How will we cut 80 per cent of emissions?
The federal government has released its long-term climate strategy with a caution that most Canadians — while sympathetic to the cause — don’t yet understand the “magnitude of the challenge.”
The document suggests the country should find a way to cut emissions 80 per cent below 2005 levels by 2050 in order to match the ambition of the international Paris climate accord.
That means ratcheting down Canada’s entire output of greenhouse gases to 150 million tonnes a year. The most recent Environment Canada inventory assessed the country’s carbon dioxide equivalent emissions at 732 million tonnes in 2014 — and slowly rising.
“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. Environment Minister Catherine McKenna was among those last year in Paris helping push for a target of limiting global warming to less than two degrees C above pre-industrial levels and closer to 1.5 degrees.
“Canada’s Mid-Century Long Term Low-Greenhouse Gas Development Strategy” says global emissions reductions of between 70 and 95 per cent are required in order to have a better than 50-50 chance of hitting the 1.5-degree temperature target. It lays out a number of strategies, including a major move to electrification.
Forestry, agriculture, municipal waste, technological innovation and energy efficiency — 38 per cent of all emissions cuts needed to reach two degrees Celsius 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. The Liberal 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 low-carbon 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… ,” a Greenpeace Canada spokesman said Friday in an email.