Dr. Ian Urquhart is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at The University of Alberta where he taught political science for over thirty years. He is the author of Costly Fix: Power, Politics and Nature in the Tar Sands.
Abpolecon.ca welcomes contributions to its website.
“Canada is the only G7 country that has not achieved any emissions reductions since 1990.”
– Jerry DeMarco, Canada’s Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, November 2023.
From Climate Change Leader to Laggard
Once upon a time, Canada spoke like a progressive climate change actor. On the eve of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit Ottawa’s Green Plan pledged to stabilize greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. Prime Minister Mulroney’s vision was one where Canadians wouldn’t use our relatively small share of global emissions as an excuse to do nothing domestically.
Conservative and Liberal governments alike flouted that promise. By 2000 Canadian emissions were 140 million tonnes (MT), 23 per cent higher than 1990 levels.
Failure summarizes the Canadian climate change record since 1990, failure to meet any GHG emissions reduction ambition. “Targets and plans have come and gone,” the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development said two years ago, “and Canada has yet to deliver on any.” Canada is the only member of the G7 where GHG emissions have increased since 1990.
This performance gap should deeply trouble anyone who believes the rich have a moral obligation to the poor when it comes to climate change. The gap is stark in the latest set of national GHG inventory reports to the United Nations.
The United Kingdom is the group’s climate change leader; the UK had cut emissions by nearly 52 per cent since 1990. Canada is the group’s laggard; Canadian emissions were nearly 15 per cent higher in 2023. Even the United States, now the world’s largest oil producer, reduced GHG emissions between 1990 and 2023.
|
G7 Member Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 1990 and 2023 (in million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent) |
|||
| Country | 1990 | 2023 | % Change 1990-2023 |
| Canada | 606 | 694 | +14.5 |
| France | 547 | 376 | -31.3 |
| Germany | 1,252 | 672 | -46.3 |
| Italy | 523 | 385 | -26.4 |
| Japan | 1,272 | 1,071 | -15.8 |
| United Kingdom | 804 | 388 | -51.7 |
| United States | 6,538 | 6,197 | – 5.2 |
| Source: 2025 National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Reports prepared under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Trump administration did not submit its inventory to the United Nations. Totals exclude emissions from Land-Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) | |||
Exploiting the Oil Sands Explains Canada’s Tragictory
Explaining Canada’s failure is easy – Alberta’s oil sands. Thanks to government largesse and technological change oil sands production grew vigorously starting in the late 1990s. This exploitation propelled Canada into fourth place among world oil producers. Thanks to the oil sands Canada supplies more crude to the U.S. than the 12 OPEC states combined.
Exploiting the oil sands accounts for the fact that new oilpatch production records are the norm year after year. These records, such as the 5.1 million barrels per day seen in 2024, are trumpeted in the business press. Last year’s record (expected to be eclipsed this year) was 300 per cent higher than production in 1990.
But record oil sands GHG emissions go largely unreported or are dismissed as unimportant.
Annex 10 of Canada’s most recent inventory of GHG emissions for the United Nations reported that upstream oil and gas emissions essentially doubled between 1990 and 2023. The increase from the upstream petroleum sector more than equaled Canada’s total emissions increase over that period (93 million tonnes more from upstream oil and gas versus 88 million tonnes from Canada as a whole).
And oil sands emissions figure very prominently here. In 2023 those emissions were a record 89 million tonnes. This new record was nearly six times higher than the 15 million tonnes they emitted in 1990. Emissions from the oil sands alone account for 80 per cent of the spectacular increase in upstream emissions.
Becoming the fourth largest oil producer in the world came with a high price – becoming the worst climate change laggard in the Western world.
Neither Alberta nor Canadian political leaders should say with a straight face that Canada is reducing GHG emissions (one of the most outrageous examples of such a claim came from Alberta’s Rebecca Schulz in early June. I critiqued that here.)
Canada’s COP 30 Desires: More Oil Sands Production…GHG Emissions be Damned
“Unprecedented highs.” That’s where atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions ended 2024. What do world leaders plan to do about that? Ostensibly they will take meaningful actions when they meet at the COP 30 climate conference in Brazil starting on November 10th.
But, if they follow Canada’s example, expect to be disappointed. What are Canada’s aspirations and commitments headed into those negotiations? Increase oil production and be sure not to say what the consequences will be for emissions.
Premier Smith has the most egregious ambitions. Her October mandate letter to Energy Minister Jean instructs him to craft a roadmap to deliver massive oil production increases. She dreams of 8 million barrels per day of oil production by 2035. This is 57 per cent more than last year’s Canadian record. It would be double last year’s Alberta oil production record.
There isn’t any mention in that mandate letter of what this increase would mean for Alberta’s, and Canada’s, GHG emissions. Nor will you find any mention of cutting greenhouse emissions in the mandate letter to Environment Minister Schulz.
Reducing GHG emissions is a profanity in Alberta.
Federal budget not climate friendly
Last Tuesday’s budget did nothing to suggest that Ottawa plans to slow the oil production train. Prime Minister Carney is on the verge of abandoning the not-yet-implemented federal oil and gas emissions cap. The Trudeau government proposed the cap two years ago because, as noted above, oil and gas emissions have risen relentlessly for more than 30 years.
However, if the federal “cap” was implemented both oil sands production and oil sands GHG emissions would rise to new records. Oil sands production under the cap is estimated to grow to a new record of 4 million barrels per day by 2030, approximately 700,000 barrels per day higher than in 2022.
That proposed cap would allow the oil sands to produce 92.4 million tonnes of GHG emissions in 2030. Yes, this would be a new emissions record. It would be four per cent higher than the emissions record reported for 2023.
But the budget made it very clear the Carney government is likely to scrap the cap. Without providing any details whatsoever, the budget dangles industrial carbon pricing, enhanced methane regulations, and carbon capture as options that would mean the cap “would no longer be required as it would have marginal value in reducing emissions.” Until now this total absence of detail and targets has been typical of Alberta, not Ottawa.
The budget was also striking for emphasizing emissions intensity as key to its unspecified climate competitiveness strategy. Emissions intensity refers to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per some unit of production (ie. a barrel of oil or the national GDP). It “It’s silent about the inconvenient truth of how many tonnes of greenhouse gases are sent into the atmosphere.
This metric has long been the darling of industry and Alberta. Those actors like to talk about reducing the emissions intensity of oil sands production. What they often don’t mention is that intensity reductions coexist with absolute increases in tonnes of GHG emissions. It’s a clever camouflage.
The budget boasts that Canada has cut “the emission intensity of oil sands operations by almost 40 per cent between 1990 and 2022.” It doesn’t mention the inconvenient truth mentioned above – the tonnage of oil sands emissions increased by nearly six times between 1990 and 2023.
As for strengthening carbon pricing, we should expect industry to meet such a move with howls of outrage. Petroleum producers demand the repeal, not the reform, of the federal levy on large emitters.
Alberta seems unlikely to support the type of carbon price strengthening (read increase) needed to reduce emissions in the oilpatch. In September the province modified Alberta’s emissions trading market. The Canadian Climate Institute concluded those changes weakened, not strengthened, that system.
Tuesday’s budget was a profound disappointment with respect to taking climate change action. It told Canadians not to expect any actions from Ottawa in the near future to slow down oil sands production and emissions.
Global Progress Demands Actions from the “Negligible” Emitters
Canadian apologists for climate inaction often base their case on the fact that Canada’s emissions are very small relative to those of the United States and China. True. But as Hannah Ritchie points out countries emitting less than 2 per cent of the global GHG emissions collectively generate more than one-third of global emission. These countries, such as Canada, Australia, and European Union members, generate more emissions than China and nearly three times the American total.
Climate change cannot be positively addressed without seriously cutting into the 36 per cent of world emissions that rich, negligible emitters send into the atmosphere. Canada belongs to this club.
Being a good global citizen demands that Canada become the country Prime Minister Mulroney imagined in 1990. We must stop chasing even higher and higher oil production levels. We must insist on significant reductions in oil sands emissions and not be satisfied with the fact that the pace by which we set new oil sands emissions records is slower now than it was before.
Related Posts
Pinocchios Aplenty: Fact Checking Alberta’s Coal Industry Modernization Initiative