Donald Trump signing the Presidential memoranda to advance the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, January 24, 2017 – Wikipedia
Trudeau acknowledged the elephant in the room: that Biden’s campaign team promised back in May that it would do precisely what transition documents reviewed by The Canadian Press suggest will happen Wednesday.
“We understand, of course, that it is a commitment that the candidate Joe Biden made to cancel this pipeline,” Trudeau said.
“At the same time, we continue to demonstrate the leadership that Canada has shown on fighting climate change and on ensuring energy security as a priority for North America.”
Advocates for the project, however, are clinging to hope that the ensuing outcry – the Alberta government is already threatening legal action – will prompt the Biden team to give them a chance to change the president-elect’s mind.
Canada has known ever since May “that we would have to work very hard to make our case for this project,” Hillman said in an interview Tuesday when asked about reports of the project’s imminent demise.
Canada and many jurisdictions around the world have committed to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 or before. But is the setting of climate targets, decades into the future, not just another spin on climate action—an abdication of the climate leadership that the scope of the challenge requires so desperately?
What is Net-Zero 2050?
Net-zero emissions are defined by the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act—tabled on November 19, 2020—as “the anthropogenic emissions of GHGs (i.e. GHGs caused by human activity) into the atmosphere balanced by the anthropogenic removal of GHGs from the atmosphere over a specified period of time.”
Or more simply put, net-zero happens when:
there are no carbon emissions, or
when ongoing emissions are offset by actions that remove carbon from the atmosphere, such as planting trees, or
when carbon recapture technology removes emissions from the atmosphere.
A Long Way to Net-Zero
The rush to net-zero—the carbon neutrality pledge—is gaining strength as countries ramp up their climate ambition. At the recent virtual Climate Ambition Summit, new major commitments from the United Kingdom and the European Union combined with China’s update of its NDC targets have increased momentum going into 2021. This will also be the year the U.S. Biden-Harris administration rejoins the Paris Agreement in time to play a determining role leading up to the Glasgow COP26 climate summit in November.
While we’re seeing some progress, with an increasing number of countries committing to net-zero, these are just “distant hypothetical targets,” says Greta Thunberg. “When it comes to the immediate action we need, we’re still in a state of complete denial…the gap between what we need to do and what is actually being done is widening by the minute.”
My name is Greta Thunberg and I am inviting you to be a part of the solution.
Popular thinking is that Net-Zero 2050 will solve the climate crisis. Not so according to Climate Home News (CHN). A recent article in CHN exposes 10 myths about carbon neutrality targets and the carbon offsets and unproven technologies that underpin the net-zero concept. “Net-Zero” has a lot of political and emotional appeal but “in practice, however, net zero targets several decades into the future shift our focus away from the immediate and unprecedented emissions reductions needed,” according to the article.
The article (authored by 41 scientists) dispels ten myths about net zero targets and carbon offsetting. You can read the full article here.
“Major and unprecedented reductions in emissions are needed now. Otherwise, our current high emissions will consume the small remaining global carbon budget within just a few years. Net zero targets typically assume that it will be possible to deliver vast amounts of “negative emissions”, meaning removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through storage in vegetation, soils and rocks. However, deployment of the technologies needed for negative emissions at the required scale remains unproven, and should not replace real emissions reductions today.”
Two of the article’s key recommendations follow:
“We must stop extracting and using fossil fuels, the primary cause of the climate crisis. As well as real-zero targets, we need an international treaty for the termination of fossil fuel production.”
“We must shift focus from mid-century net-zero targets to immediate, real emissions reductions in our own high-income countries. Reductions of at least 10% per year are needed”.
Auction of Promises
Forbes contributor Roger Pielke uses the term “auction of promises” to describe how politicians launch “targets and timetables for emissions reductions [that] are easy to state but difficult to comprehend.”
His analysis indicates “that the world, and the United States, are not moving towards net-zero carbon dioxide emissions and in fact, every day, we are moving in the opposite direction.”
Using mtoe (million tons of oil equivalent) as a unit of comparison, Pielke claims that the world requires a new nuclear power plant every day to get to net-zero 2050, i.e. to replace fossil energy. That’s one nuclear plant every day for the next 10,587 days to January 1, 2050.
In his recently released new book, Commanding Hope – The Power We Have To Renew A World In Peril, author Thomas Homer-Dixon writes that “Sometime in the not-so-distant future, about 2030 or 2040…humanity will hit a much more unforgiving wall [than COVID]—a series of undeniably disastrous climate events occurs.”
“A switch then flips in the psyches of great numbers of people everywhere…The majority of us…suddenly realize three things at once: the situation is already becoming catastrophic, everything we care about is at grave risk, and most importantly, it’s too late to do anything significant to forestall catastrophe on a world scale.” — Thomas Homer-Dixon.
And that surely is the likely outcome of following the illusory and blue sky Net-Zero 2050 mindset.
Canada’s foreign policy efforts are fragmented, a jumble of trade and aid deals that fail to adequately consider that our security is deeply tied to the health of the rest of the world. The current pandemic has shone a spotlight on this weakness.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has erased any doubts that health is a global phenomenon, and it’s become abundantly clear that Canada urgently needs a global health strategy. While the majority of the health community in Canada learned some lessons from SARS almost two decades ago, COVID-19 has also helped all Canadians realize that we can no longer afford to separate our own health from the world’s. We are only as strong as our weakest health link.
Too often Canada’s foreign policy engagement in health has focused on advancing global security — minimizing security threats from pandemics or climate change that spill across borders — or through development policy focused on helping to eliminate major infectious diseases such as HIV, antimicrobial resistance, malaria and tuberculosis.
Maternal, newborn and child health have also been a flagship for development priorities for Canada. But we have neglected, at our peril, to address the systemic inequities causing these global health threats.
Gender equality
The current federal government has taken some meaningful steps towards promoting gender equality in Canada and globally. While important, these efforts don’t sufficiently address other mounting global inequities and health needs.
Canada’s Official Development Assistance investments, as currently designed, are not properly set up to support these and other health challenges. Although health has been previously used by Canada and other countries as a political instrument to promote peace, security and prosperity, Canada can no longer afford to separate its own security agenda from its global fight against health, racial and other social inequities.
These problems are going to be exacerbated in the coming decades by the existing climate crisis.
People take part in a climate change protest in Montréal on Nov. 21, 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
The triple crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and related health and economic fallouts, climate change and persistent inequities present major challenges for wealthy countries like Canada. They require countries to address domestic needs while also tackling development priorities in vulnerable regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa.
That’s why we need a global health strategy for Canada that’s integrated, mindful of health, racial and gender equity, and also serves Canada’s security and global citizenship agendas. Canada needs to be innovative when it comes to research and policy.
Linking domestic and global policy
In addressing global health threats, the federal government must erase the artificial divisions between domestic and global policy.
Canadian strategy must fundamentally strengthen the country’s political voice in the G7 and G20. We must commit public funds and expertise toward strengthening multilateral and bilateral partnerships with other governments and global institutions such as the World Health Organization.
The federal government must also approach its commitment to global health with openness, seeking out a wide range of perspectives that will form the basis of the design and monitoring of a renewed global health strategy for Canada.
Establishing global health strategies is nothing new. Back in 2007, the foreign affairs ministers of Brazil, France, Indonesia, Norway, Senegal, South Africa and Thailand signed the Oslo Ministerial Declaration on global health as a pressing foreign policy issue. Canada was absent.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greets German Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel during the G7 leaders summit in La Malbaie, Que., in June 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
Germany’s recently launched global health strategy could be a model for Canada. It takes a whole-of-government approach to improve policy coherence rather than leaving it up to any one ministry to lead in a silo. Germany will invest more in the World Health Organization, among other multilateral organizations, and in health promotion and research that supports its strategy.
Canada too must fully acknowledge that our security interests are directly linked to health equity across the globe — and nowhere is this more evident than in the race we have witnessed to develop and now deploy a COVID-19 vaccine. Here, a coherent global health strategy would ensure that Canada lives up to its commitment to universal access to a vaccine in the face of rising vaccine nationalism.
The strategy needs to be aligned with 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda, which provides an integrated framework for member states, including Canada, to measure progress on actions taken across sectors to address health, social, economic, gender and environmental inequities.
We need a strategy with a clear mandate, accountability and monitoring mechanisms, and one that is clearly communicated. We also need to solicit advice from our global partners. Choosing to bring outside perspectives to inform strategy development would make Canada unique while also deliberately engaging a wide range of Canadian stakeholders.
A parliamentary committee on global health could also be established to guide the work across various federal departments. And we could follow France and Sweden in appointing a global health ambassador to lead government engagements.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is seen in Vancouver shortly after his election in October 2015. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
Canada can use a global health strategy to engage proactively as a leader on the global stage. In 2015, a newly elected Justin Trudeau declared that Canada was “back.” There’s no better way and better opportunity for Canada to prove it than now with a comprehensive global health strategy for the post-pandemic era.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled an updated national climate plan Friday that includes a $170-per-tonne carbon price in 2030, C$15 billion in new climate spending, a more modest Clean Fuel Standard, and a slight increase in the country’s 2030 carbon reduction goal—just barely enough to keep the government’s promise to boost its ambition beyond the 30% target originally adopted by the Stephen Harper government in 2015.
The plan commits to an eight-megatonne reduction in the 2030 target, from 511 to 503 Mt, enough to bring the percentage up from 30% to fractionally more than 31%. Ottawa projects a carbon reduction of 32 to 40% by 2030 if provincial governments get onboard with their own climate action plans.
Dale Beugin, research and analysis vice-president at the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices, greeted the announcement as a credible plan for the country to meet its climate targets. “Like many jurisdictions, Canada has often been accused of being long on climate rhetoric and short on policy to deliver,” he wrote. “This plan changes that. Environment and Climate Change Canada’s modelling shows that the multiple policy pieces in the Plan add up to emissions reductions in 2030 that actually exceed our current target.”
Dale Marshall, national climate program manager at Environmental Defence Canada, acknowledged the “more comprehensive suite of climate policies” and the “meaningful escalation” in the retail carbon price. But he warned that the $15 billion in new investment, “a small fraction of what other countries are doing on a per capita basis, clearly cannot get the job done. In fact, Canada should be investing $270 billion if it was following the level of ambition of the U.S. or EU.”
Marshall added that Ottawa “continues to ignore measures that would most effectively reduce Canada’s greatest sources of carbon emissions: the oil and gas sector, and road transportation. The steps to reduce these emissions are well known: no new oil and gas projects, a gradual phase out of fossil fuel production and use, action to increase the production of electric vehicles.”
The David Suzuki Foundation agreed that ambitious climate action means a halt to new fossil fuel production. “Climate action in Canada has been undermined by the oil and gas industry’s efforts to cancel or delay the most meaningful climate policies,” said Acting Executive Director Ian Bruce. “Yet Canadians say they want strong climate action. For this plan to succeed, Canada needs to hold firm and not give in to interests that don’t support meaningful climate action.”
We are at a moment of overlapping planetary health emergencies: COVID-19 and climate change. Both have their origins at the intersection of humanity and the rest of the natural world, both exacerbate pre-existing health inequities and both have the ability to bring health systems and economies to their knees.
The health impacts of COVID-19 are well-known — those of climate change less so. A new report by the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, an international collaboration among 38 leading academic institutions and U.N. agencies, shows that as the globe warms humans are experiencing increasing heat emergencies, wildfires, severe weather, trouble with food yields and potential for novel infectious diseases.
We need to “multisolve” — manage COVID-19 and climate change at the same time, looking for the sweet spots where a single measure can deliver the triple-win of improving public health, contributing to a sustainable economy and reducing the drivers of future crises.
The Canadian policy brief associated with the Lancet report has suggestions for doing just that.
Protect our homes
The report shows a record 2,700 heat-related deaths occurred among people over the age of 65 in Canada in 2018. Globally, the last two decades have seen a 59 per cent increase in heat-related mortality in older people.
The economic costs are also growing: work hours lost due to extreme heat exposure were 81 per cent higher in 2015-19 compared to 1990-94. Immediate action is required.
Many Canadians have had their living circumstances made precarious through COVID-19. In its fall budget update, the federal government announced $1 billion in funding, through the Rapid Housing Initiative, to be used for the construction of modular housing and affordable housing units.
All of the projects funded through this and other federal construction and retrofit programs should be evaluated for their location relative to flood-prone areas, their ability to ensure adequate ventilation and air filtration to cope with heat emergencies and wildfire smoke, and their alignment with our goal of living in a net-zero nation by 2050.
Clean the air
We must also clear the air of the pollution we can control. The Lancet report shows that in 2018 there were 7,200 premature deaths in Canada related to fine particulate air pollution from human-caused sources. This is four times higher than the number of deaths from transport accidents.
The largest portion, found by the Lancet to be over 30 per cent, was due to emissions from households, such as burning fuel for heating. That means that energy efficient retrofits can save lives!
Finally, we need to increase the resilience of health systems. In addition to ensuring health-care structures are prepared for floods and fires in terms of siting, adequate ventilation systems, and more, we must take another look at supply chains.
We learned through the pandemic that producing personal protective equipment (PPE) at home helps to ensure its availability in the face of supply chain disruption. We’ve also seen the disadvantages of not having the ability to produce the leading COVID-19 vaccines at home.
With climate set to drive further health-related emergencies as well as economic crises a shift from a culture of efficiency to one of resiliency is required. We could decrease our healthcare-related footprint and reduce the risk of supply disruption by switching to reusable medical supplies such as gowns and blood pressure cuffs.
Canada is now full of armchair epidemiologists, but few of us could draw an approximation of the country’s projected warming curve. A leap in understanding is required: this forecast must inform planning in all sectors.
As the Lancet report says, unless immediate action is taken this will threaten not only lives and livelihoods, but also compromise the hospitals and clinics we depend on.
COVID-19 is a hinge moment in human society — a time to pause, to reset. Although health workers have been appropriately lauded through this pandemic for the care they are providing, it is becoming clear that from wearing masks to retrofitting our homes, we all share the responsibility, and the honour, of saving lives.
