Canada won’t be able to meet its global warming targets if America keeps buying its oil, so environmentalists are already blaming U.S. President-elect Donald Trump for the failure.
Canadians are worried that when Trump takes office, he’ll keep driving up demand for their oil and natural gas. Since Canada’s economy is based on exporting oil and natural gas, environmentalists are worried that Canada will soon have a much bigger financial incentive to increase carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Canada is “expected by 2030 to reduce carbon emissions by a third,” Canadian newspaper columnist Les MacPherson articulated in the Wednesday article “Canada Will Have To Miss Climate Targets Without Donald Trump’s Help.”
“That means reducing our fossil fuel consumption by a third within 14 years. That’s not going to happen without reducing Canada to something like Dr. Zhivago’s Moscow, after the revolution, where poor Tanya has only enough firewood to light the stove just before Yuri arrives home from work on the horse-drawn trolley. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling sunbeams extracted from cucumbers,” MacPherson wrote.
Canada’s current government has repeatedly failed to slash emissions. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s administration attempted to impose a “climate test” on new pipelines and record any potential increases in CO2 emissions, but immediately told companies how to get around it. The measure was expected to apply to TransCanada pipelines, the company looking to build the Keystone XL pipeline, and terminals capable of exporting liquefied natural gas.
During Canada’s elections last October, Trudeau promised strict environmental reviews of energy infrastructure projection, including assessing its impacts on Canada’s carbon emissions while simultaneously promising to give individual provinces greater control over its own environmental policy.
Ironically, new research indicates that global warming will actually be beneficial to Canada. Research in the forest of the Canadian province of British Columbia and found that warmer, wetter and more carbon dioxide (CO2) rich conditions caused by global warming are an enormous help to the province’s forests.
Global warming will grow Canada’s forest enough to sequester an additional 1 billion metric tons of CO2 by 2020, according to research published by the University of Victoria.
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