Canada Hits Bottom Tier in Climate Change Performance Index:

The Trudeau government’s climate action landed
fifth from the bottom in the annual ranking of 59 countries plus the
European Union, not far ahead of Russia, Korea, Kazakhstan, and Saudi
Arabia. Top performers included Denmark, Sweden, Chile, Morocco, and
India. The lead non-profit behind the annual index, Germanwatch,
explained that the top three spots were left open because no country’s
performance was close enough to aligning with the emission reduction
goals in the Paris agreement. (So, slightly confusingly, Canada placed
58th out of 63 in an assessment of 60 jurisdictions including the EU.)

“Canada has a long way to go,” said Niklas Höhne, co-founder of the
NewClimate Institute, which worked with Germanwatch and Climate Action
Network-International to compile the index. “Canada has agreed to phase
out coal, which is good, but it’s the smallest problem.” It’s the
country’s oil and gas production that must be phased down, Höhne added.

Published
annually since 2005, the CCPI “aims to enhance transparency in
international climate politics and enables comparison of climate
protection efforts and progress made by individual countries,” say the
report’s authors. “Every year, the CCPI sets off important public and
political debates within the countries assessed,” which together account
for 92% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Climate Disinformation Campaign was Birthed in Canada, Journalist Finds:

The investigative reporter recently explained his rationale for the
book at a talk held by the University of British Columbia’s
Sustainability Hub: “I hate being lied to and bullsh**ed—I’m sure most
of us do—especially by people in power who know what they’re doing,” he
said.

Dembicki said he was inspired by an Los Angeles Times
investigation that uncovered similar tactics used by ExxonMobil to
control the narrative around climate change—but he also recognized that
most of the investigative work has been focused on the United States. As
an Albertan living and working in the U.S. he was uniquely positioned
to write from a Canadian perspective, so he began digging into publicly
available documents uncovered and catalogued by disinformation
experts—including buried research, private letters to heads of state,
and the personal emails of public figures.

He discovered that the
lie at the heart of disinformation about climate change—that fixing the
climate crisis would mean certain economic destruction—originated
largely in Canada. This revelation came from a 1993 report commissioned
by Imperial Oil, the Canadian arm of Exxon, which was “probably the most
shocking and infuriating thing” he came across while poring over
hundreds of pages of early research on the climate crisis produced by
Big Oil.

The report showed that Imperial knew the causes of
climate change and took its research one step further, developing
sophisticated economic analyses on climate solutions at a time when
global heating was barely a blip on the public radar. Imperial
determined that a national price on carbon emissions in Canada would
result in “approximate stabilization of emissions” without major impact
to the economy.

But such a climate solution would be bad for
Imperial’s own tar sands/oil sands profits, likely costing the company
upwards of C$900 million. So the company opted to bury the research and
create a list of talking points aimed at understating the severity of
the crisis and making climate solutions look economically reckless in
the media.