Canadian CO2 Emissions Are Dropping, but Not for the Reason You Think
And about that $100B the Liberals spent on the climate...
Forget all the political posturing of one kind or another about climate change. For this article, we’ll assume it’s happening. Heck. I’ll even assume that it’s a categorically bad thing.
But I will ask a simple question: have the climate-fighting efforts of Canada’s Liberal government since taking power in 2015 been effective?
How expensive have those efforts been? From a casual look through federal budget documents between 2016 and 2022, I managed to identify around $15 billion in spending for all projects whose goals could reasonably be described as reducing CO2/greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in general.
However in July, 2021, the government itself announced:
"Since 2015, the Government has invested over $100 billion in clean growth and brought forward a series of other measures, including a world-leading carbon pricing and rebate system and regulations to accelerate the phase-out of traditional coal fired electricity by 2030."
I’ll go with their number. So what did all that spending accomplish?
Looking specifically at CO2 emissions, a key data source is the government’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP). The GHGRP collects data from commercial industrial operations around the country. By 2021 (the last year for which data is currently available), there were more than 1,700 emitters from many industry categories reporting. These 10 industries make up more than half of all emissions readings in the program:
Oil and gas extraction (except oil sands)
Fossil-Fuel Electric Power Generation
Conventional Oil and Gas Extraction
Waste Treatment and Disposal
Chemical Pulp Mills
Non-Conventional Oil Extraction
Petroleum Refineries
Cement Manufacturing
Other Basic Organic Chemical Manufacturing
Iron and Steel Mills and Ferro-Alloy Manufacturing
The GHGRP data is useful because nearly all of the carbon-based energy individual consumers expend at the retail level will already be represented by the production operations that the GHGRP tracks.
As you can see from the chart below, total reported emissions per year have been trending higher between 2004 and 2021. There was a significant drop in 2020 due to the COVID-driven decline in consumption, but 2021 shows a noticeable increase. Overall, total emissions have been growing since the Liberal’s took power.
I guess we’ll have to conclude that climate change policies have been an abject failure and the government has been wasting our money.
Well hold on there just a minute. As much as I believe that, in general, governments waste money and return precious little of value to us in exchange, that might not be the case here. Remember: that chart used total emissions which is a terrible way to represent this particular dataset. That’s because the number of reporting sources has increased substantially from just 326 in 2004 to 1,732 in 2021. Obviously the total emissions numbers will rise.
Instead, let’s look at the average annual emissions of all reporting operations:
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