Most of us growing up along Canada’s East Coast never worried about hurricane season. Except for those working at sea, we viewed hurricanes as extreme events in remote tropical regions, seen only through blurred footage of flailing palm trees on the six o’clock news.

Today, a warming ocean spins hurricanes faster, makes them wetter and drives them towards Atlantic Canada and even further inland. Hurricanes, winter storms and rising sea levels will continue to worsen unless we slow climate change.

The lifeblood of coastal economies and societies has always been the connection between land and sea, and that’s become more evident with climate change. But this isn’t just a coastal story anymore.

The oceans moderate the world’s climate through the absorption of heat and carbon. And just how much carbon the ocean will continue to absorb for us remains an open question. Whatever we do, it must be grounded in our growing wisdom of the deep connections between life on land and in the sea.

As Canada commits to a net-zero future and plans its post-COVID economic recovery, innovations and investments could backfire if they reduce the ocean’s ability to absorb our excesses.

Links between land and sea

The ocean has always directly affected the climate on land. The well-being of communities across the globe is directly linked to the ocean’s capacity to continue its regulating role of heat and carbon cycles.

Drought in the Prairies is tied to water temperatures in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. When temperatures are most extreme, they signal the possible arrival of a “megadrought.”

In Australia, the occurrence of below-average rainfall, lasting several years, can be predicted by high Indian Ocean temperatures. This dries soils and lowers river flows, resulting in major community impacts such as water restrictions, declines in agricultural production and increased frequency of bushfires.

The success of Canada’s climate policies will therefore hinge on understanding how ocean processes are changing and society responds. The opportunity is at hand: Canada has committed to net-zero carbon in 2050, and to economic recovery once the COVID-19 pandemic has passed.

The federal government’s throne speech in September highlighted the oceans as critical to economic recovery post-COVID. The “blue economy,” mentioned in the throne speech, includes fisheries, aquaculture and offshore wind energy.

These two commitments are fundamentally linked: economic recovery and carbon neutrality both depend on the ocean’s ability to continue to regulate climate through heat and carbon absorption.

But the development of national policies on climate change, both in Canada and internationally, has generally ignored the ocean in climate calculations.

Scientists lobbied intensely before the Paris Climate Agreement just to make sure the ocean was mentioned.

Read more: Blue carbon: the climate change solution you’ve probably never heard of

The ability of the ocean to absorb heat and carbon changes over time and its role in moderating the effects of climate change needs to be better understood. Photo: TJ Watt

Changes to the ‘carbon sink’

We dare not further neglect the most important global storage depot on Earth: the ocean stores hundreds of times the heat and 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere, and takes up more carbon than all the rainforests combined.

Ocean carbon and heat absorption also provide a critical natural timescale against which we can measure our effectiveness in battling climate change. Fluctuations in the ocean “carbon sink” — the amount of carbon the ocean can remove from the atmosphere — will change the urgency with which we need to act.

For example, a waning carbon sink shrinks our window to curb land-based carbon emissions. But a growing sink might give us more time to enact difficult but necessary carbon policies that will have disruptive economic consequences.

There is no time for delay, and rewards come quickly; strong scientific evidence demonstrates that ocean processes controlling this absorption can either weaken or strengthen measurably in just a few decades.

Heat is absorbed physically from the atmosphere and mixed through the ocean on the scales of millennia. But carbon is absorbed through a complex network of chemical and biological processes, including coastal ecosystems such as kelp, mangroves and seagrasses that sustain local economies. Plankton (the tiny plants and animals that feed everything from mussels to whales) store carbon, so their behaviour and biology become a critical factor in the climate discussion.

We urgently need better observations of the ocean’s continued role as our heat and carbon sink.

Read more: How a salt marsh could be a secret weapon against sea level rise in B.C.’s Fraser delta

Shifting carbon sink

The North Atlantic Ocean is the most intense carbon sink in the world: 30 per cent of the global ocean’s carbon dioxide removal occurs right in Canada’s backyard. If we extend Canada’s net-zero calculation to our exclusive economic zone (waters within 200 nautical miles of our coast), our net carbon emissions could change significantly.

Current estimates suggest including the oceans would reduce net emissions and help us get to net zero faster, but what happens if that changes? We must understand fully the processes controlling the “sink” to make the right climate policy choices.

Read more about the role of natural landscapes in the fight against climate change in The Narwhal’s Carbon Cache series.

This recalculation could shift our thinking on how to rejuvenate the Canadian economy. Investment in controversial industries such as deep-sea mining, which can supply materials needed for renewable ocean-based energy technologies like those used in offshore wind, can at the same threaten the very ocean ecosystems and food systems on which we depend. Formulating effective policies in the face of these uncertainties is a major challenge. Our path forward must build on our growing understanding of the deep connections between societal and ocean well-being.

Canadian researchers, including those at the Ocean Frontier Institute where we are based, are poised to address the fundamental questions about the ongoing role of the ocean in absorbing carbon, and to help develop appropriate policies. These conversations cut across traditional academic boundaries. In the past, ocean research was separated into the natural and applied, the social and human sciences. Now, we all need to work together.

The role of the ocean has been neglected for too long and must be drawn to the centre of the carbon discussion as we plot our trajectory to net-zero carbon in 2050. Canada’s carbon policies can lead the way internationally if they are grounded in strong, and strongly integrated, natural and social sciences. It is time for the research community to step up in their support.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The Arctic Ocean could absorb 20 per cent more carbon than previously predicted before the end of the century, according to a recent study. 

It’s a jump that could result in even more acidification, jeopardizing marine wildlife.

About 7.5 billion tonnes of carbon was projected to be absorbed by the Arctic Ocean in previous estimates, said Jens Terhaar, the lead author of the research paper, released this month in the journal Nature. The new study — a joint undertaking between the University of Bern in Switzerland and École normale supérieure in Paris — found that this number is actually 1.5 billion tonnes higher (under what’s commonly known as the ‘business as usual’ or RCP8.5 high emissions scenario), reaching 9 billion tonnes of carbon absorbed by 2100.

While the Arctic Ocean represents 1 per cent of global seawater, it’s by far the most vulnerable to a changing climate, Terhaar said.

“That’s mainly just because it’s very cold and colder water holds more carbon.”

Sea butterflies rely on calcium carbonate minerals to form their shells. The availability of these minerals lessens as water becomes more acidic. Photo: supplied

Researchers used 11 existing climate models to predict future ocean acidification based on a correlation they found between acidity and sea surface density (how dense seawater is changes with temperature and salinity). 

The Arctic, in general, will bear the most severe effects of climate change, the study says. By the end of the century, surface temperatures in the region could increase by up to a range of 6.4 and 10.2 C and sea ice will continue to diminish.

A 2019 report from the Government of Canada found the country is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, while the Arctic is warming even faster. Canada’s own emission reporting indicates the country will not meet its climate commitment to reduce emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 and keep the global temperature increase as close to 1.5 C as possible.

“It would be great if politicians listened more,” Terhaar said. 

What ocean acidification means for Arctic marine wildlife

As the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, the planet warms and more of that carbon dioxide is dissolved in the surface of the ocean. The increase of dissolved carbon in the ocean decreases the ocean’s pH and also decreases the concentration of carbonate ion — a key component in the calcium carbonate used in the shells and skeletons of calcifying organisms. 

These conditions produce water that will corrode shells, which a slew of marine organisms depend on to shore up their only line of defence against predators.

Oysters and pea-sized, swimming sea snails known as sea butterflies, for instance, can’t build their shells without calcium carbonate minerals, leaving them more susceptible to hungry marine mammals such as walruses and whales.

These creatures can adapt to aggressive changes to a degree, Terhaar said, but if acidification gets more pronounced, they simply won’t be able to keep up. He pointed to U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association laboratory tests that show the shell of the sea butterfly can almost completely disappear over a 45-day period when submerged in sea water with pH and carbonate levels projected for the year 2100. 

Degradation of a sea butterfly shell over a 45 day period when exposed to increased acidity. Photo: Pacific Marine Carbon Laboratory / NOAA

Sea butterflies are as small as the pin of a head and are known to feed a wide variety of marine life from krill, to salmon to whales. 

The study focused on the mesopelagic zone, or seawater at depths between 200 and 1,000 metres, because that range is important habitat for shell-building organisms and animals that live, feed or migrate there.

“All of these organisms may have a harder time surviving because the acidification is too strong there,” Terhaar said, adding that the concentration of carbonate ions will decrease by 50 per cent in this mesopelagic zone over the 21st century due to acidification. (Across all depths in the Arctic Ocean, that number will decrease by an average of 32 per cent over the same timeframe.)

The Arctic Ocean is relatively shallow, making these sources of food easy pickings. If overfeeding occurs, there could be nothing left for marine mammals to eat, Terhaar said.

“Even small changes in the future might really change the situation of these animals and organisms, and even if their shells are less strong than before, they will be much more vulnerable to predators, and step-by-step they will be gone from the food chain,” he said. 

“I think it’s likely it’s going to be worse than before. It’s very hard to say what it’s doing to the food chain.”

An April 2020 State of the Arctic report produced by Fisheries and Oceans Canada acknowledges very little research has been done on the impacts of ocean acidification in the Arctic. 

But the report notes that “the volume of corrosive water in the Arctic is increasing with time” and also affects “non-calcifying organisms.”

The negative impacts of ocean acidification on the physiological, reproductive and immune systems on these other organisms “have been reported in other oceans,” the report states.

Recent research by Andrea Niemi, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist and lead author of the report, found that small pelagic sea snails collected in 2014 and 2017 had high levels of shell dissolution due to acidified waters (pictured below).

Scanning electron microscope image of Beaufort Sea sea snail shell showing evidence of damage due to Ocean Acidification. Photo: Nina Bednaršek / DFO

But the report concludes that “our knowledge of biological responses to ocean acidification in polar oceans is limited at present.”

Terhaar said more research on ocean acidification is also needed in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, but that’s a wholly different environment, requiring a lot of preliminary work to study the ocean system there and how it might store carbon. “Personally, I just turned my attention to the Southern Ocean, maybe others are very close to publishing interesting research.”

“The Southern Ocean is totally open (water),” he said. “It has one of the strongest currents in the world.”

Studying the Antarctic would be critical to further understanding how carbon absorption and acidification is affecting global waters. 

What needs to happen to alleviate the pressure of acidification on the oceans?

While this isn’t the first study to address ocean acidification in the Arctic, it serves as a reminder that people across the planet must work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, said Susanna Fuller, vice-president of operations and projects for Oceans North.

“Our oceans have been taking up an incredible amount of our carbon dioxide. They’ve just been absorbing, absorbing, absorbing,” she said. “The oceans have been mitigating this for us, but now they can’t absorb anymore without massively changing.”

She said while a lot of attention has been paid to increasing protection for terrestrial environments, the same doesn’t hold true for the oceans.

The state of the Arctic Ocean? Unpredictable

Marine ecosystems, including seagrass meadows, kelp forests and marshes, are essential for sequestering what is known as “blue carbon.” According to the Blue Carbon Initiative, “seagrasses cover less than 0.2 per cent of ocean floor, but store about 10 per cent of the carbon buried in the oceans each year.” Yet, “seagrasses are being lost at a rate of 1.5 per cent per year and have lost approximately 30 per cent of historical global coverage.”

“Let’s make sure we’re preserving kelp forests and eelgrass beds and marine mammal populations and fish populations,” Fuller said, adding that this study shows ocean acidification is going from bad to worse. “We think about the terrestrial environment because we can see it. I don’t think Canada has really started to think how that can be done in the marine environment.”

Fuller said if the COVID-19 pandemic can be stemmed globally, so, too, can climate change impacts, including ocean acidification.

“We can do it.”

Update June 29, 2020 11:45 a.m. PST: This article was updated to correct references to the decrease in the concentration of carbonate ions over the 21st century. The article previously stated this concentration would decrease by 12 per cent in the mesopelagic zone and 6 per cent across all depths in the Arctic Ocean. However the correct amount is a 50 per cent decrease in the mesopelagic zone and a 32 per cent decrease across all depths. Additional comment was added from Jens Terhaar about his interest in furthering his research in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica where, he believes, other scientists may be doing additional research. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Earlier this week, the federal government published a bombshell report on carbon pricing, predicting that a nationwide price of $50 per tonne by 2022 will cut emissions by 80 to 90 million tonnes of carbon pollution.

That’s equivalent to shutting down up to 23 coal-fired power plants or taking as many as 26 million cars off the road. In other words, a pretty big deal for the climate.

The stunning news spread quickly in online circles, shared by renown energy economists, clean energy experts and pollsters.

Journalist Justin Ling tweeted: “There’s been an incredibly disingenuous effort to suggest that carbon pricing won’t reduce CO2 emissions, or at least to contend that there’s no evidence to support the claim. So Ottawa went and produced the research.”

But nobody slowed down to check if the numbers were actually reflective of reality.

And they’re not.

The research that Ottawa went and produced isn’t really evidenced-based at all.

According to an analysis by Simon Fraser University energy economist Mark Jaccard, the federal carbon pricing policy will only reduce emissions by 10 to 15 million tonnes below 2005 levels — but it will take until 2030 to get there.

So the federal government’s claim of a 80 to 90 million tonnes reduction by 2022 is raising some eyebrows.

“When I see that, I’m like ‘oh come on guys, you’re trying to pull a fast one on us.’ ” Marc Lee, senior economist at the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives, told DeSmog Canada.

“People who ought to know better are just uncritically praising it.”

Carbon pricing being used as tool to justify new pipelines

This might just seem like a boring and wonkish debate over numbers. And in a way, it is.

But carbon pricing is currently playing a major role in the current climate policy landscape, viewed as the likes of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley as a key bargaining chip in the campaign to get Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Expansion built.

As a result, the amount of emissions that we think the policy can cut matters a great deal — especially if it’s used to justify a new pipeline and subsequent oilsands expansion.

Carbon pricing can be a very effective tool for increasing the cost of emitting. B.C. has been a shining example of a carbon tax that is both effective and popular with the public.

But disingenuous accounting has undermined faith in both the efficacy of putting a price on carbon emissions and the integrity of climate plans.

“The federal climate plan, overall, is weak,” said Laurie Adkin, political science professor at the University of Alberta, in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

“They keep trying to dress it up, and the latest assessment of anticipated gains from the federal carbon tax may be part of that effort.”

Analysis way overinflated current emissions

So what went so wrong with the federal government’s analysis?

Well, for beginners, it didn’t actually reference any specific numbers. The closest that they came to that was presenting a colourful graph with unclear metrics.

As Bora Plumptre of the Pembina Institute put it: “There are difficulties in actually assessing how they actually got the numbers that they did.”

By manually drawing a straight line from the supposed emissions reduction to the vertical axis (yes, that’s the only way of figuring it out) it appears that government assumes that carbon pricing will cut emissions to 680 megatonnes by 2022.

Given they’re predicting 80 to 90 megatonnes in savings, that means that it thinks emissions without carbon pricing would be between 760 and 770 megatonnes without carbon pricing.

But at last count, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions were 704 megatonnes. Even the country’s highest year for emissions — in 2007, when we emitted 745 megatonnes — was considerably less polluting than what the federal government used in the analysis.

So the actual starting point appears inflated.

“This is a trick the Conservatives used many times to try to pretend their plans were actually doing a lot more than they were actually doing,” Lee said.

A spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada told DeSmog Canada that they were contacting a “few different branches within the department” for more detailed methodology of the carbon pricing analysis but didn’t provide a response before deadline despite multiple extensions.

Government analysis ignored existing provincial carbon pricing

The analysis also assumed that the four provinces that currently have carbon pricing in place (B.C., Ontario, Quebec and Alberta) don’t already have them in place.

You read that correctly.

B.C. introduced its carbon tax in 2008. Quebec brought its cap and trade scheme into existence in 2013.

For inexplicable reasons, the federal government simply pretended that wasn’t the case and that four of the five highest polluting provinces in Canada didn’t already have carbon pricing. In his critical breakdown of the analysis, Jaccard wrote that it’s “grossly misleading to suggest that current provincial pricing can be attributable to federal policy.”

It also appears safe to assume that the modelling didn’t include industry exemptions and subsidies like gasoline used on farms, or natural gas burned by conventional oil and gas producers, or a large chunk of completely unpriced emissions at oilsands mines via Alberta’s convoluted output-based allocation system.

Experts suggest there’s also a chance that the federal government included significant emissions reductions accomplished by other policy measures.

“It’s very misleading, and also neglects that most of the impact is largely based on regulation, Lee said.

“We didn’t get rid of lead in gasoline because we had a lead tax that was phased in over 20 years. We just said ‘no, you can’t have lead in your gasoline after this date.’ ”

A steep carbon price needed for dramatic cuts

It’s not like carbon pricing couldn’t have these kind of reductions.

In fact, if you plug in a $50/tonne carbon price into the Pembina Institute’s nifty new climate policy simulator, it pops out 114 megatonnes in reductions by 2022.

But Plumptre caveated that by noting the simulator doesn’t include any exemptions or subsidies, and treats all carbon pricing as a tax (instead of including more complex cap and trade schemes, used in Ontario and Quebec).

Furthermore, Pembina actually uses a considerably higher baseline emissions assumption than the federal government due to recently updated global warming potential factors and higher rates of methane leakage, which puts Canada even farther from its Paris targets.

Jaccard and his team at Simon Fraser also reported in a 2016 analysis that Canada could meet its Paris target with a $200/tonne carbon price by 2030.

But they concluded rather starkly: “ It is highly unlikely that our political leaders will implement such a price, given the severe political consequences.”

So without such dramatic increases to the carbon tax and in the absence of transparent government accounting, experts are left scratching their heads at Ottawa’s latest rosy report.

“It’s all just been this black box and they’re basically saying ‘trust us,’” Lee said.

“I feel like the federal government doesn’t have much credibility on the climate file these days because they’re saying ‘we’re all in favour of climate action and we’re also in favour of pipelines,’ which we know are going to increase emissions and are specifically designed to allow the increase of production from the oilsands.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Alberta oil and gas companies are wasting so much natural gas each year that Albertans are losing out on up to $21 million a year in provincial natural gas royalties.

Oil and gas companies let an estimated $253 million worth of natural gas escape through undetected leaks and the practice of venting annually.

According to Progress Alberta, a progressive advocacy group, the lost royalties could pay for five new schools, 84 new playgrounds or 36 new nurses.

“This is a valuable resource that Albertans own and it’s money that should be going to things Albertans want and need that’s just being lost to the atmosphere forever,” said Duncan Kinney, executive director of Progress Alberta, in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

In addition to the lost royalties, the potent greenhouse house is leaked into the atmosphere without paying the province’s $30/tonne carbon levy, which results in a further loss of up to $1.4 billion in revenue, according to a new analysis by the Pembina Institute. When that carbon price increases to $50/tonne, as Premier Rachel Notley has indicated it will, those lost revenues rocket to $2.25 billion.

So why is this valuable resource disappearing into thin air?

ICYMI: Canada-U.S. Plan to Nearly Halve Methane Emissions Could Be Huge Deal for the Climate

Alberta underestimating methane leakage by 25 to 50 per cent

Reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector is considered to be one of the easiest ways to quickly reduce emissions. Methane has 34 times the “global warming potential” as carbon dioxide over a century.

And Alberta’s oil and sector emits a lot of it, with 31.4 megatonnes of methane entering the atmosphere in 2014 — although a recent study by Carleton University suggestedthe province is underestimating pollution by between 25 and 50 per cent, meaning annual emissions are more likely around the 45 megatonnes per year mark (which is about how much we thought all of Canada was emitting in 2016).

Fouty-five megatonnes a year is the greenhouse gas equivalent to 240,899 vehicles on the road.

Oil and gas companies have resisted changes that would require them to limit the leaking and venting of natural gas, arguing that it would result in job losses.

However, the federal government has committed to reducing methane emissions by 45 per cent below 2012 levels by 2025. Those reductions can be achieved through things like limiting the intentional “venting” of methane, using optical gas imaging cameras to detect unintentional leaks and installing flares to combust methane into carbon dioxide.

Federal draft regulations were released in May 2017, and proposed delaying full implementation of new rules by three years to 2023, instead of 2020. It was expected that Alberta would release its own version of regulations in November.

Industry  won a major concession from government in not having to pay any carbon tax on fuel used in the production of conventional oil and gas until 2023, including vented and flared gas.

The delay of action on reducing methane emissions ultimately impacts the entire country.

“What Alberta does will really make or break the ability to meet that [methane] target at the end of the day,” said Andrew Read, senior analyst with the Pembina Institute and report author.

Alberta oil and gas companies are wasting so much natural gas each year that Albertans are losing out on up to $21 million a year in provincial natural gas royalties. https://t.co/g0ExC0coTF

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) January 26, 2018

Improved leak detection and data collection critical

The federal government anticipates companies will need to spend $3.2 billion in between 2018 and 2035 to comply with the new regulations.

However, the government calculates the economic value of avoided climate change impacts will be more than $13 billion, with another $1.5 billion in conserved gas that can be sold by companies. That combines to a net benefit of $11.7 billion. In addition, a report by the Blue Green Alliance suggested methane regulations will create 1,500 jobs per year.

But for methane regulations to work, there  needs to be robust monitoring of leaked and vented methane.

ICYMI: Five Handy Facts About Alberta’s New Carbon Tax

“Having specific requirements for monitoring the leaks and trying to address them is also very important, so that we can actually tell if this is working,” said Brenda Heelan Powell, staff counsel at Alberta’s Environmental Law Centre, in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

Alberta could be ‘reducing class sizes, or hiring more nurses’ with lost revenue

It’s already taken a long time to get to this point.

The regulator-led Methane Reduction Oversight Committee was formed in September 2016 by the province and included representatives from industry and environmental organizations. But as reported by the Financial Post, talks broke down in the summer of 2017. Discussions with remaining stakeholders were set to conclude by last December.

We’re now less than two years away from when the federal regulations are proposed to start taking effect — and time is running out quickly to get industry ready.

These delays matter.

Environmental Defence estimates that pushing back the full implementation of regulations from 2020 to 2023 will result in an additional 55 megatonnes of methane being released.

That will have serious climate impacts. But it also deprives provincial coffers of potential royalty revenue, which is a pretty big deal for a province facing down a $10 billion deficit.

“We could be reducing class sizes, or hiring more nurses, or building more schools or playgrounds,” Kinney said. “These are things that people want and are demanding.  We’re in this self-imposed austerity in Alberta, and it’s somewhat unnecessary if we were just to follow through on these methane regulations.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

It’s been a full six months since Alberta introduced its economy-wide carbon levy and the sky has not fallen.

In fact, unlike what many politicians and pundits were predicting ahead of the implementation of the $20/tonne carbon levy, the cost of gasoline at the pumps hasn’t spiked — and has in fact been consistently lower than when politicians like Jason Kenney and Derek Fildebrandt made photo ops by filling jerry cans ahead of January 1, the date the carbon tax took effect.

The question now is less about whether the carbon price is going to be implemented, and more about what the revenue — $3.85 billion over three years — is actually going to pay for.

Here are 10 ways carbon levy revenues are being used to create a better quality of life and lower emissions in Alberta.

1) Calgary’s New Green Line: $1.53 Billion

On July 6, the province committed  $1.53 billion to Calgary’s massive Green Line LRT. The investment will be released over eight years, entirely from revenue generated by the carbon levy, and lead to completion of the first stage of a brand-new north-south transit line by 2026.

2) Municipal Solar Program — $5 Million

Alberta plans to generate 30 per cent of its electricity by 2030 via renewables, which has understandably generated a lot of attention on utility-scale power plants, such as wind and solar farms.

But a considerable amount of electricity is used every day by municipal buildings throughout the province, including offices, community centres, fire halls and police stations. Many of these buildings serve as ideal settings for installing solar panels due to their large, flat roofs.

So Alberta is helping incentivize solar investments via a rebate system for every watt of installed capacity, for up to 20 per cent of expenses or $300,000 per application. A similar program has also been established for solar panels on farms.

3) On-Farm Energy Management — $10 Million

Speaking of agriculture, the Alberta government has also expanded the On-Farm Energy Management program to help subsidize energy efficiency investments that reduce emissions and increase competitiveness (to the tune of covering 70 per cent of expenses).

The list of coverable expenses includes things like: variable speed drives for pumps, fans and compressors, energy-efficient lighting, high-efficiency tankless water heaters, greenhouse energy curtains, greenhouse carbon dioxide recovery programs and high-volume low-speed circulation fans.

Originally, the program only covered 35 per cent of eligible costs to the maximum of $50,000. But thanks to the additional funding, the government now covers up to 70 per cent to the maximum for $750,000. In addition, the program now covers 100 per cent of the first three sub-meters, used to track energy consumption.

The program has been so popular that it’s no longer accepting applications, and has requested even more funding from the government to meet the demand.

4) Household Rebates — $1.5 Billion

A popular critique of carbon pricing is that it unfairly punishes lower income people, costing poor people a higher percentage of their income and leaving even fewer options to, say, buy a newer and more fuel-efficient car or furnace.

Thankfully, Alberta has integrated well-designed rebates into the design of the carbon levy, channelling $410 million in 2017-18 to household rebates.

Two-thirds of Albertan households have already received partial or full rebates, depending on their income levels. Consumers who pollute less than average actually make money from the rebates.

Over three years, the household rebates will amount to $1.5 billion.

5) Indigenous Climate Leadership Programs — $35 Million

Another huge series of investments specifically involves First Nations and Metis communities in Alberta, with a total of seven programs funded with revenue from the carbon levy.

Those programs include the Alberta Indigenous Solar Program, Alberta Indigenous Energy Efficiency Retrofit Program, Alberta Indigenous Green Employment Program and Alberta Indigenous Community Energy Audits Program.

These initiatives aim to bring many of the best opportunities in renewables and energy efficiency to First Nations reserves and Metis settlements across the province.

For instance, the solar program provides grants for up to $200,000 per project for buildings that are owned by organizations and communities, including schools, medical centres and offices. Another $14 million was specifically designated for energy efficiency projects.

6) Technology Research for Methane Reduction — $40 Million

Okay, we know this one sounds kind of boring, but stay with us because it’s funding some pretty innovative things.

Here’s the deal: methane is a huge component of natural gas. It also just so happens to be super potent for the atmosphere (with 84 times the global warming potential as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period). And Alberta generates a lot of the stuff from oil and gas activities, because it gets vented in all sorts of ways once you start digging around under the earth’s surface.  There’s also lots of methane from agriculture (cow farts, basically) and diseased trees.

Now for some good news: Large emitters that fail to cut emissions enough to meet specific targets pay into a fund for research projects to help cut methane emissions from oil and gas, agriculture, power generation and forestry.

Emissions Reduction Alberta will award $40 million to applications via a competitive bidding process, with a max of $5 million per applicant.

On July 7, Emissions Reduction Alberta announced it had picked a dozen projects, with approved funding of up to $29.5 million.

Here’s an example: ZKO Oilfield Industries got $2.8 million in funding to demonstrate an in-pipe turbine generator that uses flowing natural gas to generate electricity, which is then used to power chemical injection pumps, eliminating a large source of methane venting in natural gas production. Cool, huh?

Another example: Viresco Solutions got $1.46 million to demonstrate a feed ingredient for cattle that significantly reduces cattle-based methane emissions (aka make them less gassy).

“The ingredient can be introduced to regular feeding regimes to reduce the methane produced by each animal, enabling substantial reductions in emissions from Alberta’s beef and dairy industries,” says the project description.

Then there’s Titanium’s project ($5 million) to design an oilsands tailings treatment system that eliminates certain tailings streams while recovering bitumen, solvent and high-value minerals. By preventing solvent and bitumen release, the vast majority of methane emissions from mined oilsands operations can be reduced.

7) Bioenergy Producer Program ($60 Million)

Of all renewable energy options on the table for country-wide deployment, bioenergy is probably the one most easily forgotten. But it already plays a notable role in Canada: at the end of 2014, it sported 2,043 megawatts of generating capacity, more than solar power with 1,843 megawatts of installed capacity.

The thing to know about bioenergy is it’s no one thing. It can include burning wood byproducts, capturing methane from landfills and converting sugars in agricultural products into ethanol. There’s a lot of research and development being done to help make it even more viable.

That’s why the Alberta government introduced the $60-million Bioenergy Producer Program. By providing 31 bioenergy companies with short-term and production-based grants — meaning that money is awarded based on the energy output — the provincial government hopes to give an additional boost to the burgeoning field.

In total, the grants are expected to reduce provincial emissions by 1.5 megatonnes and create 500 jobs.

8) Non-Profit Energy Efficiency Transition Program ($1 Million)

This one’s extremely straight-forward. Many nonprofits in Alberta are operating with razor-thin margins already, but could help cut greenhouse gases and electricity and heating costs by implementing energy efficiency measures.

The first step is a simple audit, helping organizations figure out where the biggest savings are, after which they can collaborate with the newly formed Energy Efficiency Alberta office to patch the figurative holes. The Alberta government directed $1 million to this task. The program quickly reached “full subscription,” meaning that future applications are closed for now.

9) School Rooftop Solar Program ($9 Million)

Schools often have sizable roofs. They also consume a significant amount of electricity every day with enough lighting, heat and air conditioning to create comfortable learning conditions for hundreds of students.

Combine those two facts and you’ve got yourself a fantastic opportunity for installing solar panels.

In October 2016, the Alberta government committed $9 million to the task of installing solar panels on 36 schools around the province. At the time, CBC reported that the idea was actually generated by students themselves, who submitted it to the government via a public feedback period for the climate change plan.

10) Accelerated Coal Phase-Out ($1.1 Billion)

Next to the household rebates, this is the second priciest item on the list of things the Alberta government has funded with its carbon levy revenue, costing $97 million per year until 2030 (totalling $1.1 billion).

Here’s the deal: 12 of the 18 coal-fired power plants in Alberta would have been shuttered by 2030 under former prime minister Stephen Harper’s federal regulations. That left six coal plants operating for many years afterwards, with one potentially spewing out massive amounts of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, fine particulate matter and mercury until 2061.

Coal is one of the worst-polluting forms of energy on the planet, so the Alberta government introduced new rules requiring all coal-fired power plants to shut down by 2030. Predictably, the owners of the half-dozen facilities weren’t pleased, contending they deserved compensation.

A 2015 Pembina Institute report concluded this action was by no means legally necessary, nor would it result in an unfair economic burden on the companies.

But like it or not, the Alberta government decided to hand over $1.1 billion to the three companies (TransAlta, Capital Power and ATCO) to “provide investor confidence.” All that revenue will come from the levy on large industrial emitters, as opposed to the levy administered on regular Albertans.

The good news is 10 megatonnes of annual emissions will be permanently cut, Alberta’s air will be cleaner and the province is one step closer to a building an electricity system for the 21st century.

So What’s Next?

Those are the highlights for now, but Energy Efficiency Alberta will review its programs and develop new programming as needed, meaning there may be new programs next year.

We will also likely see a significant chunk of transit funding directed to Edmonton as well: after all, while it’s certainly not legislated, it’s an unwritten rule of sorts that Calgary can’t get funding without Edmonton also getting a similar dollar amount.

There’s plenty more to be done in Alberta on the climate front, particularly around oilsands emissions — but it’s difficult to dispute the incredible progress that the Alberta NDP has made in a few short years on the climate file. The architecture has been laid for many more years of expanded success.

That is, of course, assuming the newly formed conservative mega-party doesn’t win the 2019 provincial election.

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For decades, the urgent need for climate action was stymied by what came to be known as “climate denialism” (or its more mild cousin, “climate skepticism”).

In an effort to create public confusion and stall political progress, the fossil fuel industry poured tens of millions of dollars into the pockets of foundations, think tanks, lobby groups, politicians and academics who relentlessly questioned the overwhelming scientific evidence that human-caused climate change is real and requires urgent action.

Thankfully, the climate deniers have now mostly been exposed and repudiated. Relatively few politicians now express misgivings about the reality or science of climate change (the current Republican nominee for U.S. president being a notable exception, along with some other conservative bright lights like Sarah Palin and Canadian MP Cheryl Gallant).

That’s the good news.

The bad news is we face a new form of climate denialism — more nuanced and insidious, but just as dangerous.

In the new form of denialism, the fossil fuel industry and our political leaders assure us that they understand and accept the scientific warnings about climate change — but they are in denial about what this scientific reality means for policy and/or continue to block progress in less visible ways.

In the lead-up to the Paris climate talks, for example, the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) issued calls not only for a global climate agreement, but also for a global carbon pricing system. The OGCI includes most of the world’s largest oil companies (Shell, BP and Total among them), so this was a big deal. But as research by the UK-based InfluenceMap uncovered, “behind the scenes, however, [these companies] are systematically obstructing the very laws that would enable a meaningful [carbon] price.”

Here at home, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) — the most influential oil lobby group in the country — proclaims on its website that “climate change is an important global issue, requiring action across industries and around the globe.”

Sounds nice and green. Yet CAPP continues to push hard for expanded oilsands production and new pipelines on behalf of its members, which include the country’s largest oil companies.

Claiming that we can take effective action on climate change and ramp-up fossil fuel production at the same time is what CCPA senior economist Marc Lee refers to as “all the above” policy-making.

It’s what former Prime Minister Harper was doing when he claimed Canada could be a climate leader while at the same time increasing fossil fuel production, so long as industry reduced emissions per unit of oil, gas or coal produced (i.e. reducing so-called “emissions intensity”).

It’s what Prime Minister Trudeau and Premier Notley are doing when they say we will have carbon pricing and various regulations, while at the same time supporting expanded oil sands production and new bitumen pipelines.

It’s what Premier Clark is doing when she proclaims B.C. will be a climate “leader” while at the same time pursing a ramp-up in natural gas fracking and the development of an LNG export industry.

And it’s what Canada is doing when we sign the Paris agreement on climate, while failing to adopt the stringent policies that will help keep global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

The “all of the above” approach is wishful thinking at best. A recent study by earth scientist David Hughes published by the CCPA and Parkland Institute found that if Alberta and BC go ahead with planned expansion of the oilsands and development of an LNG industry, it will blow our Paris climate commitments right out of the water.

On a related front, the new climate denialism operates hand-in-glove with Indigenous Rights and Title Denialism.

Like its climate counterpart, this form of denialism sees politicians claim to accept recent court rulings and the historic reality of Aboriginal Rights and Title. Indeed, our new federal government has promised to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and ensure that all its policies are consistent with UNDRIP. But again, our governments are unwilling to accept what rights and title mean in practical policy terms.

Indigenous rights denialism finds expression in particular when rights and title are at odds with the power and interests of the corporate fossil fuel sector.

We see both Indigenous rights denialism and climate denialism at play in various fights over pipelines.

In the case of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain project, for example, numerous First Nations along the route have firmly rejected the proposed pipeline expansion. There is clear evidence that the pipeline is also at odds with Canada’s commitment to lower its greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, both federal and provincial governments remain firmly in favour.

Similarly, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers released a discussion paper earlier this year endorsing UNDRIP “as a framework for reconciliation.” The discussion paper explicitly recognizes the right to self-determination by Indigenous Peoples and the related right to free, prior and informed consent. This sounds very promising. Yet it is fundamentally in contradiction with CAPP’s support for new pipeline projects like Enbridge’s Northern Gateway, which is the subject of a legal challenge by eight First Nations.

What part of either Aboriginal Rights and Title or climate change science is confusing here? Why is this clear NO so contentious?

Talking honestly about what climate change and Indigenous rights mean for the policy choices before us is admittedly challenging. The public is nervous, and many are deeply anxious about their economic security and jobs. So the urge to take an “all of the above” approach is understandable.

But real leadership requires leading a different conversation, one where we speak frankly about the scope of transformational change that lies before us in the next thirty years.

When a friend is struggling with an addiction they cannot bring themselves to confront, true friends do not show sympathy by turning a blind eye to the destructive behaviour. Rather, a real friend makes an intervention, and tells the truth. We can acknowledge the steps our political leaders have taken towards becoming climate leaders — but we need to keep pushing them to meaningful action.

It may be difficult to imagine a world that isn’t dependent on fossil fuels, or a future where Indigenous Peoples exercise their full historic rights — and there’s no doubt it will take hard work to get there. But just as children today have never known smoking to be permitted in restaurants or driving without mandatory seatbelt laws (both changes that were fiercely resisted by industry but are now fairly universally accepted as the new normal), those born in the coming decades likely won’t know what a gas station is, except for what they see in old movies.

The reality of climate change means that one way or another, the next generation is going to live through an industrial revolution in high speed. That’s simply a fact. Our political leaders need to move past these current incarnations of denialism and focus instead on making sure the transition can occur in a just manner.

This is a guest article by Seth Klein and Shannon Daub , originally published on PolicyNote.ca as part of the Corporate Mapping Project, a research and public engagement initiative investigating the power of the fossil fuel industry. The project is jointly led by the University of Victoria, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Parkland Institute, and is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Last week, Mark Jaccard — a renowned climate policy analyst and professor at Simon Fraser University — published a short paper exploring federal approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The report was quickly shared by other climate policy experts, including the University of Alberta’s Andrew Leach, Clean Energy Canada’s Dan Woynillowicz and York University’s Tzeporah Berman.

Unfortunately, many news outlets, including the Toronto Star and Metro, ran articles suggesting that Jaccard was petitioning against a carbon tax, with emissions reductions entirely accomplished via regulations.

That’s clearly not the case if one bothers to read the paper (a reality Jaccard spent much of the following days pointing out on Twitter).

Given the recent announcement by federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna that the government is examining carbon pricing as a tool to meet 2030 targets, actually reading Jaccard’s report is very much worth the time.

The premise is simple.

A price on carbon (either via a tax or cap-and-trade system) is often politically unpopular even at low levels (one need look no further than Alberta), let alone in the neighbourhood of $200/tonne, which would actually be required to prompt an energy transition. (Hence the name of his paper: Is Win-Win Possible: Can Canada’s Government Achieve its Paris Commitment … And Get Re-Elected?

So why not pay attention to the vast possibilities of “flexible regulations,” combining policy options like industry-specific performance standards, mandatory market shares and partial-zero-emission vehicle obligations with a $40/tonne carbon price?

On Thursday, DeSmog Canada spoke with Jaccard about his report, the significance of political viability in building meaningful climate policy and how California is leading by example. The following transcript has been lightly condensed.

What compelled you to write the report?

This took six months. Really, this is a long-standing reaction to the election of a new government almost a year ago, a government that said “okay, we want to take action.”

We noticed … that there’s a real barrage of messaging going to the government that we must price emissions.

So I had a lot of people saying to me: “This isn’t correct. It’s actually factually incorrect to say we must price emissions. It’s a choice.” And so people said to me: “Shouldn’t somebody point that out?” And I said: “Well, I can point it out but it takes six months.”

And here we are. People say to me: “Ah, we see, you tried to time it just after Catherine McKenna said we’re going to price emissions.” And it’s like: “You don’t understand.”

It’s released now simply because I’m going away to Oxford tomorrow and I told my students two months ago: “Come on, we’ve got to try to get this out before I go away, it would be nice to get out before there is a provincial-federal meeting and so.”

So basically, the motive — and I’m going to be really careful because I’ve been misquoted here in the last two days quite a bit — was simply a response to the factually incorrect message that we must price emissions. That doesn’t mean I’m against it or for it. I’m against untruths.

And as an academic, how could we help with that? Produce a report in which emissions pricing doesn’t play the dominant role. We kept it in there because we were trying to do something that was practical and kind of in line with what’s been happening so far. You do have a federal government that says “we want a minimum emissions price across the country” so one of our scenarios has them relying almost completely on an emissions price.

And the other says: “Let’s assume that you do this minimum that you talked about but you find it politically difficult to go beyond that minimum. Does this mean that you can’t achieve Paris?”

And that’s the motive for the study.

.@MarkJaccard on Political Viability, ‘Untruths’ And Why You Should Actually Read His Latest Report https://t.co/8fCl37O6OT #bcpoli #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 26, 2016

Do you think it’s fair to say that political viability has been historically underestimated by researchers and economists?

Yes. That’s my take. I did a study for the Mulroney government in 1988/1989 as a new professor saying: “Oh yeah, you want to reduce emissions. That’s neat. And Margaret Thatcher says that and Ronald Reagan. Here’s emissions pricing: have a really small price on emissions, let it rise over time.”

And the government even paid for me to go to Paris to a meeting at the International Energy Agency with economists from other countries. And we all came back to our countries and said, “yeah, price emissions.”

Thirty years have gone by since then.

So there have been little cases where people have priced emissions. But I think at some point, somebody needs to point out those have been really low prices compared to what you need to cause an energy transition. And that’s why our report is laden with terms about energy transition.

You can increase the price of gasoline by 10 cents a litre; the carbon tax in B.C. doesn’t even do that. But we know that price of gasoline has gone up and down 50 cents. You really think adding 10 cents is going to get people to buy electric and biofuel cars? Almost all modelling shows that it won’t do that.

Where I get misquoted is people will say: “Oh, Jaccard thinks the policy should be ‘a’ or ‘b.’ ” I’m actually not saying what the policy should be. I’m saying if you are severely constrained politically, is all hope lost? And then I just said: “If you look around, how is California reducing emissions? How did the Swedes reduce emissions?”

And that’s the purpose of the report: to inform decision-making.

A popular critique of flexible regulations is that on a national scale it could be more difficult to administer or track as opposed to the potential transparency of a carbon tax. Do you buy that, or do you think it’s more about the actual design of the regulations?

If it’s the transportation sector, of course that’s a false statement because we’re already regulating the transportation sector! Even Stephen Harper ramped up emissions regulations — because he copied Obama — and in fact it’s better to do that nationally rather than provincially.

The auto industry will say “don’t do it, don’t do it.” But if push came to shove and you were actually doing it in one province, they would say: “Oh no, no, it should be federal. It should be the same across the country. Don’t try to make us hit different targets in Ontario and Saskatchewan.

If it’s electricity, then I would partly agree with that statement. It’s harder for the federal government to go after electricity. We’re very careful on that end of the report. Again, Stephen Harper put in a coal plant reg. Now, it was a soft, weak reg but it did require coal plants to close down or do carbon capture and storage. So what we’re talking about is just ramping that up.

In fact, you don’t even have to ramp it up in Ontario because they already did everything. You don’t have to ramp it up in any of the hydro-dominant provinces. You don’t have to ramp it up in Alberta, because they already said they’re going to not use carbon pricing but just regulation to shut down the coal plants.

It’s quite funny. People will talk about: “Oh look, Alberta has a carbon tax.” But they knew the carbon tax wasn’t big enough to close down the coal plants. It would have to be about $80 or $90/tonne. So they’re saying “close the coal plants.”

So if the federal government tightened the Harper national coal plant electricity reg, it’s really only Saskatchewan that would raise bloody hell. Even Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have already sort of put in policies like Alberta. So then maybe we say in there “give a little bit of money to Saskatchewan.”

But when it comes to industry across the country: again, federal government is better to do it. And industry would tell you that at the end of the day. Stephen Harper had this whole process going on. Of course, he wasn’t really pushing it because he didn’t really want to do anything. He wanted to look like he was doing something.

But the regs they were designing: I had a look at them nationally for a performance standard for emissions. It’s really not much different from the effect of a carbon tax. You can do that federally as well.

You mentioned California. Are there other jurisdictions that you or other climate policy academics look to as inspirations or role models, harnessing regulations for this purpose?

I’m shocked that an entity like the Ecofiscal Commission, and I write about it in the report, say “we have to have fiscal solutions.”

And I’m like “why did they never write about the renewable portfolio standard, which several European countries and something like 30 U.S. states have?”

It has a lot of the benefits of emissions pricing in terms of flexibility. And oh my goodness: half of the U.S. states are using this to get greenhouse gas emissions down in the electricity sector. Why is no one talking about that? Why isn’t the Ecofiscal Commission talking about that?

Likewise, California’s vehicle regs, its low-carbon fuel standard: there’s several of these. If you looked at California today, maybe people will say “oh, they’ve got an emissions price and cap-and-trade that now Ontario and Quebec have joined.”

But actually, the top modellers in the U.S. tell me that about 90 per cent of the reductions in the last eight or nine years, and the forecast for the next eight or nine years, in California are occurring because of the flexible regs, not because of that very low floor price in their cap-and-trade, which works out to about $15 U.S., or half the B.C. carbon tax.

Why do you think it is that the Ecofiscal Commission but also various newspapers do seem to focus on an either/or scenario, either carbon tax or regulations?

Yeah, and to add to your comment: either a carbon tax or command and control regulations that are really economically inefficient.

Well, I have one little paragraph in the report — because I try to anticipate, because I know them so well, all the arguments that will be made — and point out that it looks like there are two types of people who really want to ignore other evidence and stay on this emissions pricing.

One kind is conservatives who really just don’t want big government and they’re afraid that any kind of regs have transaction costs and administrative costs and so on. And some of that’s true. But it’s not as bad as Ontario taking the emissions price revenue that it’s got and deciding to create $2.3 billion of programs over a three-year period. It’s hilarious. So don’t tell me that emissions pricing is automatically more economically efficient.

The argument is that we should do this with minimal government. And they think emissions pricing is easier because you can put a carbon tax on and use that to cut corporate taxes. In other words, do what Gordon Campbell did. When Campbell was bringing in that emissions price — the carbon tax in B.C. — I was the one who said: “Good. Give the money back. You don’t need to create big government.” He did that.

That’s kind of a model for the C.D. Howe Institute, the Ecofiscal Commission and the new head of the Conservative Party in Ontario, Patrick Brown. People like him, who are saying “we conservatives are not just Stephen Harper types, sort of denying climate change or doing nothing about it, but we don’t want to create big government in doing it.”

That’s one group of people who don’t seem to even want to look at flex regs.

The other ones are, as I said, economists and the Ecofiscal Commission kind of seems to have all of that together who just don’t want to think too much about political acceptability and say: “Our job is to just tell you the lowest cost option, and you do what you have to to get political buy-in. But this is the way you should do it.”

Any final thoughts?

I beg people to read the first nine pages.

Photo of Marc Jaccard giving a  speech at Enbridge Northern Gateway protest in Vancouver, by Chris Yakimov via Flickr.

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On Sunday, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna announced that the federal government will stick with the previous government’s target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The news, delivered via an interview with CTV’s Evan Solomon, attracted a significant amount of criticism.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May described it as “nothing short of a disaster for the climate” and Press Progress suggested the news undermined election commitments and later statements by the Liberals.

Fair enough: McKenna had previously called the targets the “floor,” noting that “certainly we want to try to do better.” And in election materials, the Liberals stated: “We will work together to establish national emissions-reduction targets.”

Not exactly a broken promise, but some had hoped for more.

But here’s the thing: yes, the Liberals could have set a more ambitious target. And yes, to help keep global temperatures below two degrees of warming, they will need to in the future.

But what matters is not setting a target — it’s meeting a target.

The two previous federal governments were nowhere near to meeting the targets they set, so Canada is working to catch up right now.

While setting a new, more ambitious target might have drawn positive headlines, it may well have set the country up for repeated failures.

Ultimately, policy experts are more concerned with the details that will be contained in the government’s upcoming climate plan.

“At the end of the day, as much as the goals and targets matter, what matters most is reducing emissions,” says Amin Asadollahi, the lead for climate change mitigation for North America at the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

“Measures matter more. Setting up a target and missing it misses the point.”

Clare Demerse, federal policy advisor for Clean Energy Canada, agrees.

“We have, in this country, a long history of having targets and a very short history of having actual plans to meet them. We have been in a situation where Canada has really established a credibility problem in terms of hitting targets. We need to fix that.”

Paris Agreement Requires Canada To Review Targets Every Five Years

The important and now reaffirmed climate target is a reduction of emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030; a recent paper from the Climate Action Network indicated that current measures will result in a 91 megatonne overshoot, so a lot is still going to have to change.

There’s also a goal in place to cut emissions in 2020 by 17 per cent, largely considered impossible given a decade of inaction by the federal Conservatives. And then there are the most distant goals of a 65 per cent reduction by 2050 and a G7 goal of full decarbonization by 2100.

The Paris Agreement, which hasn’t yet been ratified by Canada, will require each country to review targets every five years starting in 2018 and justify plans to the international community.

“Every five years, we’ll come back to the table and the international community will test this resolve as to whether it has the political will to put the world on a trajectory to avoid the worst impacts of climate change,” Asadollahi says.

And political will — inextricably linked to public acceptability — is what this is really about. Can the Liberals put in place a plan to meet the target and get re-elected?

Why @JustinTrudeau’s Commitment to Harper’s Old Emissions Target Might Not Be Such Bad News After All https://t.co/SBtzmCn2W0 #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 21, 2016

2030 Target Tough, But Achievable

Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada, says that meeting the 2030 target will be challenging but achievable, especially given Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s popularity and available political capital.

Plenty of options are on the table. A predictable price on carbon via a tax or cap-and-trade framework is considered the most important. McKenna has indicated the federal government will set a national price if provinces don’t take measures themselves, despite resistance from Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall.

A new report, Is Win Win Possible? Can Canada Meet Its Paris Commitment … And get Re-Elected?, published on Tuesday by renowned climate policy analyst Mark Jaccard recommends a combination of a $40/tonne of carbon dioxide tax by 2030, accompanied by an array of flexible and industry-specific regulations.

Other measures could include an accelerated phase-out of coal, better building codes, fuel efficiency standards, energy efficiency measures, incentivizing a faster deployment of renewables and smart grids, support for electric vehicles and charging stations and better public transit.

Demerse notes that governments and industry often overestimate how difficult environment policy is going to be to implement.

“Once you get started and it becomes a conversation where you take the lobbyists out and unleash the engineers, you see all kinds of innovation,” she says. “That’s certainly been the story with clean energy, where we’ve seen the cost of clean energy fall very significantly.”

Let's Not Forget About Decarbonization

Stewart warns that such measures could be effective enough to meet 2030 targets, but would be undermined if the Liberals approve new pipelines and massively expanded oilsands production, which would lock in new greenhouse gas emissions for decades.*

As a result, he says it’s important to start working now towards decarbonization — meaning no further growth of the oilsands, as also recommended by Jaccard — which in itself would allow for the meeting of 2030 targets given oil and gas now contributes the most emissions of any sector in the country.

Stewart says that such decisions will require some “tough political fights” but that the federal government has all the tools it needs to make the big changes required.

“If you’re not forcing anyone to change their behaviour, you’re not actually changing any outcomes,” he says. “Thirty per cent by 2030 isn’t good enough. We have to go farther. And the Paris Agreement builds in a way to ratchet up that level of ambition.”

The next United Nations climate conference will take place in Marrakech, Morocco, from November 7 to 18. Given the successes at the last iteration in Paris, it’s likely that it will be a quieter affair. But Canada will need to have the ball rolling on a serious climate plan by that point, especially given its ambitions to land a UN Security Council seat.

“We haven’t seen the work they’ve been putting together,” Demerse says. “We know it’s going to be very political and not simple. We’re still in a wait and see mode. This is a process that can deliver but we don’t yet know what’s going to come out at the end of this.”

*Update Notice: Sept. 22, 2016, 10 a.m.: This article previously incorrectly stated that the Liberals could approve new pipelines and meet the 2030 targets.

Photo: Environment Minister Catherine McKenna and her chief of staff Marlo Raynolds, via the Pembina Institute.

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There’s a new kind of building going up in an old East Vancouver neighbourhood. An eight-storey, 85-unit rental housing development is nothing new for a city that is constantly being torn down and built higher, but an apartment here comes with a perk.

“You could technically heat that apartment with a hairdryer,” says Ed Kolic, the developer behind The Heights, the new Passive House-certified development. When completed, it will be the biggest of its kind in Canada; globally, second only to a new building in New York.

Low-energy houses like this could make a serious dent in Canada’s carbon emissions, cutting up to 2.7 per cent from the total, while simultaneously becoming an engine for economic growth.

“In all of the climate change literature globally, the quickest and fastest way to take action on climate change is to look at the energy use in buildings,” says Charley Beresford, director of the Columbia Institute.

The federal budget, released Tuesday, provides nearly $750 million for investments related to energy efficiency.

“It’s quite a refresher from a Harper budget,” says Karen Tam Wu, director of the Pembina Institute’s buildings and urban solutions program. “What we want to see is, how will the government take the dollars that have been allocated to energy efficiency in buildings and actually incentivize uptake of green buildings at an accelerated rate?”

The largest single pot of money to come out of the budget for these improvements is a $573 million commitment to improve the energy and water efficiency of social housing over the next two years.

“We’re going to have to scale this to major energy upgrades across the country, so by focusing on a social housing initiative, it’s a great way to pilot this idea at a smaller scale,” Tam Wu told DeSmog Canada.

The government has earmarked $128.8 million for Natural Resources Canada to ramp up its energy efficiency standards for products, buildings and vehicles.

A further $40 million will go towards improving the climate resiliency of buildings — meaning buildings like Kolic’s, with their insulation-focused design, may come into fashion in places that are facing intensified winter storms, such as Eastern Canada.

Provincial Governments Lag Behind in Regulations

But provincial governments, with a few exceptions, haven’t yet provided the mechanism that would allow municipalities to push their residents toward more efficient homes.

The Columbia Institute released a report last week calling for provinces to make it easier for municipalities to provide up-front cash for homeowners to retrofit their homes.

If home energy retrofits sound like an un-sexy way to fight climate change, wait until you hear the name of what could be the best shot at achieving that: Local Improvement Charge (LIC) enabling. Despite the name, though, it’s a powerful tool.

Basically what LIC means is that municipalities can loan homeowners the money to improve the insulation in their homes, then gradually make the money back through increased property taxes. It’s an existing system that local governments use to make other improvements, like fixing a sidewalk, then recouping the cost from the people who benefit.

In Halifax, where an LIC program has been piloted, 388 homeowners saved an average of about $14,000 over the lifespan of their new systems (about 25 years). A similar program in Nelson, B.C., (albeit with repayments going to the electrical bill rather than property taxes) resulted in 35 per cent less energy use for the retrofitted homes; nearly 40 per cent of them took advantage of loans to do it. And Manitoba Hydro claims to be on track to retrofit a whopping 86,992 homes by the end of the year under its 15 year-old Power Smart Residential Loan program.

Retrofit Investments Deliver Bang For Buck on Jobs

In return, the municipalities get to help meet their climate targets — but there’s evidence for another benefit to supporting green building projects. Depending on which study you read, for every million dollars invested in building retrofits, somewhere from between 13 and 17 jobs are created. That’s compared to about five jobs created for every million dollars invested in fossil fuel projects.

A report commissioned by Natural Resources Canada, Energy Efficiency: Engine of Economic Growth in Canada, found that savings on heating costs meant that for every dollar invested in energy efficiency, another $3 to $5 would be added to the economy. Overall, the report says, this could mean hundreds of thousands of new jobs in multiple sectors as the savings make their way through the supply chain.

There’s another way all levels of government can take advantage of efficiency gains, Tam Wu says.

“What all levels of government should be doing is leading by example,” she says. “And that’s what we want the provincial government to do, by setting a bold target for what level of emissions reductions we can achieve through our buildings.”

Municipalities Lead the Way on Efficiency

Regulations have been moving faster at the municipal level. Vancouver, for example, requires that to rezone a lot for a new development, the proponent has to build the new building to demanding LEED Gold or Passive House standards. Even remote Bella Bella, where most of the electricity comes from diesel generators, a new modular building Britco built in the Lower Mainland and shipped to the Central Coast community takes the energy equivalent of six light bulbs to heat.

“[Britco] had never done that before,” says Tam Wu. “That kind of energy savings just totally makes sense in remote communities.”

The private sector overall seems ready to respond to increased demand, and that demand has shown to be easily created by incentives from all levels of government.

In Brussels, which developer Kolic cites as inspiration for his Vancouver development, new EU regulations forced the city to get serious about efficiency. With new funding and the spin-off businesses that created, Brussels quickly went from hopelessly inefficient and outdated to having 5,000 new buildings meet the Passive House standard.

“It went from having the worst standard of energy efficient buildings to becoming a world success story within a period of ten years,” Tam Wu says.

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This is a guest piece by James Rowe, an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a member of the Corporate Mapping Project, a research alliance investigating the power of the fossil fuel industry in Western Canada. This piece originally appeared on openDemocracy.

The world’s largest producers of oil, Saudi Arabia and Russia, agreed to a production freeze in February 2016. This deal holds production at the near-record highs that were reached in January in an effort to stop the plunge in world oil prices. But even if other key producers like Iran and Iraq agree, it won’t address the supply glut that has been driving prices into the ground.   Saudi Arabia could be doing more to orchestrate a production cut, and the Saudis would certainly benefit from a price bounce—the Kingdom ran a budget deficit last year of nearly US$98 billion. So why is the House of Saud content to keep the world swimming in cheap oil?   The motivation for Saudi Arabia’s passive response to the price crunch is the source of much speculation, but the consensus is that the Saudis are working to protect market share—primarily by driving high cost ‘unconventional’ production like US shale oil out of the market. There is a larger force, however, that has not received enough attention in efforts to divine Saudi intentions: the ‘carbon bubble.’

What is the Carbon Bubble?

The carbon bubble refers to the overvaluation of fossil fuel companies and petrostate treasuries given the need to rapidly reduce C02 emissions if catastrophic climate change is to be averted. “Catastrophic” is the technical term for predicted climate change if global warming cannot be limited to at least 2 degrees above its present level.   The International Energy Agency estimates that 60 per cent of known fossil fuels need to stay in the ground to avoid breaching that limit (even more if the 1.5-degree target codified in Paris is used). The earth’s carbon budget (or what can safely be burned) is much smaller than the fossil fuel reserves that are available for extraction and combustion.   According to the Carbon Tracker Initiative we have five times more reserves than can be burned.    However, these unburnable reserves are already factored into company share prices and budget projections for petrostates like Saudi Arabia. When policy making catches up with ecological necessity and scientific advice, these reserves will become financially worthless and the carbon bubble will burst.   Recent climate policy deals in Alberta and Paris are only the beginning of a tightening policy environment for fossil fuel producers.   Given the massive wealth and influence of fossil fuel companies it would be naive to count on political and economic institutions to legislate for planetary liveability without massive popular pressure. Thankfully that pressure is growing daily. Powerful examples include proliferating divestment campaigns, Indigenous-led resistance to pipeline construction in Canada, and 350.org’s campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline.   The existential threat posed by climate change is giving these activist efforts an urgency that it would be risky to bet against. “We are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself” was a slogan popularized on the streets of Paris during recent United Nations climate negotiations.   In this context of accelerating climate change and mounting popular protest, the hands of legislators are likely to be forced. When legislation aligned with a 1.5-degree world comes into effect, the carbon bubble will drop back down to earth.

Peak Demand and the Carbon Bubble

Traditionally, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has coordinated production levels to stabilize oil prices. But in this case Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s most powerful player, has resisted calls for cuts and has convinced its Persian Gulf allies to do the same (the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar).   The evidence suggests that the carbon bubble is central to Saudi Arabia’s decision making.   U.S. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks reveal a Saudi regime that is worried about the impact of climate legislation on national income. Eighty per cent of the Kingdom’s budget is derived from the petroleum sector, so the prospect of not being able to sell the country’s vast oil reserves due to global emission limits poses a massive economic and political threat to the ruling monarchy.

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“Saudi officials are very concerned that a climate change treaty would significantly reduce their income,” wrote the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in a memo in 2010. As global concern over climate change intensifies, the Saudis have begun factoring in the reality of “peak demand.”   In 2013, before oil prices started tumbling, Ali al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s petroleum minister, told reporters “demand will peak way ahead of supply.” In the lead up to climate negotiations in Paris, he acknowledged that “in Saudi Arabia, we recognize that eventually, one of these days, we are not going to need fossil fuels. I don’t know when, in 2040, 2050, or thereafter.”   This admission is aligned with the scientific consensus on climate change. What makes it remarkable is that the comment comes from the oil minister of the world’s preeminent petrostate. The Saudis have snapped out of denial and are actively working to diversify their economy and plan for a post-carbon world. According to Naimi, the Kingdom plans to become a “global power in solar and wind energy.”   Saudi Arabia does not, however, deserve congratulations. Like corporate producers of oil such as Exxon, the Saudis have played a dangerous and obstructionist role in climate negotiations. Saudi Arabia has been a regular winner of the “fossil of the day” award from civil society groups at UN negotiations. The leaked cables from the U.S. State Department reveal frustration over the Saudis’ “schizophrenic” approach to climate change: aggressively pursuing market share in renewable energy while simultaneously blocking international negotiations.   It is in Saudi self-interest to extend the age of oil. Given the ecological necessity and political plausibility of a massive energy transition, however, the Saudis appear to be positioning themselves for the next best option: gobbling up as much of the earth’s remaining carbon budget for themselves before the bubble bursts. Isn’t it better to sell at a lower price than to receive nothing at all from vast unburnable reserves?

Cutting a Big Slice of Carbon Pie by Keeping Oil Prices Low

The production cost for a barrel of Saudi oil is approximately US$10. ‘Unconventional’ sources like tar sand oil cost approximately US$40 to produce. With oil currently trading at around US$35 per barrel, Saudi Arabia is much better positioned to manage the downturn than unconventional producers. With large financial reserves the Kingdom can sustain short-term losses in revenue. Moreover, Saudi efforts to pursue large budget cuts show a commitment to a low price environment (though popular unrest over austerity budgets may change this calculus).    By keeping prices relatively low and outcompeting higher-cost producers, the Saudis not only protect short-term market share. They also ensure that by the time demand shocks arrive, the Kingdom will have sold what it could while its reserves were still burnable. And if Minister Ali al-Naimi’s surprising vision comes to pass, by midcentury the Saudis will diversify into competitive producers of solar and wind power.   The current downturn in oil prices does not appear to be slowing growth in renewable energy. Increasing cost-competitiveness and the different markets served by renewables have been key buffering factors during the petroleum price crash. In the long run, according to Naimi, solar is “more economic than fossil fuels.”   Government legislation that forces producers to keep fossil fuels in the ground is supposed be the needle that bursts the carbon bubble. The looming threat of that legislation, however, may have been enough to start the bubble’s deflation already. All commentary on Saudi motivations during the current price plunge is speculative, but Saudi Arabia’s concern over peaking demand due to climate change, along with its heavy investments in renewables, points to a strong link between a low oil price and a deflating carbon bubble.    

What a Deflating Carbon Bubble Means for Citizens, Governments and Investors 

If “peak demand” is a central part of the Saudi calculus, then a big rebound in oil price is unlikely anytime soon. The implications of this prospect are enormous. For example, with persistently low oil prices, regions betting on Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) and shale oil as economic drivers will lose out.   Similarly, new pipelines for transporting Alberta tar sands oil to market (like Energy East) may become unnecessary due to slower growth. The economic argument against unconventional oil and gas development just got supercharged.   On the financial front, low oil prices mean that falling share prices among fossil fuel companies are unlikely to rally over the long term. When the carbon bubble collapses completely these investments will fall still further. By betting on a post-carbon future and initiating the carbon bubble’s deflation, the world’s primary petrostate has fortified the economic case for fossil fuel divestment. Institutional investors like the Rockefellers Brothers Fund that have recently divested their portfolios of fossil fuel companies have already benefitted from the move.   Working to avoid catastrophic climate change can feel hopeless in the face of corporate-funded denial and obstruction. But the collective efforts of activists, climate scientists, and educators appear to have convinced the world’s largest producer of oil that fossil fuels have no future. The post-carbon world is fast emerging from the shell of the old.  Those still in denial about this transformation are in danger of becoming fossilized themselves.

Image: Bryan Burke

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This article by policy analyst Matt Horne originally appeared on the Pembina Institute website.

Last week, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna and Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr announced Canada’s intention to apply a climate test to major energy infrastructure proposals. This was the fifth of five new principles they announced to improve environmental assessments in the country.

The change is good news because it will fill a long-standing gap in the country’s environmental assessment process. The standard approach has been to look at individual oil pipeline or LNG terminal proposals without worrying about the oilsands mines or gas fields they’re connected to. The new approach will include the carbon pollution from the project being proposed and the carbon pollution from the development associated with it.

What the federal government hasn’t said yet is how they plan to evaluate the new information and integrate it into their eventual decisions. Here are four questions I’d like to see included in their climate test, using Petronas’s Pacific NorthWest LNG project to illustrate how they might work. In many cases, the federal government — as opposed to the proponent — is in the best position to address these questions.

The project is proposed for Lelu Island at the mouth of the Skeena River in northwest B.C. and is a good example of how important it is to look at the associated upstream development. The standard approach to environmental assessment would consider the 4 million tonnes of carbon pollution from the LNG terminal — just shy of the emissions from 900,000 cars on the road. Not a small amount by any means, but if the scope is broadened to include the carbon pollution from the connected pipelines, gas processing facilities and gas wells, the number almost triples to 11 million tonnes.

Question 1: Are there opportunities to cut carbon pollution?

One of the reasons for doing environmental assessments is to ensure that proponents are planning to use the best available processes and technologies. In other words, can we build the same project with fewer impacts on the environment? A climate test should help us do a better job of that for large energy projects by looking at the full range of opportunities to reduce carbon pollution. And the same approach should apply for the newly broadened scope of assessment.

In the case of the Petronas proposal, the results aren’t great. Based on our analysis, the 11 million tonnes of carbon pollution the project would be responsible for could be cut in half with better technologies and practices. These include opportunities like using renewable energy instead of gas and reducing methane leaks from gas wells and pipelines.

Some of the opportunities are directly in Petronas’s control. For example, Petronas’s proposal would be powered entirely by gas, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t be using renewable energy. For example, the LNG Canada and Woodfibre proposals — both of which are also in B.C. — intend to use about 20 per cent and 100 per cent renewable energy, respectively.

By expanding the scope of assessment, the revised process should also include opportunities outside of Petronas’s direct control. This is where it seems more appropriate for the federal government to be considering these opportunities as opposed to asking the proponent to do so.

A specific example is the methane that is released from valves and controls along the gas supply chain. These are a significant source of carbon pollution and can be reduced or eliminated with improved technology and better leak detection programs. A recent study by ICF International found that methane emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector could be reduced by 45 per cent for less than $3 per tonne of carbon pollution. The federal government has the ability to consider analyses like these to determine if there are further opportunities to cut carbon pollution.

Question 2: Are the policies in place to ensure carbon pollution is minimized?

While there is no shortage of opportunities to reduce carbon pollution, there is also no shortage of opportunities not being pursued because of a lack of effective climate policy. Without carbon prices that increase over time and effective regulations, the business case to reduce carbon pollution isn’t strong enough. Where policies are lacking, the federal government can work with the provinces to ensure that any gaps are filled with a mix of provincial and federal policies.

In the case of Petronas, the province’s Climate Leadership Team provided a clear statement that those policies aren’t yet in place. The team concluded that the province was not on track to meet its targets and that B.C.’s carbon pollution was going to rise without new climate policies. They provided the province a package of recommendations — including a number for LNG and natural gas — that would help the province maintain a strong economy and get back on track to cutting carbon pollution. Those recommendations have yet to be adopted by the government, so the carbon pollution from any development that does proceed will be much higher than necessary.

Question 3: Does the project fit within a plan to meet climate commitments?

Canada has pledged to cut carbon pollution so that the country is responsible for at most 524 million tonnes by 2030. And that number will need to continue dropping post-2030. In assessing the carbon pollution from any proposed project, the government should be able to show how that upward pressure is accounted for in their plan to meet their targets in the medium and long-term.

The 11 million tonnes of carbon pollution from Petronas’s LNG project and the associated upstream development would account for over 2 per cent of Canada’s 2030 target. If the government decided to approve the project, they’d need to show how that 11 million tonnes fits into a plan that meets their 2030 target and positions them for further reductions post-2030.

Question 4: Is the project viable as world moves away from fossil fuels?

If the world’s governments collectively achieve the ambitions they agreed to at the Paris climate talks in December, it will mean a rapid shift away from fossil fuels. If that happens, there will be abundant global supply of oil, gas and coal, without anyone wanting to buy it. In that scenario, will Canadian suppliers of fossil fuels be able to compete for an ever-shrinking market or will they be priced out? While we can’t answer these questions definitively today, the cabinet should consider them and the economic risks they could pose to the country.

I co-authored a paper looking at the role of natural gas in a world with strong climate policies. In this scenario, gas demand peaks in 2030 and drops below current levels by mid-century and continues to decline after that. Those numbers are based on scenarios in which the world avoids two degrees of warming. If we get close to avoiding 1.5 degrees of warming, which was the agreement in Paris, the peak in global gas demand will need to be sooner and lower.

Petronas says they want to be operating by 2020, which is 10 years (or less) before global gas demand would peak and then begin a 50-year decline. How robust is their business case to that drop in demand and the accompanying drop in price? It’s possible they could be one of the suppliers that manage to stay afloat. It’s also possible they could sink. The government should be aware of those risks in making its decision. So there you have it — four questions that should be on Canada’s new climate test when it deliberates on the carbon pollution associated with major energy projects. They aren’t easy questions to answer, but tests aren’t supposed to be easy. They’re supposed to make you think.

Author's Notes:

• In this article, we use a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 34 for methane emissions in calculating the carbon pollution from the Petronas LNG project and associated upstream development. The backgrounder on the project that we published in July 2014 has slightly lower numbers because we used a GWP of 25 for methane.
• The carbon pollution estimates for the Petronas project and the associated upstream development are based on phases 1 and 2 (19.2 million tonnes of LNG per year) of the proposal going ahead.

Image: Matt Klotz

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