Olivia Woods
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that he will make sure Canada meets its most recent climate goal, which this time is supported with a plan for how to reach it.
Canada has established 8 different emission objectives for greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. Six of them have passed, and Canada never even came close to meeting them.
The next deadline is in 2030, and it calls for Canada to reduce emissions to 55%-60% below 2005 levels.
To achieve the new objective based on 2020 emissions levels, annual emission reductions of around 23 million tonnes are required. That’s the same as removing 5 million cars from circulation through the end of the decade.
On Tuesday, at a q&a session at the Canadian Climate Institute’s conference in Ottawa, climate journalist for Bloomberg News, Akshat Rathi questioned Trudeau if Canada will be able to make the target reductions in time.
He responded with a simple “Yes.”
“Every other plan was based on targets,” said Trudeau. “Any politician can put forward a target. Can you actually put forward a plan to do it?”
The path towards the Liberal’s original 2030 goal was first established in their 2016 climate plan, however, enough concrete measures were never added.
According to Trudeau, Canada’s Emissions Reduction Plan does provide a clear road map to the new objective announced last year.
The plan details sector-by-sector the emissions that must be removed to achieve the 2030 target, and provides some, but not all, of the ways in which this could be accomplished.
The oil and gas industry must cap emissions at current levels and reduce them by 38% by the year 2030. More information on the details of that cap is expected to be available next year.
The oil and gas industry will be given a significant boost with the addition of a new tax credit to encourage the installation of carbon capture and storage systems. However, the industry finds the government’s timeline too ambitious.
Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, stated at Tuesday’s conference that the country needs to double or triple its electricity production if it is to achieve its climate targets. He also said that the government will have to put a lot more money into other sources of power to make that happen.
“It is going to need to be of a much more significant scale for us to move forward,” he added.
Trudeau refused to give a specific date by which Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions will begin to significantly decrease on the path to 2030.
Original source material for this article taken from here
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