Canada Will Cut GHG Emissions by Oodles Vows PM!

 


Compared to their peers, the Brits have achieved fairly good results in cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. They not only promised - everyone does that - but they delivered.

On climate change, as in many other areas, the Canadian government has issued plenty of bold promises but all that shows is that talk is indeed cheap. Too often these promises end in a heap of "We tried. We can't. We're sorry."

Today is Joe Biden's "virtual summit" of 40 world leaders on slashing greenhouse gas emissions. Mr. Trudeau dutifully brought his offering. Canada will cut emissions by 40 to 45 per cent by 2030 - somehow, maybe.

The Brits realized the only way to achieve targeted cuts is to make them mandatory. You have to bind the government to achieving specific results. That means details, concrete figures, exacting time tables.

Could Canada deliver the promised cuts? Maybe, but it wouldn't be easy. Cutting our GHG emissions by almost half within just nine years is more than ambitious. It would involve sacrifice from the already hard-hit energy provinces, especially Alberta, which seems to have other problems at the moment.

And what of Mr. Trudeau's glorious new pipeline to "tidewater," the steel tube he wants to use to flood world markets with the dirtiest, highest carbon form of ersatz petroleum of them all, bitumen. The pipeline he had to have so badly that he paid way over market for the project when no one in the private sector would touch it. You see, we don't take any responsibility for that stuff once it's in the hold of a supertanker. Then it becomes another country's problem. It's off our books. And that's a key to Canada's emissions performance, keeping the books tidy.

Nine years is an incredibly brief time in which to restructure an economy. Can it be done? Sure it can but it might entail going on something akin to a war footing and that can be very costly. With just under nine years, you have to hit the ground running. Waiting until the virus emergency is over is wasting time we don't have. Trying to do so much in such a short time with a minority government, that's a stretch.

Can the Liberals win a majority in an election fought over the climate emergency? Are Canadians ready for that? What are our priorities? Where do we draw the line?

It's been just over five years since Justin Trudeau and Catherine McKenna strolled the floor of the Paris climate summit and proclaimed "Canada's back." Now it's time to make good on that promise.

The Supreme Court, in a split-decision, upheld Ottawa's carbon tax but that hasn't tamed the unruly western provinces. They're masters at throwing tantrums and throwing up barricades at the intersections. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.

Image
  The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded...
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more