A glass half-full of emissions reductions

Open this photo in gallery:

The good news is that Canada’s progress on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is a glass half full. But there isn’t much chance the Liberal government will get a lot of political credit for it.

The official report on emissions from 2022, released Thursday, found they are up slightly. But that is not, as economist Dave Sawyer of the Canadian Climate Institute put it, the “big picture.”

Canada’s emissions are still substantially lower than they were in 2019, before COVID-19 shutdowns caused economic activity and greenhouse-gas emissions to plummet all over the world. And emissions are decoupling faster from economic growth: The economy grew by 3.2 per cent since 2019, but annual emissions went down by 5.9 per cent over that period, from 752 megatonnes to 708.

But while Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault declared the results to be progress, his political opponents saw it as a target.

“Another report, another failure!” New Democrat MP Alexandre Boulerice bellowed in the Commons.

The Bloc Québécois’ Mario Simard echoed that sentiment, and insisted that with the opening of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion, Mr. Guilbeault will be consolidating Canada’s position as the world’s fourth-largest petrostate, “between Russia and Iraq, and the top of the rankings of the world’s worst polluters.”

Sure, the emissions numbers aren’t a full-on whooping success. Canada’s target under the Paris Accord is to cut emissions by 40 per cent below 2005 levels. By 2022, it was only down 7 per cent.

Mr. Guilbeault argues Canada is still on track to meet its commitments, but that depends on estimated future reductions, including from policies still on the drawing board, such as a cap on emissions from the oil and gas sector.

There are positives in the trendline. And the political debate about targets for reducing emissions seems to revolve around the idea that meeting the targets is the only thing that matters, rather than making progress in reducing emissions.

The Conservatives didn’t bother talking about the emissions report on Thursday, but usually they like to argue that the fact the targets are not met shows that emissions-reduction policies are a waste of time and money – and that’s a good reason to stop proposing any such policies. The NDP’s Mr. Boulerice is keen to declare defeat to win over folks to the argument the government is doing nothing. The Bloc seems to think a failure to meet Paris targets might make Quebeckers wants to separate from Alberta’s oilpatch.

Modest progress isn’t a selling point in politics. There won’t be cheers because emissions went up only slightly and still remain below where they were a few years ago. Mr. Guilbeault argued gamely that emissions went down between 2019 and 2022 by an amount equal to the emissions from 13 million cars.

A lot of the experts, such Mr. Sawyer, see it as significant progress.

The economy was still recovering from COVID slowdowns in 2022, but “emissions didn’t jump as much as we thought,” Mr. Sawyer said. And the trend of emissions decoupling from economic growth – less carbon emissions for each unit of economic output – has accelerated over the past three years, to 3 per cent each year from just over 2 per cent. It will have to hit 6 per cent to meet Paris targets, but it is progress.

“This notion of decoupling from economic growth is showing now a consistent trend of accelerating,” he said.

The reductions aren’t even across the economy, and it shouldn’t be a massive surprise that the oil and gas sector, a major slice of Canada’s economy, now accounts for 31 per cent of Canada’s emissions. But emissions from electricity generation have been declining significantly.

The debate over how much of the progress is owing to government policy, and how much comes from technological advances isn’t going to end because of the advances. The high-profile political battle over the fuel charge – better known as the carbon tax – rages on. The Institute recently published a report that argued that the fuel charge will be responsible for 8 to 14 per cent of emissions reductions from 2025 to 2030, while industrial carbon-pricing policies will be responsible for 20 to 48 per cent of reductions.

Yet the emissions results themselves aren’t the failure Mr. Guilbeault’s critics claim. The Liberal government can’t expect it will win them political points, but for those looking for long-awaited progress on emissions, the glass is now half full.