Alberta's emissions cap math doesn't add up

Who are you going to trust: the Government of Alberta or your lying eyes? That was essentially the message coming from Premier Danielle Smith and the trio of UCP ministers flanking her at a press conference Tuesday announcing the province’s latest multi-million dollar ad campaign against federal climate change policy. This time it was objecting to the proposed cap on oil and gas emissions in predictably dishonest terms, suggesting that a policy formalizing promises already made by the oil and gas industry will “cripple Canada” and destroy billions of dollars in wealth and tax revenue. 

Rebecca Schulz, Alberta’s Minister of Environment and Protected Areas, began her remarks by encouraging people to “look at the facts” — before immediately proceeding to manipulate them. “Our oil and gas sector is already leading the way on emissions reductions across our country,” she said. “Emissions intensity per barrel has already fallen by 23 per cent, and we can double that in the next few years.”

This is a familiar talking point that actually dates back to the NDP government and its efforts to tell a better story about the oil and gas industry. It’s true that emissions intensity per barrel has fallen by 23 per cent from 2009 levels, but those reductions are well in the past now. As the Pembina Institute noted in a recent report, per-barrel emissions from the oil sands have actually increased since 2018. And because Alberta’s oil production is increasingly dominated by oil sands projects, the average emissions intensity of its barrels is actually higher today than it was in 1990. 

The overall emissions from Alberta’s oil and gas industry have also increased substantially in recent years, which further puts the lie to Schulz’s claim. As a recent CBC story noted, changes to the way methane emissions are counted — using aerial surveys to conduct measurements rather than relying on self-reported data from oil and gas companies — has resulted in an across-the-board increase of 10 to 15 megatonnes per year between 1990 and 2021 compared to previous National Inventory Reports. 

Then again, knowing things doesn’t seem to be a high priority for Schulz. “The Prime Minister loves to talk about the environment,” she said, “but his own government has missed every single emissions target that they have set in the last nine years.” In fact, the only climate targets the Prime Minister has set in those last nine years were for 2030 under the Paris Accord, starting with a pledge of 30 per cent below 2005 levels and bumping it up to 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels. 

Yes, there are growing concerns Canada won’t be able to hit those targets — due almost entirely to the oil and gas industry and its growing share of national emissions — but at least the federal government has interim targets in its plan. Alberta’s Emissions Reduction and Energy Development Plan, by comparison, just makes a vague commitment to reaching net-zero by 2050 and then offers no credible pathway for achieving that and no targets that could be used to assess its progress in the meantime. 

Brian Jean, the Minister of Energy and Mines, was the next to try his hand at gaslighting by suggesting that “Alberta has been reducing our emissions for years, and we didn’t need a federally regulated emission cap to do so.” This, too, is inaccurate. While emissions in most parts of the country have declined since 2005, in Alberta they’re actually up 7.5 per cent. Alberta did see a reduction in emissions from its peak in 2015, but this is a direct result of the NDP government’s coal phaseout, a policy the UCP steadfastly opposed until they realized they could take some credit for its successes. While the coal phaseout reduced emissions from electricity production by almost 24 per cent since 2020, the province’s emissions actually increased ever so slightly over that same period.  

Not to be outdone, Premier Smith recycled the long-debunked falsehood that Alberta could somehow get credit for emissions reductions associated with LNG exports. “If we were able to displace China’s coal plants, even just 20 per cent of China’s coal plants, and get credit for it, that would offset all of Canada’s emissions.” This is, to borrow from an old ad turned popular meme, not how any of this works. The country exporting the fossil fuel doesn’t get credit for emissions reductions happening elsewhere, and even if it did the credit would properly go to BC, where most of the gas feeding Canada’s west coast LNG terminals will come from. 

As the Canadian Climate Institute’s Dale Beugin noted in an exhaustive takedown of this lazy and lousy argument, the math here just doesn’t add up. “If nations exporting and importing LNG could both claim credit for any resulting emissions reductions, that would be double counting. It would undermine transparency and accountability for emissions, not to mention the foundations of international climate negotiations. No country would be solely accountable for any emissions reductions. That’s pretty much the exact opposite of the best way to solve a global collective action problem.”

You’d think that these inconvenient truths would give the Alberta government at least a moment’s pause. At some point, its continued insistence that Alberta’s oil and gas industry cannot possibly meet the emissions reduction targets set by Alberta’s oil and gas industry will start to impact how investors and other stewards of capital treat their promises and pledges. The lying and gaslighting might keep the UCP membership in line before November’s crucial leadership vote, but there are other players in this game who won’t be so easily conned. At some point, Albertans might even get tired of being lied to so brazenly.