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Zero Carbon

With Chris Hatch
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March 24th 2024
Feature story

Carbon ruckus, climate crickets

You’re probably sick and tired of hearing about the carbon tax. Even more sickening — pit-of-the-stomach sickening — is the nauseating lack of context to all the political tumult.

I don’t mean Pierre Poilievre’s lying-by-omission on carbon rebates. That’s sleazy and deceitful and hardly new in politics. The cold void in the gut comes watching Parliament and the press obsess over Poilievre’s non-confidence motion the very same week the World Meteorological Organization is “sounding the Red Alert to the world.”

“The state of the climate in 2023 gave ominous new significance to the phrase ‘off the charts,’” said the WMO as it officially certified last year as the hottest on record by a freakishly wide margin.

“A huge margin at the planetary scale,” wrote Gavin Schmidt this week in Nature. Schmidt is the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and oversees the tracking project for temperature changes since 1880. “Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly,” he writes. “We could be in uncharted territory.”

If you didn’t hear about the WMO “sounding the Red Alert,” it’s probably because it barely made the news. The weekend weather forecast gets more coverage than a global red alert from the world’s meteorologists. Instead, we are inundated with articles and commentary gloating over the plight of carbon pricing or counselling strategic retreat on that policy.

But if you’re paying attention to the big picture, you don’t have to be a fan of carbon taxes to realize that we couldn’t be acting against carbon pollution aggressively enough or pulling hard enough on every possible lever to stop fossil fuels.

“This sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models,” says Schmidt. Translated to layperson’s terms, the predictions were already pretty dire. But now, even the top experts don’t know what the hell is going on: “Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.”

Schmidt is worth quoting a bit more, not only because he’s one of the world’s top climate scientists, but because none of us would put our kids on a bus that had even a one per cent chance of crashing.

“It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty to seasonal predictions of droughts and rainfall patterns.

“Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behaviour is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time. We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.”

That planetary context is mostly absent from the Canadian debate. Somehow, we manage to debate climate policy while ignoring the climate itself. And the country-by-country context is almost entirely invisible. Over half of Canadians tell pollsters that our country is doing its fair share to combat climate change.

But as you know from last week’s Zero Carbon newsletter, Canada is well offside other wealthy countries when it comes to carbon pollution. The world’s rich countries have cut fossil fuel emissions back to 1973 levels, on average. Last year, carbon emissions from Europe fell to 60-year lows. But Canada’s carbon spew diverged from the pack since the 1990s and the gap keeps growing.

Several of you asked to hear more about what’s driving this growing gap and our resident data cruncher was happy to oblige. It was Barry Saxifrage who first pointed out that Canada is an exception to First World progress. Just to recap, here’s how Canada’s CO2 emissions look compared to the average for advanced economies.

Chart by Barry Saxifrage for Canada's National Observer

So, what accounts for that clear divergence after the 1990s? “The Big 3 sectors account for most of the changes,” says Saxifrage: “Oil and gas, transport, and electricity. In the 1990s, just about everything shot up, including all of the Big 3.”

Here’s a visual display of changes in each sector from 1990 onwards.

Chart by Barry Saxifrage for Canada's National Observer

In the 2000s, Canada’s electricity sector noticeably got its act together. Ontario, in particular, with the coal phaseout under the provincial Liberals. But the oil and gas industry, as well as transport, kept skyrocketting. The net result was an overall plateau through the 2000s.

If you’re wondering about that big drop in carbon pollution from heavy industry, it’s not really a story of systemic improvement — half the cut (11 MtCO2) came from closing one big Adipic acid factory.

Then “in the 2010s (pre-pandemic), only electricity declined,” says Saxifrage. “Every other sector increased emissions. This is the critical decade when most advanced economies cut emissions but Canada increased them. We have an economy-wide problem, except for electricity.”

That’s a key point: it’s easy to see that the oil and gas industry is the biggest and fastest-growing driver of the gap. “How do you spell TARSANDS????” one newsletter reader replied last week.

Overall, fossil fuel production is causing about 30 per cent of Canada’s total emissions. Even if climate pollution from the oil and gas sector was magicked away, we’d still have to cut the other 70 per cent. As so many readers clearly understand, climate change keeps getting worse until greenhouse gas emissions are cut to zero (net zero for the wonkier-minded).

Transportation is another big culprit. It’s a tough one because Canadian vehicles are among the most-polluting in the world and the fleet turns over slowly. The Europeans are finding it tough as well but with targeted government policies, they have cut oil consumption roughly 13 per cent since the highs of 2005/06.

EV adoption is over twice as high as in Canada and many European nations have a new car tax that drastically increases the price of gas guzzlers. If we might circle back to the tax ruckus for a moment, we’d note it was precipitated over the upcoming $15 per tonne carbon tax increase. Adding together the various fuel and carbon taxes in Canada and Europe, you find road fuels about $300 more per tonne of CO2 across the Atlantic.

The post-pandemic situation in Canada is hard to read. And that’s a major problem for advocates of climate policy because the pandemic scrambled any results that policies like the carbon tax might be having. The federal carbon tax only came into effect across the whole country in 2019. Several national policies came even later and some are still in the works.

There was an obvious rebound after the pandemic, which other wealthy countries have since turned back. The most recent data for Canada come from unofficial estimates — they show we are still below pandemic levels but ticking upwards.

It’s a real frustration for data analysts: you can get stock market reports up to the second but the most recent official Canadian greenhouse gas data is for 2021. In April, the feds will release the “National Inventory Report, 2024.” Despite the title, it will only give figures for 2022. Two independent organizations — the Canadian Climate Institute and the Energy Institute (formerly BP Statistical Review of Energy) both estimate Canadian carbon emissions increased in 2022 and Saxifrage used the Energy Institute data for his charts above.

The roundup

The non-confidence vote calling for a “carbon tax election” somehow managed to be both sickening and performative — Pierre Poilievre didn’t even show up. He went to a fundraiser instead of voting in the House.

Canadian environment and climate organizations called out “some federal politicians and many premiers” for “shamelessly exploiting Canadians’ very real economic pain for political gain,” reports Natasha Bulowski.

In a joint statement, the groups say, “It is clear to us that the debates and votes held in Parliament this week calling for a freeze on long-planned carbon pricing increases are part of a concerted effort to dismantle more than just carbon pricing: they are part of an ideologically driven effort to limit all climate action.”

The Canadian Climate Institute looked at which federal climate policies will have the biggest impact by 2030 and found the industrial price on pollution is the heaviest hitter.

“Some policies in Canada’s climate plan will reduce emissions more than others — but they all add up. Every megatonne of emissions matters,” said the institute’s Anna Kanduth.

Gas giant Fortis loses a round

The BC Utilities Commission (BCUC) has dealt a blow to efforts by the province’s gas utility to expand natural gas infrastructure in the province, reports Marc Fawcett-Atkinson. Relying on claims about “renewable natural gas,” Fortis was trying to circumvent municipal climate rules restricting the use of conventional fossil-based natural gas in new buildings.

Feds drop impact assessment for Highway 413

The federal government will not proceed with its own environmental impact assessment of the contentious highway proposed for southern Ontario, reports Abdul Matin Sarfraz. Environmental groups are furious:

“Highway 413 is the bulldozer front of farm-eating, nature-killing, climate-warming, developer-enriching sprawl that would cost Ontarians billions. Much better city-building and transportation alternatives are at our fingertips,” said Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence.

‘Bewildering’ to ignore meat-eating

Food experts are criticizing the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for ignoring the carbon reductions from switching away from meat-heavy diets and for “dismissing” the potential of alternative proteins and plant-based substitutes.

“The FAO roadmap neglects one of the most obvious and urgent interventions to reduce emissions from the food system: shifting away from the production and consumption of animal-sourced foods,” say a team of academics writing in Nature. “Animal agriculture, including animal feed, accounts for 12-20 per cent of total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is responsible for nearly 60 per cent of the food system’s emissions.

“The FAO fails to present any methods or concrete data behind their claim that incremental tweaks in farmed animal management alone can meet our climate goals,” Matthew Hayek of New York University told The Guardian.

Petrochemicals are killing us

“It’s well known that fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change. A dirty secret is that they’re also the source of toxic chemicals linked to rising rates of chronic and deadly diseases,” writes Liza Gross for Inside Climate News.

“Mounting evidence links petrochemicals to the rapidly rising prevalence of a slew of chronic and deadly conditions, a review published in the New England Journal of Medicine warned earlier this month.”

KLM’s greenwashing ruled illegal

Marketing campaigns by the airline KLM, which promoted the sustainability of flying, were ruled illegal by the Amsterdam District Court. The judge ruled against KLM’s marketing of offsets and its claims to be aligned with the Paris Agreement climate goals. The case was brought in 2022 by Dutch groups Fossielvrij Netherlands and Reclame Fossielvrij, with the support of lawyers for ClientEarth.

Pennsylvania's largest solar farm will replace its largest coal plant

The U.S. government has awarded $90 million to build Pennsylvania’s largest solar farm. It will be built on 2,700 acres of land formerly used by the Homer City coal plant, reports Electrek.

Germany kickstarts plans to dismantle gas distribution network

The German government’s economic ministry issued a “green paper” showing that “grids for the existing natural gas supply will no longer be needed in their current form and scope once the country approaches its target of becoming climate neutral by 2045,” reports Renew Economy.

“With the goal of climate neutrality by 2045, there is foreseeably no longer any use for over 90 per cent of the existing gas distribution networks,” according to an analysis in 2023 by the think tank Agora.

South Australia joins Denmark targeting 100% renewable electricity by 2027

South Australia officially accelerated its 100 per cent renewable electricity target to 2027.

“Wind-powerhouse Denmark has the same ambition, but is slightly ahead as things stand,” reports Progress Playbook. “In 2023, the Scandinavian nation sourced 88 per cent of its electricity from renewable technologies, versus South Australia’s 71 per cent.”

Obscene A.I.

I’ll leave you with a recent piece by Elizabeth Kolbert because … well, because it’s Elizabeth Kolbert.

Writing about the Obscene Energy Demands of A.I. for The New Yorker, Kolbert wonders, “How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?”

And she introduces us to Alex de Vries, who blew the whistle on Bitcoin’s energy guzzling: “De Vries, who now works for the Netherlands’ central bank, estimated that if Google were to integrate generative A.I. into every search, its electricity use would rise to something like 29 billion kilowatt-hours per year. This is more than is consumed by many countries…”