Can the cap address the gap? The growing chasm between climate rhetoric and reality

The federal government has just released draft legislation to cap the GHG emissions of the oil and gas industry and it couldn’t have come at a better time. In late October, the United Nations Environment Programme released its Emissions Gap Report 2024 and the news wasn’t good. We are way off track on our Paris commitments to keep global warming under 1.5 C. 

Climate communicators talk about the importance of hope. I’m struggling. But how about this: instead of thinking we’re doomed, consider the vast costs of continued global heating. Decarbonization will bring a windfall of new jobs when fossil fuels are shuttered and we rework transportation, manufacturing, heating, and agriculture. Or, in UN speak: “A minimum six-fold increase in mitigation investment is needed for net-zero – backed by reform of the global financial architecture, strong private sector action and international cooperation. This is affordable: the estimated incremental investment for net-zero is $0.9-2.1 trillion US per year from 2021 to 2050 – investments that would bring returns in avoided costs from climate change, air pollution, damage to nature and human health impacts. For context, the global economy and financial markets are worth $110 trillion US per year.”

I get that this climate change thing is complicated. There’s COP this and COP that. There’s the IPCC, BOGA, UNEP, GHGs, and CCS. The world is on fire while we drown in acronyms. 

But as a simple starting point, here are the three main climate change facts you need to know: Climate change is real and is happening now; scientists understand it; we can stop it.

In order to preserve the possibility of future life under 1.5 degrees of warming, 42 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut in the next six years, and 57 per cent by 2035. 

Climate crunch time

Forty-two per cent in six years means it’s climate crunch time. 

UN headline writers aren’t yet using all caps, so things must not be that bad, right? For the next report’s title, I suggest, “PHASE OUT OIL AND GAS OR BE PHASED OUT!” Or maybe UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen could try dropping a few f-bombs instead of cooly pronouncing: “The sooner we strike out hard for a low-carbon, sustainable and prosperous future, the sooner we will get there – which will save lives, save money and protect the planetary systems upon which we all depend.” 

Hardly fighting words; there’s not even an exclamation point!

While scientists and the UN couch increasingly terrifying information in polite language, oil and gas is rampaging. Paris Agreement be damned, fossil fuel companies are in a global race to find more deposits to get even more countries hooked on the (gr)easy money that comes from their doomed product. It’s drill baby, drill with no respect for the science or the deadly flooding and hurricanes that their activities exacerbate. 

It’s not just the new fields being developed off our coast, in Africa, South America, or the Arctic. Between 1990 and 2022, Canada’s oil sands production emissions grew by 467 per cent, and conventional oil production by 24 per cent. There’s a growing gap of GHG emissions between the promised phase-out and what is really happening. 

We are allowing our leaders to pay lip service to Canada’s Paris Agreement commitments while oil and gas production grows. Cheers! Let’s raise a half-empty glass to White Rose, Bay du Nord, Persephone, and wherever else they plan to drill off our shores. While there are signs the oil and gas industry is on the wane in Newfoundland and Labrador since its peak in 2017, you’d never know it from the provincial government’s rhetoric, or from the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, which in September issued a new call for interest in oil exploration in Jeanne D’Arc and the Labrador South region. 

What the hell are we playing at? 

The world is now on course for a temperature increase of 2.6 C to 3.1 C. It’s a nasty legacy to leave our children and grandchildren. 

In my last column, I promised to share some strategies from Genevieve Guenther’s The Language of Climate Politics, which explores how discourse and rhetoric around the sustainable transition have been weaponized by the fossil fuel lobby and those in government who support them. 

Let’s look at Furey’s speech to the Empire Club in April 2024 as a case study.

“We’re still major players when it comes to producing oil, oil that is important for Canada, for the world, and for the climate. Our oil is desirable from a carbon-profile perspective. Our newest discovery [is] estimated to be at 8 kg of carbon per barrel, and not to pit jurisdiction against jurisdiction, but Alberta is investing billions of dollars now to reduce from 80 kg a barrel. We have a natural competitive advantage,” Furey said.

“This is the product the world needs right now, and it would be irresponsible for us not to develop it. But in our province, we know that you can achieve a constructive balance — one between answering today’s energy needs while moving towards a greener tomorrow. In Newfoundland and Labrador, this is not a zero-sum game.”

The irresponsible bit is blatantly untrue. Given global warming, the responsible (backed by science) thing to do for Newfoundland and Labrador, the rest of the world, the ocean, and the environment, is to leave the offshore oil under the ocean floor. Furey’s claim that answering today’s energy needs while moving towards a greener future is clinging to the idea that our very survival hinges on oil and gas when the opposite is true. Guenther would compare this to the upside-down propaganda in Orwell’s 1984. “Where the slogans of Big Brother’s totalitarian Party are: war is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.”

Let’s look at Furey’s use of the term ‘carbon profile’, which refers to the viscosity of a petroleum product. While our offshore oil may be less viscous (olive oil versus tar sands’ cold molasses), it contains the same amount of carbon. It may be faster to extract, doesn’t require as much refining—and is therefore more profitable—but it’s as carbon-y as the other guys’ oil.

I’ve heard the same low-carbon oil malarky from Seamus O’Regan, Siobhan Coady, Bernard Davis, Andrew Parsons, and Charlene Johnson. What they’re all referring to are scope 1 and scope 2 emissions — that is, the amount of carbon burned to access the oil (aka operational emissions). These account for just 10 to 15 per cent of fossil fuel companies’ emissions. They don’t include the emissions from transporting or burning those fuels. So calling our oil ‘light’ because it has a comparatively lower ‘carbon profile’ neglects to mention the emissions from delivering the oil to market and the emissions from when the product is actually used. Politicians and industry use a disinformation technique Guenther calls ‘paltering’ — statements which contain an aspect of truth but also leave out more important information.

If Furey was referring, instead, to oil’s carbon footprint, that’s just a bit of marketing magic created by the ad firm Ogilvy & Mather (cue the Mad Men theme song) for British Petroleum, the same folks who brought you Deepwater Horizon (the real disaster, not the movie). They even made a handy carbon footprint calculator so you can check how much carbon you, as a consumer, use to buy ever more expensive groceries, heat your home, or (tsk! tsk!) book an economy flight. I wonder if British Petroleum uses the same calculator on the exploration, production, transportation, and burning of the oil they dredge up? Or the number of private jets and first-class business flights their execs take? Somehow, I doubt it very much. 

Calling oil light, low-carbon, or green is just a ploy to make a case for drilling more oil. What the world needs is for us to leave it in the ground. The acronym for that is: LINGO (the leave it in the ground initiative). Last week, renowned energy humanities scholar Imre Szeman reflected on the new Canadian greenwashing law and how it forced oil companies and oil lobby groups like Pathways Alliance to scrub their websites of misinformation and disinformation. Unfortunately, it has no such effect on politicians. 

Offshore or tar sands: Oil is burning up our chance of a liveable future

In Canada, oil and gas drives just five per cent of the economy but is responsible for 31 per cent of our GHG emissions. The Sierra Club has been lobbying the feds to cap the GHG emissions of oil and gas, which rose 83 per cent between 1990 and 2022.

Environmental Defence Fund Staff wear ’emissions caps’ at COP28. Photo: Environmental Defence Fund.

To no one’s surprise, Energy NL CEO Charlene Johnson (our province’s former environment minister) is opposed to the emissions cap. In Energy NL’s submission to the feds on the legislation, she pleads to “allow room for growth for future lower-carbon oil and gas projects which will help Canada both achieve emission targets and meet global energy demand,” while arguing that the offshore oil industry “has committed to being active participants in working towards Canada’s climate change goals.”

This is gaslighting of the highest order. Oil and gas are not helping anyone reach climate goals. Industry players may use the colour green on their websites. They may throw around terms like ‘net-zero’ and ‘sustainability’. They may greenwash their reputations by funding green training. But their product and the illogical argument that the continued extraction of fossil fuels can help us transition out of this mess is false. Fossil fuels are the problem, not the solution.

Energy NL’s submission also asks the feds to recognize “the measures already implemented, and commitments made by oil and gas industry participants to reduce emissions on their pathway to net-zero by 2050.”

When industry and governments use 2050 as a net-zero goal, we should ask: why so damn late? Countries like Denmark, France, and Ireland, and even Quebec—members of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance—have all committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2030, or 2040 at the latest. All of this, bearing in mind that even if we shut down all the largest GHG emitters today, we will still be dealing with climate impacts for hundreds of years.

When fossil-fuel pushers talk about net-zero in this context, they mean reducing scope 1 and 2 operational emissions. This may include eliminating methane gas flaring on platforms and putting windmills on oil rigs (yes, wind-powered oil extraction exists), but it does not stop the drilling. Even if the extraction process is eventually net-zero, it doesn’t make the transportation or the use of the product net-zero.

Energy NL’s anti-cap submission also claims the industry is concerned about the “unnecessary administrative burden” of the emissions cap. Truly, my heart aches for fossil fuel’s administrative burden — if only the burden were true. 

The Sierra Club points out the industry’s “heavy lifting is done by methane reductions” (turn off the flaring), while Environmental Defence points to the IEA (International Energy Agency), which “has shown that nearly half of the global oil and gas industry’s methane emissions can be reduced at little or no cost.”

Canadian companies can eliminate 75 per cent of their methane emissions at an average cost of just $11 per tonne, Environmental Defence argues. “Remember, this is an industry that just made over $130 billion dollars in the last three years.”

Genevieve Guenther would remind us that the cost of not transforming could be infinite. 

Now that the draft legislation is released, lobbying by the fossil fuel industry will go into overdrive to dismantle it. 

The International Institute for Sustainable Development, for its part, suggests that “the policy should be further strengthened by removing the proposed ‘decarbonization program’ from the final regulations to prevent double-counting of emissions reductions in the sector. The final regulations must also be designed to ensure that any domestic offsets made available to the sector reflect real, additional, and verifiable emissions reductions.”

To ensure the proposal is not weakened — that, for example, carbon offsets are not put back in the legislation — write your MP to reiterate your support for the draft legislation. 

The consultation period for the legislation is open until Jan. 8, 2025.

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