Climate change is an unprecedented global emergency with devastating human rights consequences. Half the world’s population already suffers from severe water shortages and diseases linked to climate change are on the rise. We must change course to protect lives and rights.
The role of fossil fuels in this emergency is indisputable and is prompting stark warnings from specialists like those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Unless the use of fossil fuels is drastically and immediately reduced, the IPCC asserts, the accelerating climate crisis will expose millions, if not billions more people to water and food shortages, as well as deadly heat stresses, exacerbating droughts and other life-threatening disasters.
We must acknowledge Canada’s contribution to this crisis and immediately stop funding fossil fuels.
Canada is the world’s third largest oil exporter. According to the most recent data released by Environment Canada, our oil and gas exports generated an incredible 954 megatonnes of CO2 in 2019 alone, more than the total emissions in the country in the same year. Canada may have stabilized its domestic emissions, but those generated by its fossil fuel exports increased by more than 46% between 2012 and 2019.
Many Canadians are probably unaware that our status as a global fossil power depends on billions of dollars in public funds provided each year by Export Development Canada (EDC), Canada’s export bank. EDC’s support to the sector averaged $13.6 billion per year between 2018 and 2020, making Canada the largest provider of public funds for fossil fuels in the G20. EDC spends 22 times more in this sector than in renewable energy.
The federal government pledged last December to “develop a plan” to phase out public funding to the fossil fuel sector, including by federal Crown corporations like EDC, but there are concerns that the plan may have significant loopholes.
Indeed, the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan, released by Ottawa in March, calls on the fossil fuel industry to reduce emissions — by 31% below 2005 levels by 2030 — while allowing for an increase of oil and gas production.
Such inconsistency is based on the calculation that at least 80% of oil and gas emissions come from their combustion. As a result, Canada can increase its production for export—and support it with huge amounts of public money, like the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion—while having the air to meet its climate obligations, as it will not count emissions generated in countries where Canadian fossil fuels are burned.
Add to that the new carbon capture, use and storage (CUSC) tax credit, a controversial initiative denounced by hundreds of climate scientists and academics as a massive oil and gas subsidy. Ottawa says CCUS projects are exempt from an international commitment signed at the United Nations last November to end a small portion of its fossil fuel funding by the end of this year. Meanwhile, EDC has announced the creation of so-called “transition bonds” that will support oil and gas companies wishing to invest in CCUS technology.
Ottawa justifies its funding of CCUS projects with the opportunity to position Canada as the “cleanest oil and gas producer” in the world. Yet it is inappropriate to be a “clean” producer of products whose effects, as Amnesty International reports in Our rights are burning!jeopardize the rights to water, food, health, housing, work and life of hundreds of millions of people.
Even if Canadian oil and gas companies were to capture all of their emissions—and CCUS projects have yet to meet their targets—the consumption of the fuels produced would continue to exacerbate climate change, havoc among vulnerable populations, deepen inequalities and trigger serious and irreversible effects.
The alarms ring and they are deafening. The world urgently needs a just transition to sustainable climate solutions that protect human rights and provide us with a livable future. This requires Canada to immediately stop funding fossil fuels and rapidly reduce production, with or without carbon capture.
As António Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, put it bluntly: “The really dangerous radicals are the countries that increase the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic folly. »
Canada’s fossil fuel madness must end.