The proposed emissions cap is a fair policy that will help reduce emissions, improve air quality, and save lives and money
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I know many environmentalists whom I deeply respect and admire. But when someone calls me an environmentalist, I cringe. It’s the ‘ist’ at the end of ‘environmentalist’ that hits me. I go into the woods and feel good. I see the intrinsic value of the water I drink and the air I breathe. So what? Most people would say the same.
I don’t think people deserve to lose their homes or lives to wildfires. I think if we can help prevent millions of deaths worldwide every year by reducing air pollution, that would be a good thing. Most Canadians share those values, ‘ist’ or no ‘ist.’
I don’t judge people for relying on oil and gas for work, heat, or transport. Only changing our energy system will lower our dependence. When I see a gas station, I don’t think of the devil; I think of road trips as a kid. If it weren’t for the fact that our dependence on oil and gas is driving wildfires, storms, and droughts that threaten the lives of millions and global security, I would not be writing this.
But telling people to stay reliant on oil and gas when we can shift our system away from it or lying to people about the seriousness of climate change or the costs of climate action does get me angry. There are those who claim it is high treason to say climate change is real and that we should act on it as a country – that doing anything at all on climate change will crush our entire economy. Letting other countries outpace us in renewables strikes me as more of an issue.
Then there are the rest of us who fall across a wide spectrum of grey. In the vast grey, we all hold many different beliefs, aside from generally wanting things to get better. I probably disagree with you, reader, on at least something. But if there’s one thing most of us agree on, it’s that whatever we do to address climate change, it should be fair.
Recently I wrote a piece for Troy Media called Oil giants plead poverty over emissions cap despite soaring profits, in which I detailed how oil and gas corporations have argued falsely that the emissions cap would harm the Canadian economy. Since then, the government of Alberta has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars spreading misinformation about the cap – money that should have gone to things like rural wildfire prevention.
The draft emissions cap on climate pollution from oil and gas corporations is now out, and it’s pretty much what was expected. The heavy lifting is covered by cheap-to-implement methane emissions reductions. Seventy-five per cent of those methane reductions come at an average cost of only $11 per tonne. A bargain for corporations that saw huge profits off the inflation that’s haunted us. Other ways to reduce emissions, like electrification, also exist. It’s only fair they invest some of those huge profits in reducing their pollution.
We can take the lead and make things better for ourselves at the same time. Canada’s per-person emissions are some of the highest in the world and have remained so because these corporations have let their emissions grow unnecessarily. By contrast, individual Canadians and other sectors have already done a lot to make reductions. The cap is also important because 13 Canadian oil and gas corporations are among 88 polluters responsible for a major share of the forested lands lost to wildfires in North America between 1986 and 2021.
For those of us who want to wind down oil and gas, I’m sorry, but the emissions cap isn’t going to do anything to stop oil and gas expansion. However, the emissions cap is a policy built on a value we all need to embrace more: fairness.
The cap will finally give us a chance to lower our emissions profile, and to save Canadian lives and billions of dollars through reductions in ambient air pollution. That should be a win for any environmentalist, any oil and gas worker, and any Canadian – it could even be an easy PR win for oil and gas corporations if they just embraced the cap. It’s a reminder that, whatever you think of governments, even broken clocks are right twice a day.
In any future in which we all work together on our problems, we are going to have to do something about climate change that doesn’t just trust corporations to do the right thing. We, in the grey, are going to have to agree on something if we want things to get better. Fairness is a good place to start.
Conor Curtis is head of communications at Sierra Club Canada.
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