Harper government blowing smoke on GHG stats

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/05/2015 (3273 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Here’s a fib federal Conservatives repeat so often it almost sounds true: Greenhouse gas emissions are decreasing.

Tories casually slip that fiction into radio interviews, into question period retorts and into back-and-forths with journalists. Earlier this month, when Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq announced new climate change targets in Winnipeg, she told reporters since the Harper government took power in 2006 emissions have dropped by 130 megatonnes.

At best, that’s spin, a kind of talking-point shorthand that oversimplifies a specific bit of scientific speculation and misleads the public into thinking total emissions are shrinking. At worst, it’s a demonstrable lie deliberately repeated by Tories who believe we’re too dumb to read the fine print.

Just this month, Environment Canada released its latest batch of emissions data, this round for 2013. Emissions in 2013 totalled 726 megatonnes, exactly what they were when the Tories took power in 2006. It’s true emissions took a healthy dip for a couple of years during the recession, as they did in most developed nations where the economy slowed. But emissions started climbing again when the economy recovered in 2010 and they’ve been on a slow rise ever since. In 2010, Canada pumped out 701 megatonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalents. In 2013, we were at 726 megatonnes.

There are three ways the Conservatives fudge the facts to make us think emissions are shrinking. Stay with me here. It’s not hard, but the Conservatives think you’re too science-phobic to care.

Emissions intensity

“We’re the first government in Canadian history that actually reduced emissions while growing the economy,” Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment Colin Carrie told the CBC earlier this month. Carrie was repeating a talking point delivered in the House many times, including by former environment minister Peter Kent.

Carrie was talking about emissions intensity, which measure emissions per dollar of GDP or per barrel produced by the Alberta oilpatch or per chunk of metal produced by a steel mill.

Intensity measures were a favourite during the Bush era, now largely discarded in the United States. Intensity measures don’t matter much. That’s because nearly every scientist agrees we’ll reach a catastrophic climate change tipping point if average global temperatures rise more than 2 C, a figure many even argue is too lenient. To stop that climate change tipping point, we can only add a finite amount of extra CO2 into the atmosphere, maybe another 565 gigatons, in the next few decades. It doesn’t matter if the economy is getting more energy-efficient if total emissions are increasing. We’ll still be in big trouble.

As University of Winnipeg climate geographer Danny Blair says, climate change isn’t an economic problem, it’s an atmospheric one, meaning it doesn’t matter if we manage to grow the GDP just a little faster than our emissions if we’re still loading more and more CO2 into the air.

Emissions per capita

In February, a government press release said “Canada’s per capita GHG emissions are now at their lowest level since tracking began in 1990… “

Maybe that’s true. But, who cares? It’s a red herring, just like intensity measures. The words “per capita” work like a little footnote, a caveat the federal government hopes our eye glosses over, so we don’t realize that, since 1990, total emissions increased by 23 per cent. Sure, the population grew a little faster than emissions, but emissions are still growing.

The “if-we’d-done-nothing” number

This is the figure Aglukkaq was using when she was in Winnipeg recently and said emissions declined by 130 megatonnes.

That number is a what-if number, and a partisan one. If Canada — or, really, if a fictional Liberal government in office for the last decade — had done nothing to curb emissions after 2005, our emissions would be 130 megatonnes higher by 2030 than they will be thanks to the fine Conservatives’ climate change policies now in place.

Follow that? You’re not really supposed to. You’re just meant to hear “emissions declined by 130 megatonnes” and assume the federal government has everything under control. The figure is largely speculative nonsense anyway. And, again, it obscures the fact emissions are going up. Plus, any reductions in emissions have come largely, if not exclusively, because of provincial initiatives, notably Ontario’s.

The federal government has done almost nothing on its own to curb emissions, earning it the contempt of environmental activists, right-leaning pundits and the international community alike. Few of those experts believe Canada will reach even its anemic new target announced in Winnipeg earlier this month, the weakest target among G7 countries.

Instead, the Harper government tries to duck the globe’s most pressing problem with dodgy numbers and spin that borders on dishonesty.

Please, humour me one last time: Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions are going up.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca