Our demand
The sector with the greatest impact on the climate crisis in Canada is fossil fuels, which account for the largest share of our domestic GHGs (26%) and whose emissions have grown the most (87% growth between 1990 and 2019). To hope to limit global warming to a safe threshold, the International Energy Agency concludes in its Net Zero by 2050 report that we must abandon all further fossil fuel exploration and development projects now, and the agency provides a roadmap for doing so. According to the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) Production Gap Report 2021, in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C, by 2030, global fossil fuel production must decline by 6% per year. While there is a strong need to reduce production, it is still at risk of increasing, including in Canada.
The federal government has actually promised measures to cap and reduce GHGs from fossil fuels, which we welcome. However, the big problem is that our reduction policies focus on upstream GHGs, related to production processes ("scope" 1 and 2), such as extraction, transformation or transportation. However, for the fossil fuel industry globally, about 85% of the greenhouse gases of the complete life cycle of fossil fuels are emitted during the consumption and combustion of the fossil fuels. The Government of Canada's new commitments published on March 29, 2022 only call for a 31% reduction in emissions from the oil and gas sector over the period 2005-2030, and this only with regards to scope-1 and 2 emissions, omitting the elephant in the room: the scope-3 emissions linked to the combustion of our exported fossil fuels.
But the biggest problem is that Canada is a predominantly fossil fuel exporting country, and the federal
government excludes this from its reduction plans. The GHGs linked to the combustion of our fossil fuels that
we export, alone, are 1.3 times higher than all the domestic GHGs in Canada. For instance, according to
information obtained by EcoJustice, for the year 2019, while Canada's total domestic emissions amounted to
730 megatons of CO2, the emissions related to our exported fuels amounted to 954 megatons. The
implication is that any federal reduction plans will be ineffective if they ignore the large share of our emissions.
Moreover, while Canada's domestic emissions stabilized between 2012 and 2019, Canada's exported
emissions from the sale of oil, gas and coal grew by an alarming 46%.
For this campaign, we are calling on the federal government to quickly eliminate all fossil fuel related GHGs. Our main demand is the inclusion of these exported GHGs under the reduction and capping measures. And in this campaign, we are calling on all of our federal MPs, throughout Canada, to demand a real cap on GHGs from fossil fuels. Our demand is a concrete and politically realistic measure to truly address the climate crisis in Canada, as the federal government has jurisdiction over exports and GHG reduction policies. While this measure to reduce Scope 3 exported emissions may require the creation of a different mechanism than for the reduction of Scope 1 and 2 emissions, it is imperative to include these greenhouse gas emissions in the cap-and-trade measures. With barely three years to avoid catastrophe, if Canada is not prepared to take this step now, when will it be?
Our demand:
As part of a future federal law or regulation on capping GHG emissions from the Canadian fossil fuel sector, that coverage include all GHGs related to the full life cycle of fossil fuels, i.e. "scopes" 1, 2 and 3, including emissions related to the burning of exported fossil fuels.
In conjunction with this demand, we are also asking the government to impose high rates of reduction and
rapid implementation.
Finally, we would like to reiterate that Canada's energy transition must include a fair transition plan for workers.
In the current and foreseeable future context of labour shortages, other industrial sectors will be able to take
advantage of the reduction in size of the Canadian fossil fuel industry, and this, with reduced impacts on its
workers. The government must plan a transition with them if it cares about their economic future. To fail to do
so is to abandon them to market forces. It is better to plan than to undergo this transition.