Activists say oil is influencing climate plan

OTTAWA — Canada is living in a fantasy world if the government thinks it can meet its greenhouse-gas promises without reducing how much oil and gas the country produces, environmental groups told the world at a global conference on climate change Monday.

Environmental Defence and Stand.earth used United Nations climate talks in Poland to release a new report accusing the oil-andgas industry of undermining Canada’s climate plans.

“Oil and gas is the major obstacle to Canada actually being a climate leader and not just talking about being a climate leader,” said Dale Marshall, national program manager for Environmental Defence.

The report accuses the industry of successfully lobbying Canada to water down climate policies or exempt it from them, including delaying cuts to methane emissions from oil-production facilities and exempting up to 80 per cent of oilsands emissions from the federal carbon price due to kick in next year.

Marshall said Canada’s policies to allow oilsands production to expand, and even buying the Trans Mountain pipeline to facilitate that expansion, are counterintuitive for a government that keeps claiming it wants to be at the forefront of global climate action.

Patrick McDonald, the director of climate for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, dismissed the report as a “targeted effort by special interest groups looking at only our industry.”

McDonald said the Canadian oil-and-gas industry is the only one in the world subjected to a carbon tax and that it is innovating to reduce emissions.

“We’ve been very active and very environmentally responsible,” he said.

The report, however, says the emissions from each barrel of oil produced in Canada have grown 20 per cent between 1990 and 2016.

Catherine Abreu, the executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, said at a news conference at the meeting in Poland Monday that even if the industry can use technology to reduce emissions per unit of oil, gas or coal produced, that’s just a temporary fix in a world where the long-term plan has to be to stop using fossil fuels entirely.

“There are a lot of countries who, like Canada, seem to be under the impression that their fossil fuels are somehow different from everyone else’s fossil fuels,” she said. “As if their coal, oil or natural gas is magically non-emitting and actually good for the climate, while everyone else’s fossil fuels are the problem.”

The Paris Agreement, the operative pact meant to head off the worst of climate change, committed the nations of the world to cutting emissions and the amount of carbon pollution trapped in the atmosphere enough to keep the average global temperature from rising no more than two Celsius compared to pre-industrial times. They’re supposed to try to keep the temperature increase as close to 1.5 C as possible.

The difference between the two is significant, with millions more people displaced at two Celsius.