Scientists say there is no such thing as ‘low carbon’ oil, despite the claims of the Newfoundland and Labrador government, which claims that such oil does exist, off the island of Newfoundland.
Damon Matthews, professor of climate science at Concordia University, maintains that this name is in itself an inappropriateness. It is true, he says, that fewer greenhouse gas emissions are produced by oil extraction off the coast of Newfoundland than by the oil sands in Alberta.
But Professor Matthews points out that emissions during extraction represent only a small percentage of the carbon footprint of this oil: it is its combustion that weighs heavily in climate change, he says.
Newfoundland and Labrador Finance Minister Siobhan Coady last week touted her province’s ‘low-carbon oil’ as she defended her government’s more than $60 million investment in oil exploration off the island.
Daniel Scott, a geography professor at the University of Waterloo, says there’s no place for oil in the low-carbon transition that governments, including Canada’s, have embraced. committed under the Paris Agreement in 2015.
The agreement’s 195 or so signatories have pledged to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C.
Biologist William Cheung of the University of British Columbia is one of the authors of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This report was released days before the Newfoundland and Labrador provincial budget was tabled.
Director of the Institute for Oceans and Fisheries at UBC, Professor Cheung says Newfoundland and Labrador’s decision to continue funding and encouraging oil exploration runs counter to science and main conclusions of the IPCC.
“The world must now undertake deep, rapid and sustained mitigation action,” Cheung said, referring to the report’s recommendations on reducing greenhouse gases.
“And we know that fossil fuel emissions are the single largest source of emissions that contribute to climate change, past and present. »