Good morning,
Only in Alberta. That was the refrain when news broke that Alberta’s ruling party was considering striking carbon dioxide from the list of global-heating pollutants and instead, embracing the gas as a "foundational nutrient for all life on Earth.”
Alberta, the powerhouse producer of oil and gas in Canada, has a deservedly bad rap for thwarting efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Its premier, Danielle Smith, is an unabashed fossil fuel booster, who lashes out at anything that would make life more difficult for corporations mining the oil sands and fracking for gas.
She throws around threats of lawsuits against federal climate policy like a major league pitcher. Days before her leadership review, Alberta filed suit against the federal carbon pricing system, on grounds it was being unfairly applied across the country — pointing to the tax carveout on home heating oil in the Atlantic provinces.
This week, Smith threatened to mount another court challenge, this one against the proposed federal oil and gas emissions cap, claiming it encroaches on provincial jurisdiction and threatens to lead the country “into economic and societal decline.”
And then there are the roadblocks the Smith government has thrown up to thwart Alberta’s thriving renewable energy sector, I imagine to ensure fossil fuel companies maintain their edge.
Even against this backdrop, the CO2 love-fest motion by the United Conservative Party (UCP) seemed beyond the pale. But lo and behold, it passed. An overwhelming majority of UCP members voted last weekend to ditch the province’s emissions reduction targets and recognize carbon dioxide as “a foundational nutrient for all life on earth.”
That put Smith in a bit of a quandary. She couldn’t wholeheartedly promise to back the resolution; giving up on emissions reductions all together could potentially rob the giant oilsands companies of huge amounts of money they want for their carbon capture projects.
Smith resolved that dilemma by saying she would honour the spirit but not the text of her party’s resolution and promised continued support for the oil and gas industry’s commitment to reach net-zero by 2050.
All of this made us at Canada’s National Observer wonder where the motion came from in the first place. To be sure, some carbon dioxide is a foundational part of life on our planet; plants need it to grow and humans and other animals exhale it when they breathe. Of course, just like coffee that eventually gives you the shakes, there is a limit to how much carbon dioxide is good for the planet.
Alberta’s motion ignores entirely the fact we are well past the threshold. Carbon dioxide, produced when humans burn fossil fuels, and other greenhouse gases like methane, act like a blanket that traps more and more of the heat around the planet. As the planet warms, more energy is added to the atmosphere, creating more violent storms, less predictable weather patterns, drying forests and rising sea levels. The hurricanes, floods and forest fires tell you all you need to know about how far past optimum levels we have already gone.
Turns out the folks, who designed the pro-CO2 slogans and urged us to forget the facts, were from a front group for a coalition of American coal producers. They crafted the argument in 1997 to prevent climate policies curtailing coal. It has been in circulation ever since, used as a rallying cry by climate deniers, online conspiracy theorists, and now, sadly, Alberta’s leading political party.
Adrienne Tanner — Editor-in-Chief
TOP STORY
Even anti-climate policy disinformation is prone to being recycled. The climate-denying statements that laud carbon dioxide as a ‘foundational nutrient for all life on earth’ have been around since 1997. They were crafted by defenders of coal, and have been used since by fossil fuel boosters of many stripes. In addition to the UCP voting to strike CO2 from the list of pollutants, the myth was propagated by at least two members of B.C.’s Conservative Party during the recent B.C. election.
Marc Fawcett-Atkinson reports
Number of the Week
512 — the potential work hours lost to heat in 2034
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