Clare Demerse

Fact-Checking Canada's Environmental Record

2013-03-13T12:57:51-04:00

With consideration of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal heading into the home stretch, a parade of Canadian politicians have been making the trek to the U.S. to try to convince the Obama Administration of the pipeline's merits.

The good news is that the recent visitors -- from Premiers Redford and Wall to federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver -- now acknowledge that Canada's environmental record is crucial to the upcoming U.S. decision.

The bad news is that there are some gaping holes in that record.

Minister Oliver has called for pipeline decisions to be "based on science and facts, not conjecture, hyperbole or ideology." In that spirit, surely it's fair to put some of the assertions in Minister Oliver's recent Chicago speech under the microscope.

"Current projections show that Canada is halfway to meeting" its 2020 greenhouse gas emissions target.

If you read that statement to mean that we're "halfway there" right now, I have bad news for you. Environment Canada estimates that Canada will only be "halfway" to meeting its 2020 target in 2020 -- meaning that we're on track to miss the 2020 target by 113 million tonnes, or double the current emissions of British Columbia.

To date, the federal government has not published any plan or proposal to close that gap, and the trend line that Minister Oliver alludes to with his "halfway" assessment already factors in the effects of all existing federal and provincial climate policies.

"Total greenhouse gas emissions from oilsands production represent 0.1 per cent, or one one-thousandth, of global emissions."

No argument with the numbers themselves, but Joe Oliver isn't in charge of climate change for the world; he's the minister of Canada's natural resources. And in the Canadian context, the oilsands play a starring role as the single fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas pollution in this country.

Indeed, the projected growth from the oilsands sector alone from 2005 to 2020 is large enough to cancel out all other emission reductions taking place elsewhere in the Canadian economy over the same period. More than anything else, the oilsands explain why Canada is projected to miss its 2020 target by such a large margin.

"Once the federal regulations are in place, Canada will be one of a very few oil producers in the world with national binding regulations on its oil and gas sector."

As Minister Oliver's statement hints, the reality is that that there are currently no federal constraints of any kind on greenhouse gas pollution from Canada's oil and gas sector. The government has proposed a variety of approaches to controlling Canada's emissions since first taking power seven years ago, and made a specific commitment to a sectoral regulation for oil and gas in 2011, but there's still nothing on the books. In other words, they've made their new year's resolution (again), but they haven't yet headed out the door to the gym.

If and when Canada does get a regulation into place, it will join numerous oil and gas-producing jurisdictions that have already taken steps to tackle their emissions. We recently published a report listing some of those policies, which include carbon taxes in Norway and Australia and cap-and-trade systems in the European Union and California (not to mention carbon pricing in B.C. and Alberta).

Several of those policies are not specific to the oil and gas sector; instead, many of these jurisdictions have adopted economy-wide carbon pricing that includes oil and gas emissions. That kind of broad-based pollution pricing is economically efficient, flexible, and frankly the preferred policy option for many oil and gas companies. Unfortunately, it's an approach that the Harper government continues to attack on a daily basis as a "job-killing" "tax on everything" -- but that kind of rhetoric was conspicuously absent from Minister Oliver's U.S. outreach.

"Canada's oilsands are subject to some of the most stringent environmental regulations and monitoring in the world."

That's a bold claim from a government that spent much of the past year revising many of Canada's most important environmental laws to make it easier for resource development to go ahead. The federal government has partnered with the Government of Alberta on a new approach to environmental monitoring that shows promise; unfortunately, budget wrangling and delay means that the new system is still not up and running.

We'll stop there for now, although the federal government has provided plenty more material that merits a closer look -- including its very rosy assessment of Canada's coal regulations or the assertion that the Keystone XL project would be a huge job creator when the State Department's recently-released supplemental environmental impact statement found that operating the multi-billion dollar Keystone XL pipeline would create a total of 35 permanent jobs.

A year ago, the federal government's emphasis was on faster project approvals, more oilsands development, and pipelines in all directions. It's good news that scrutiny from the sector's major customer has reminded our political leaders that environmental protection needs to be just as much of a priority.

The government's rhetoric has already changed in response, but even the best speechwriters can't make a compelling case when there's little good material to work with.

Environment Minister Peter Kent said last week that the release of the long-promised oil and gas sector regulations is drawing near. It's a crucial decision for Canada's approach to climate change. And if Ottawa rises to the challenge by adopting tough rules, it's also a high-profile opportunity for the government to write itself a better script.

Why You Should Care About the Oil Sands

2011-08-10T09:45:29-04:00

Anyone who works on climate change policy in Canada, like I do, ends up talking about the oil sands on a daily basis. The massive development reshaping parts of Alberta's landscape attracts criticism like no other project in Canada, and those concerns don't stop at our borders.

But as its public profile has grown, some have argued that the oil sands sector is being unfairly singled out . After all, the oilsands now account for less than seven per cent of Canada's total greenhouse gas pollution -- far less than the emissions from coal, transportation or heating our homes.

So we're sometimes asked to justify why we put so much emphasis on one relatively small piece of Canada's emissions puzzle.

New analysis released by Environment Canada last month makes it crystal clear why the oil sands matter so much.

In late July, the department published a document called Canada's Emissions Trends, which provides an up-to-date projection of greenhouse gas pollution under a "business as usual" scenario -- in other words, our emissions future unless governments take stronger action than they have to date. And the picture it paints of where oil sands emissions are heading is not pretty.

Under "business as usual," emissions from the oil sands will triple from 2005 to 2020. That represents 12 per cent of Canada's projected national emissions in 2020, more than the total for any province except Alberta and Ontario.

In other parts of Canada's economy, emissions are expected to grow much more slowly or even to drop. The oil sands are headed in exactly the opposite direction. The sector is projected to be responsible for 388 per cent of the increase in Canada's industrial emissions, according to a Pembina report based on an Environment Canada study.

If that growth does take place, it's going to make hitting Canada's 2020 emissions target very, very difficult. But the oil sands' influence doesn't end with their direct impact on Canada's emissions.

Over the years I've worked on climate policy, I've become more and more concerned about the disproportionate weight that this small but mighty slice of Canada's emissions seems to be exerting on our government's overall approach to global warming.

As a thought experiment, let's assume that Prime Minister Harper's government wants to see the oil sands continue their rapid growth indefinitely. What would that mean for his climate policy?

For starters, he would need an approach that allows for increases in emissions from the oil sands, at a time when climate science tells us that overall greenhouse gas emissions from countries like Canada need to be dropping quickly.

Pity the poor federal environment minister who has to convince Québec's manufacturing sector or B.C.'s forestry sector that they need to make deeper cuts to allow the oil sands to pollute more. Even the most determined environment minister might retreat from that prospect.

So the likely political outcome becomes that that the oil sands' "need" for policies soft enough to allow for increased emissions sets the bar -- a very low one -- for the rest of Canada's industrial sectors.

And the oil sands' long shadow isn't just visible in Canada's domestic climate policy; instead, it has crept across our borders to shape foreign policy too.

The emissions produced by separating oil from sand make the resulting product 'dirtier,' in greenhouse gas pollution terms, than conventional oil produced in North America. So if growth in the oil sands is your goal, policies that require other countries to choose cleaner fuels are not environmental victories but threats to the industry's export market.

I wish this were only a hypothetical risk, but it's not. Our organization and others have documented attempts by Canadian officials to undermine cleaner fuels policies in the U.S. and the EU .

Imagine if we had put our eggs into a different basket. Instead of pouring billions and billons of dollars into tar, picture a Canada that had invested in engineering and manufacturing solar panels.

Rather than fearing the green choices other countries made, we would celebrate them. The more jurisdictions decided to tackle climate change, the more potential customers our solar panel makers would have to sell to, and the more jobs we would create.

Recent choices by the federal government suggest that it sees oil, not clean technology, as Canada's economic ace in the hole. That would explain Ottawa's decisions to support carbon capture and storage technology -- which aims at allowing fossil fuel production to reduce its emissions -- while cutting back on federal investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

But by increasing our economy's reliance on the oilsands, we're essentially making a bet that the rest of the world won't take meaningful action on climate change.

If that bet proves to be correct, we can keep on selling oil to our American neighbours (and perhaps to other markets) as long as we want, and the only risks we face are the potentially devastating consequences of global warming itself -- that, and continuing a Canadian tradition of never reaching our emission targets.

But if we bet on the wrong side, and other countries do make the shift to clean energy, the pitfalls are potentially massive. All the capital that companies have sunk into the oil sands would suddenly look like a dead end. Rather than selling China our oil, we could face a future where we're buying their state-of-the-art electric cars.

In Canada, rising concern about climate change over the last two decades has coincided with a massive expansion of development in the oil sands. It's not hard to make the case that the development of the oil sands has stunted and disfigured Canada's approach to climate change.

If our governments wanted to change that assessment, the bottom line is really simple: we can't keep letting one sector's overheated growth steal the show.

Climate policy has to be designed to meet Canada's greenhouse gas targets in the smartest and most efficient way possible -- and that means all of us, oil sands included, have to do our share.

Clare Demerse is the director of the climate change program at the Pembina Institute, a national sustainable energy think tank based in Alberta. She lives in Ottawa.