Can you imagine prime minister Justin Trudeau telling the G20 country leaders that they have not done enough to save our planet? He told the G20 meeting in Rome last week that Canada “wanted a stronger and more ambitious agreement on climate change to emerge from the summit.” You have to admit that our prime minister is carrying hypocrisy to greater heights every time he opens his mouth on this subject. He is spending taxpayers’ money to twin the Trans Mountain pipeline to enable three times as much of the highly polluting Alberta tar sands bitumen to be shipped around the world.
Does Canada take less blame for the pollution when other countries process the bitumen into ersatz crude oil to continue the pollution chain?
And how is this for more hypocrisy? Trudeau’s office issued a tweet on Sunday (as he was leaving for the COP26 Conference in Glasgow). The twit’s tweet read: “Climate change cannot be denied. And climate action cannot be delayed. Working together with our partners, we need to tackle this global crisis with urgency and ambition.”
And when he got to Glasgow, Trudeau takes the microphone and repeats his promise to world leaders that he will (sometime in the future?) set a hard cap on emissions for the oil and gas industry in Canada.
Sounds good. Obviously, it means nothing to him. He tells us he wants to set targets on reducing global warming while his pipeline is accepting contracts for shipping Alberta tar sands output for the next 20 years. And the Kenney government in Alberta hopes it will never end.
But what is the Trudeau government really doing today to cut greenhouse gas emissions? Not many of us today are worried about his commitments for 2050. It is today that the seas are warming, the ice caps are melting, that coal is still be used in vast amounts to generate electricity, that we are generating more and more greenhouse gases. Commitments for the future will not cut it.
There are many ways Canada can speed the saving of our planet. We can adopt high-speed electric trains that can compete with the excessively polluting regional air lines. Canada needs high-speed electric trains from Halifax to Vancouver. We need more low-cost ‘green’ electricity to heat our more energy-efficient homes and work places. And we need carbon pricing that cannot just be passed on to the consumer.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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