The federal election, the U.S., and climate action - Inside Climate

Eli Pivnick - Apr 15, 2025 / 11:00 am | Story: 544527

Photo Elections Canada

Our environmental crises continue to worsen from climate change to biodiversity to microplastics to the state of our forests.

I thought climate would be front and centre in the current federal election. A Leger poll last month found 65% of Canadians think Canada should invest in renewables rather than fossil fuel development. Also, 62% felt Canada should maintain its climate

commitments independent of the U.S. administration’s decisions and 67% agreed the next Canadian government should make climate action and protecting nature a priority.

So why do we not hear more about climate action and other environmental issues in this election?

It is true the U.S. President Donald Trumpis taking up a lot of the oxygen in our election. One of his main policies is to halt action on climate and environmental regulations and increase fossil fuel exploitation, even to the point of putting pressure on trading partners to buy more American fossil fuels.

In the tariff crisis Trump has created, it is inevitable all lobby groups, from industry to NGOs, will declare the crisis response should include putting a higher priority on their preferred projects.

Conservative Leader, Pierre Poilievre has been a consistent booster of the fossil fuel industry and is silent on the subject of climate. He has used the tariff crisis to declare the need for new oil pipelines. That assertion ignores the $50 billion the Canadian government has now invested in the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline, an amount no company is going to be willing to invest in the future.

It also neglects the fact pipelines will take a decade to build, while, in only four short years, Trump will be out of power. Also in four years, the International Energy Agency predicts oil and gas demand will have peaked and start falling. The Carbon Tracker, a London-based climate think tank, predicts oil and gas prices at that time will begin to fall as demand softens.

They also note Canada’s oil and gas are relatively expensive to produce and will not be in a good market position when prices begin to fall. Poilievre also promises to fast-track new resource projects which will ensure a decade of litigation by First Nations, who will not have been adequately consulted and may not agree with those projects.

Liberal Leader Mark Carney, while much more aware of the need for climate action, has claimed we can expand oil and gas production while reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, which are currently 30% of Canada’s total emissions.

He purports to do this for oil by reducing the GHG intensity per unit of oil produced. Even if true, the solutions may reduce the GHGs per unit but not the total if more oil is produced. More oil produced means more oil burned, resulting in more GHGs, regardless of where the burning takes place. Additionally, the main method currently proposed to reduce GHGs of oil production is through carbon capture and storage, which has proven to be extremely expensive and only feasible if taxpayers pay for most of it, for which the industry is lobbying hard.

This is similar to B.C. Premier David Eby’s claims that LNG will be “carbon neutral” because the industry will use electricity to run its operations. The amount of electricity required to do that makes the proposal more fantasy than fact.

All of this ignores the urgency of the climate crisis and Canada’s and B.C.’s commitments to reduce our carbon pollution. Two years ago, U.N. Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, called for a phase-out of fossil fuel production if the world was to avert the worst of the climate crisis. Last year, he called for a ban on fossil fuel advertising, a tax on fossil fuel windfall profits and urged financial institutions to stop funding fossil fuel projects. Canada has made a modest effort towards the first of these and nothing at all on the others.

Climate and other environmental issues may be downplayed in this election because a lot of our mainstream media is American-owned. As well, according to a 2020 Stand.Earth report, 70% of oil sands production is owned by wealthy foreign investors and shareholders.

In B.C., the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline and massive Ksi Lisims LNG project that Eby must decide on this spring are mainly owned by Western LNG, an American consortium.

Other countries, even the U.S., are moving ahead with climate action. American battery storage capacity, allowing more efficient use of renewable energy, reached 20.7 gigawatts in July 2024, or the equivalent of 20 Site C dams. It is expected to double again by the end of this year.

Canada needs to step up and meet our climate commitments regardless of who is elected. Phasing out fossil fuels, while not solving all our problems, will mean a livable planet with good jobs and less pollution.