Despite repeated calls from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, scientists and environmental groups, the Trudeau government will not support the idea of including the complete phase-out of fossil fuels in the final declaration of the climate conference that will take place. COP28 opens this Thursday. Canada is one of the largest producers of oil and gas in the world.
As part of a technical briefing held on Wednesday, the federal government confirmed that it would not support a declaration that indicates that countries are committing to an outright “exit” from fossil fuels, namely oil, gas and coal. In the language of the COP, which is generally in English, we speak of a “ phase out “.
“Canada is in favor of language that points towards the elimination of emissions from the use of fossil fuels,” it was indicated as part of this press briefing, which served to “communicate contextual information without mention of the sources.
Concretely, this means that the Trudeau government would only support a declaration which evokes “an exit” from fossil fuels, but whose greenhouse gas emissions would not be captured by a “carbon capture and storage mechanism”. In the language of the COP, we then speak of a “ phase out of unabated fossil fuels “.
“We want to focus on the problem at the heart of climate change, which is the phenomenon of emissions,” it was clarified on Wednesday, reiterating the objective of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.
Does this mean that Canada wants to focus on the development of technological processes for carbon capture and storage? “There are several paths to achieving the carbon neutrality objective and technological paths are part of the solutions for the years to come,” it was argued.
“The Trudeau government is seriously slowing down the global climate fight and favoring oil and gas companies when it refuses to commit to stopping any new production expansion projects and quickly eliminating all fossil fuels,” responded Wednesday the head of Greenpeace’s Climate-Energy campaign, Patrick Bonin.
“The exit from fossil fuels that the world needs to see land at the COP in this hottest year on record is a rapid, fair, funded exit that includes all fossils, with no loopholes. This is not an outing “with mitigation measures”,” also argued Caroline Brouillette, director of the Climate Action Network Canada.
In anticipation of COP28, the Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres, also pleaded on Monday for an exit from the “era of fossil fuels”, which according to him are leading us towards the “climate chaos” predicted by science . “We are decades behind” in terms of energy transition, he said earlier this fall, due to “the procrastination, the tensions and the blatant greed of old interests who make billions thanks to fossil fuels”.
For the moment, the signatory countries of the Paris Agreement which meet within the framework of the COPs have only managed to include in their final declaration the idea of a “reduction” in the use of coal without a carbon capture mechanism. carbon. This inscription was in the declaration of COP26, in 2021.
In 2022, fossil fuel producing countries managed to block the idea of extending this very loose language to oil and gas. You should know that the final declaration of the COP is adopted by consensus.
Experimental technology
The idea of capturing and storing emissions linked to oil and gas production is dear to the industry, which wants to increase production in the coming years.
The New Ways Alliance, which brings together companies that exploit the tar sands, is promoting this still-experimental technology in its public relations campaign to highlight the industry’s efforts to align with the “carbon neutrality” objective of the federal government by 2050. But this campaign is the subject of an investigation by the Competition Bureau.
According to the New Pathways Alliance, the expected reduction would be “10 million tonnes annually by 2030”, then 20 million tonnes in 2050. Canada’s most recent greenhouse gas report, that of 2021, estimates emissions from the oil sands sector at more than 85 million tonnes. For the oil and gas sector, we are talking about 189 million tonnes. And these increase year after year.
In a report released last week, the International Energy Agency concludes that oil and gas companies must start “abandoning the illusion” that “implausible” amounts of carbon capture are the solution to the climate crisis worldwide.
The report says limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C would require 32 billion tonnes of emissions to be sequestered through carbon capture by 2050.
“The amount of electricity needed to power these technologies would be greater than current global electricity demand,” says the report, which adds that this amount of carbon captured would require an increase in global spending on the technology from 4 billion last year to 3500 billion by 2050.
The Trudeau government is nevertheless trying to stimulate investment in this expensive technology by promising a tax credit for companies that deploy carbon capture projects.
Capturing and storing carbon emissions from Canada’s oil and gas industry, however, would not change emissions from the combustion of exported resources. Greenhouse gas emissions linked to the use of exported fossil fuels totaled more than four billion tonnes between 2016 and 2020, according to an estimate from the Federal Ministry of the Environment.