Toward The Abyss

Susan Riley is as mad as hell. The Trudeau government says it will fight climate change with carbon capture -- even as it approves another mega oil project:

According to the not-so-subtle Liberal communications plan, the few progressive and chewy morsels in last week’s federal budget should overshadow Justin Trudeau’s most brazen betrayal since 2015—far graver than his reversal on proportional representation and other, less consequential, broken promises.

That betrayal also happened last week, just a day before what turned out to be a low-key budget: Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s decision to permit a new oil development—the Bay du Nord deep-sea project, located in the North Atlantic, some 500 kilometres north east of St. John’s, N.L. That permission was granted in the direct wake of another dire climate change report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a warning from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to all governments that investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is “moral and economic madness.”

It’s the sort of thing Guilbeault, once a prominent Quebec environmentalist, used to say—in fact, when it first appeared he called the IPCC report “sobering.” Among other things, the Bay du Nord decision represents the complete and total capture of another high-minded environment minister by a powerful industry and its political protectors. Every dedicated federal environment minister—from Charles Caccia, David Anderson and Jim Prentice, through to Stéphane Dion and Catherine McKenna—has been eventually undercut by the prime minister of the day, irrespective of party affiliation.

This, along with an unbroken national record of failing to meet international emissions reduction goals, suggests a systemic problem that transcends partisanship. No national political leader has found the conviction and courage to stand up to the fossil fuel sector, and its fierce political enablers in Alberta, and force it to accept responsibility for the destruction of our planet. Or, at least, for its share.

It's clear that in Canada -- and the rest of the world -- the fossil fuel industry calls the tune:

The Trudeau government is only the latest manifestation of this trend. While emissions continue to rise, and oil enjoys a hopefully brief revival, the climate consequences—from flooding in British Columbia and elsewhere, to devastating wild-fires, to heat waves at the poles—become more dire, more intimate, and harder to ignore.

So the Trudeau government can’t ignore them. Instead, it promises to address rising emissions—including the 26 per cent that come from Alberta’s oil sands—but always sometime down the road, 2030, say, or 2035, but definitely 2050. The government’s latest Emissions Reduction Plan, for instance, also released before the budget, calls for a 45 per cent reduction in oilsands emissions from 2005 by 2030.

That goal sounds steep—Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley calls it “fantasy”—but Guilbeault points to “plans to develop guidance” to require new oil and gas projects to have “best-in-class” emissions control leading to the “cleanest oil and gas” on offer. But, not before extensive consultation with the industry, provinces, indigenous leaders—and, wait, haven’t we heard this before? Anyone remember Stephen Harper’s “sector by sector” consultations with large emitters in 2008? Suffice it to say, they ended inconclusively and emissions are higher than ever.

The problem is painfully obvious in the Ukrainian war. Oil represents forty percent of Russia's economy. A worldwide ban on Russian oil would immediately bring Russia and Vladimir Putin to their knees. But Europe relies on Russian oil.

We keep marching to the abyss.

Image: NPR