Liberals kicking climate action down the road

One of the easiest tricks governments can use to pretend to be acting on any issue is to announce large headline promises which are intended to be delayed — for years, or even for multiple terms of office. And many of the federal Liberals’ recent budget announcements are designed to fall into that category.

Large funding numbers in areas ranging from child care to housing to military equipment are backloaded years down the road. But the plan for at least the current term of office is to do effectively nothing — leaving plenty to promise in the next election campaign, and little to show for the last one.

It would be bad enough if doing nothing meant merely standing still in the meantime. But often, the cost of putting off action is to exacerbate the problem that needs to be solved in the first place. And that reality is particularly stark when it comes to two new developments on the climate change front.

Given the feedback mechanisms involved in our atmosphere, every deadline pushed back creates a cascade of additional environmental damage. And the result is to leave an even more difficult job to be done — just as soon as somebody is responsible enough to take the task seriously.

Beyond delaying funding for public environmental programs, the Liberals have also decided to start retrenching from previously announced steps and targets — making our climate mess even worse than it has to be.

The first recent example comes from Canada’s most recent report on its plans to meet the Paris emission reduction targets agreed to by the international community just a year and a half ago.

Remember that Canada’s target in 2015 was one held over from the Harper Conservatives — which Trudeau had proclaimed to be unacceptably weak before taking power.

Trudeau’s initial excuse for lowering his sights was that his government would actually implement a plan to reach the new target. By the federal government’s own account, though, Canada is set to fall far short of the mark.

The federal government has set targets which involve greenhouse gas emission reductions by 2020 and 2030. But its projections instead show Canada’s emissions increasing through that entire time period, rather than being reduced by 28 per cent as promised.

At best, the emission projection may be incomplete in not taking into account some recent policy announcements. But that leads to the second recent development.

It was just last year that Trudeau treated a plan to regulate methane emissions beginning in 2018 as a point of pride.

And the timing of methane emissions is especially crucial, since their greatest impact is immediate.

Over a 20-year time period, the global warming effect from methane is up to 86 times as severe as that of carbon dioxide. Which means that anybody looking to rein in climate change before its effects become far more severe should see methane reduction as a top priority — and any delay as unconscionable.

But in the face of lobbying from the oil sector, Trudeau has decided not to push for any methane reductions until after the next federal election — with the final targets to be delayed until 2023.

The result will be up to 55 million additional tonnes of methane being released in the meantime. Or, in the language of so many climate change estimates, the effect of Trudeau’s single industry-demanded regulatory delay will be equivalent to putting a billion cars on the road for a year.

Unfortunately, that represents added climate damage we’ll have to address someday. And so what seems easiest for Trudeau now will only lead to complications in the end. Fingas is a Regina lawyer, blogger and freelance political commentator who has written about provincial and national issues from a progressive NDP perspective since 2005. His column appears every week.

The Liberals have also decided to start retrenching from previously announced steps and targets.