Pipelines left out of climate strategy
The federal government has released its long-term climate strategy with a caution that most Canadians don’t yet understand how difficult it will be.
“Most Canadians recognize the need to mitigate climate change and limit the increase in the global average temperature, but the magnitude of the challenge is less well understood, with a requirement for very deep emissions cuts from every sector by mid-century,” says the 87-page plan, released Friday at an international climate conference in Morocco.
The document says that for Canada to reduce its entire output of greenhouse gases to 150 million tonnes a year by 2050 to match the international Paris climate accord, a major move to electrification for everything from transportation to building heating and industrial power is necessary. The most recent Environment Canada inventory assessed the country’s carbon dioxide equivalent emissions at 732 million tonnes in 2014 — and slowly rising.
Forestry, agriculture, municipal waste, technological innovation and energy efficiency — 38 per cent of all emissions cuts needed can be achieved through energy efficiencies, notes the paper — all get their own chapters, but Canada’s oil and gas sector does not.
Nor does the strategy paper mention the current political debate over approval of new, long-term fossil fuel infrastructure, including pipelines. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has already approved a major liquefied natural gas project for northern B.C. this fall and is poised to pronounce on Kinder Morgan’s proposed tripling of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline by mid-December.
“Canada’s mid-century strategy is not a blueprint for action and it is not policy prescriptive,” states the document. “Rather, the report is meant to inform the conversation about how Canada can achieve a lowcarbon economy.”
Environmental advocates were quick to weigh in.
“The report’s warnings on the dangers of building new infrastructure that locks in a high-carbon economy has to be seen as a big, flashing red light telling Trudeau to reject the Kinder Morgan and Energy East pipelines,” Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada said Friday in an email.
Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson, chair of the big-city mayors caucus in the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, was in Marrakech at the climate conference all week and has heard the antipipeline pitch repeatedly.
He said that he sees no inconsistency in approving new pipelines while driving down greenhouse gas emissions, noting a million barrels of oil a day currently travels through Edmonton neighbourhoods by rail.
“This is product that is already being extracted and processed, to some degree, today,” said Iveson.
“And it’s going to continue to be as long as there’s a market for it. And there’s going to continue to be a market for it as we make this transition.”