictions — have moved plants or outsourced energy-intensive products such as steel and cement to environmentally dirty nations.
For instance, Canada’s imports of steel jumped between 2018 and 2019 alone by 87 per cent, bought, directly or indirectly, from countries not bound by the Kyoto-paris Agreement.
Germany and the United States have done the same.
“Since 1997, the 37 developed countries have reduced CO2 emissions by about seven per cent, while exempted country emissions rose 130 per cent.
And overall global emissions hit a new record in 2018, up two per cent year over year and up 49 per cent since 1997,” according to official figures contained in a report by former Canadian investment bankers who are now investors, Steve Larke and Adam Le Dain.
“Driven by good intentions and accelerating energy demand, the world is facing an unintended energy crisis.”
Counterintuitively, Canada must prioritize the building of pipelines to export its oil, with relatively low emissions, and to build natural gas pipelines and dozens of LNG projects on both coasts.
This is because every single energy molecule that is exported from Canada to Asia or elsewhere replaces their need to burn dirty coal, or to fuel their vehicles with electricity generated by coal. (This was a platform in the Tory energy policy this election, plus conservation subsidies for consumers.)
Canada’s foolish belief in an international treaty that doesn’t work has left us badly behind.
The Americans have dozens of LNG export projects completed or under construction and Canada, with one of the biggest natural gas endowments on the planet, has been unable to get one built — thanks to the usual suspects in Ottawa, British Columbia and Quebec.
The country could be a major player in LNG exports but time is running out as Australia and Qatar also move aggressively to compete. Instead, Trudeau cripples Alberta, subsidizes profitable Loblaw to buy lower-emission refrigerators and campaigns across the country about climate change in two fuel-guzzling aircraft and does nothing to curb demand at home by consumers.
The inconvenient truth is that for every pipeline and well and LNG plant that is not built in Canada, the Chinese and Indians will simply burn more dirty coal.
The Liberals and Greens in Canada are not the solution.
They are the problem.
Canada should have been ... leading an international movement to scrap and try to redo the Paris agreement.