Whether Mark Carney’s sweetheart deal with Alberta will lead to the defeat of his minority government is, admittedly, an interesting question.
But arguably even more interesting (not to mention important) is this question: Will Carney’s deal move us — and the rest of the world — a little closer to climate Armageddon?
Sadly, the answer is, unequivocably, yes.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), signed last month by Prime Minister Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, amounts to Ottawa’s full surrender to the pro-oil agenda of Alberta and its fossil fuel industry, which responded by giving Carney multiple standing ovations at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.
The MOU goes well beyond opening the door for a new pipeline from Alberta’s oilsands to the B.C. coast.
“Whether or not a pipeline happens, Smith and the oil industry have already won,” B.C. climate activist Seth Klein said in an enlightening interview on “The Breach.”
As Klein noted, the MOU completes Carney’s retreat from former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s climate agenda. Although Trudeau was far from the climate warrior he posed as, he did introduce initiatives aimed at helping Canada achieve the international goal of “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2050.
For months, Carney has been abandoning those initiatives. But the MOU goes much further.
To start, it cancels Trudeau’s plan for a cap on oil and gas emissions — a cap which was bitterly opposed by oil interests, who realized it would require them to cut production.
Instead, Carney has agreed to rely on Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) to reduce emissions.
CCUS is the solution long promoted by the oil industry, because it’s no solution at all. It’s a notorious fig-leaf allowing the industry to go on producing as much oil as it wants, without actually reducing emissions.
The David Suzuki Foundation notes that, over the past five decades, CCUS technology has succeeded in eliminating only a minuscule share — about 0.001 per cent — of global carbon emissions.
In fact, it’s mostly been used to actually increase oil production in exhausted wells, under a process known as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). When the Trudeau government created a CCUS tax credit, it specified it couldn’t be used for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR).
But Carney’s MOU reverses that, explicitly permitting EOR to qualify for the extremely generous tax break.
David Ho, an oceanographer and carbon removal expert at the University of Hawaii, argued in the journal “Nature” that carbon removal technology (like CCUS) should not be regarded as the solution to climate change “as if it somehow replaces radical, immediate emissions cuts.”
I sent Carney’s MOU to Professor Ho, who responded that the MOU is not good news for anyone “who values a habitable planet.”
“CCUS projects have a long history of failure, and even when they succeed, much of the captured CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery ,” wrote Ho. “The MOU explicitly allows EOR, and anything that leads to more fossil fuels coming out of the ground is bad news.”
Carney has effectively abandoned the goal of “net zero 2050” — which means reducing a country’s emissions so that the overall effect on the climate is zero.
The MOU redefines Canada’s goal as “reducing the emissions intensity of Canadian heavy oil production to best in class in terms of average for heavy oil by 2050.”
So, rather than aspiring to eliminate emissions by 2050, Canada has now adopted the far more limited goal of merely reducing our emissions to “best in class in terms of average for heavy oil.” Whatever that means. Well done, Canada!
One suspects Carney is doing all this in the hopes of satisfying U.S. President Donald Trump. But surely, by now, we know there’s no way to satisfy the fickle, untrustworthy U.S. president.
Carney’s deal with Alberta is certainly not nation-building. It might better be described as climate-destroying and capitulating to Alberta’s oil industry — which, incidentally, is overwhelmingly foreign-owned.
This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.
