Parts of Canada look like they were ripped right out of an apocalypse movie today, with deep orange skies and plumes of smoke looming over roaring fires that eclipse the landscape.
As Canadians fled their flaming homes, as innocent wildlife burns and suffocates, Prime Minister Mark Carney took to social media — not to post about any of that, though.
“The world wants to do more with Canada. Our MOU with Alberta will unlock those opportunities in energy — and create lasting benefits for Canadians,” he wrote, boasting, as Canada burns, about the benefits of his deal that makes the climate crisis even worse.
To say that Carney has been a failure when it comes to the climate crisis is an understatement.
He stood alongside a beaming Alberta Premier as the two announced Danielle Smith’s proposed new oil pipeline to the West Coast. He’s admitted that Canada is abandoning its 2030 emissions reductions targets, telling Canadians we can’t afford to take the kind of bold climate action that would allow us to meet them. Carney is also actively embracing AI — despite its thirst for water and energy — and peeling back protections that keep endangered species alive in the face of corporate greed.
In short, Carney is sending us careening even faster into a climate dystopia.
“Prime Minister Carney is intent on taking a wrecking ball on Canada’s climate ambitions, while clearing the way for increasing fossil fuel production, which will only worsen the climate disasters and the costs Canadians are already facing,” Aly Hyder Ali, the senior program manager on oil and gas for Environmental Defence, told me in a statement.
But don’t worry, folks. He has a plan.
While Carney (at the time I am writing this piece) has yet to acknowledge the dystopian, climate crisis-induced horrors currently upending the lives of Canadians, he did post on Tuesday about an agreement for “cutting emissions.”
“The Pathways Project will be the world’s largest carbon capture, utilisation, and storage project — built right here in Alberta,” Carney wrote.
There’s just one problem — the carbon capture project that Carney is touting as the salve to concerns about the emissions from a new oil pipeline?
It’s full of more hot air than Canada’s skies right now.
And if we’re going to actually address those burning skies, we’re going to have to be see through the smoke of Carney’s claims.
Because, according to Hyder Ali, “PM Carney is trying to greenwash his fossil fuel expansion plans with carbon capture and storage.”
What is Carbon Capture and Storage?
Carbon capture and storage is basically exactly what it sounds like. The technology capture carbon before it can slip away into the atmosphere. Then, the company takes the captured carbon and stores it (there are other options, too, such as utilizing it to make other products).
So far, the technology has proven to be incredibly expensive and inefficient at making a significant dent in emissions.
For example, the Pathways Alliance — the group of oil sands companies boosting the Pathways Project — is asking for $16.5 billion in public funding to build the pipeline that would carry this captured carbon and the storage facility where it’d be kept.
For that price, the project could see a net reduction of about 10 – 12 megatonnes of emissions by 2030. Meanwhile, the annual emissions from Alberta’s oilsands, according to the latest federal figures, were 89 megatonnes in 2023.
These carbon-carrying pipelines also aren’t without their own risk.
In 2020, a pipeline carrying this captured carbon dioxide ruptured in Mississippi. The carbon dioxide from the pipeline moved through the community, poisoning people as it displaced the oxygen they need to breathe. More than 45 people were hospitalized and 200 had to evacuate.
“Pathways CCS will not mitigate the pollution from existing oil production, let alone the expanded pollution to fill a new million barrel a day pipeline,” Hyder Ali said.
“First Nations, farmers and landowners have opposed the Pathways project given its significant health and safety risks.”
All this, and here’s the wild part: the carbon that’s captured can also be used to extract even more oil.
In a process called “enhanced oil recovery,” companies can take the captured carbon and inject it into depleted oil wells, pushing out — and eventually, burning — even more oil that would have otherwise stayed in the ground.
This is actually the most common use of captured carbon. About 73% of captured CO2 is used this way every year.
Mark Carney is ‘not the climate guy’ people thought
Canada’s government is planning to give oil and gas companies a tax credit if they use the captured carbon to extract even more oil. Yes, really.
This has led Seth Klein, a climate change writer and activist (and, full disclosure, NDP Leader Avi Lewis’ brother-in-law), to a conclusion about the prime minister.
“Carney is clearly not the climate guy many people thought,” he told me in an email.
Klein pointed to the fact that a centrepiece of the government’s climate spending these days comes in the form of “clean economy investment tax credits.”
“The basic idea of these credits is that, if and when a company undertakes a capital expenditure to lower carbon emissions, the government will rebate them with a tax credit worth 15 to 40 per cent of their investment,” he said.
“The federal government is so enamoured by this model that, in its most recent spring economic update, it extended the credits — and stretched credulity — by offering them for LNG investments and even “enhanced oil recovery” CCS projects, meaning, making the credit available to projects that use captured carbon to frack yet more oil.”
On top of all this, Klein warned that even if carbon capture and storage was able to capture almost all oil and gas production emissions — which, as we already cover, it doesn’t even come close to doing — it “would still be a fraudulent climate ‘solution.’”
“That’s because 80-85% of the carbon pollution from oil and gas isn’t from the production; it’s from when that oil and gas reaches its destination and is burned. And CCS does nothing to reduce those emissions,” he said.
“It’s like being comforted by a tobacco CEO telling you that none of the workers in his factory smoke. Who cares!”
So what do we do?
It’s clear Carney’s climate promises around carbon capture and storage are basically just him blowing smoke.
Meanwhile, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is filming videos mocking people who care about the climate crisis. Ontario Premier Doug Ford cut the province’s budget for emergency forest firefighting.
Politicians from Canada’s biggest parties are all failing us on climate. That’s why it’s up to Canadians to remind politicians we still care about having a liveable planet. We won’t be fooled by greenwashing and fear mongering around Donald Trump. We need to get organized and make our voices heard.
As the dystopian scenes today have made clear, our future depends on it.
