Like many jurisdictions across the world, the United States and Canada have adopted climate policies that are based on popular, though completely bogus, myths. Fully correcting these beliefs would require dozens of articles, but in this three-part series, I will tackle three commonly held beliefs about climate policy:

1. American and Canadian plans are part of a worldwide trend of significantly reducing human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, primarily as a result of lessening our dependence on coal, oil and natural gas.
2. The Paris Agreement will compel countries around the world, including China, the world’s largest emitter, and other developing countries, to make meaningful reductions in GHG.
3. The sources of raw and processed materials and technology needed to carry out President Joe Biden’s and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate change plans—wind and solar power and batteries—are secure and reliable.

All of the three statements above are false.

Concerning the first myth, GHG emissions are not reducing internationally. The countries of the world have been setting targets for emissions reductions since 1992. In 2015, at the 21^st Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris, countries agreed to submit voluntary plans every five years as to how they would reduce emissions in the future. Several countries, including Canada and the U.S., submitted plans indicating their voluntary objectives for emissions reductions by 2030.

Yet, global GHG emissions rose by 59% from 1990 to 2019. With the exception of a few countries in Europe, no country has ever met its emission reduction target. As shown in the following figure, despite 25 previous UN COP meetings, CO₂ emissions, the principal GHG emitted by human activity (aside from water vapor), have continued upward unabated.

 

 

The trend since 2005 is particularly worth noting (Canada’s CO₂ emissions dropped by an amount too small to see on the scale of the following graph):

 

 

Not surprisingly, atmospheric levels of the main anthropogenic greenhouse gases continue to rise accordingly, as seen below.

 

 

The lack of impact of the UN climate change conferences on the levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere is especially pronounced:

 

 

We can see from the following graph that my country has been especially poor at meeting its targets, regardless of whether Liberals or Conservatives are in power (ref: Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy):

 

 

* Note: While CO₂ is the most important GHG, aside from water vapor, gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also hypothetical drivers of global warming. Carbon dioxide-equivalents (CO₂e) attempt, to sum up all of the supposed warming impacts of the different GHGs in order to give a single measure of total GHG emissions.

Why are international emissions continuing to rise?

Between 2010 to 2019, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries reduced their GHG emissions from 13 billion tonnes per year to 12 billion tonnes per year or 8%. During the same period, the non-OECD countries increased their emissions from 18.1 billion tonnes per year to 22.2 billion tonnes per year or 23%. Non-OECD emissions, therefore, rose four times as fast as OECD emissions fell during this time frame. As non-OECD nations constitute two-thirds of global GHG emissions, a share that is constantly increasing, it is not surprising that global GHG emissions have continued to grow despite the actions of OECD countries.

Over the past century, Canadians and Americans have developed our economies, settlement patterns, and infrastructures based on inexpensive and plentiful energy. Our roads, railways, electricity generation, and transmission facilities, mines, pipelines, city structures, industrial plants, commercial facilities, vehicles, and homes have all been designed and built based on a heritage of plenty of energy.

Much of that infrastructure cannot be replaced in a few decades. Historically, energy transitions have occurred because new technologies arose that were superior in terms of reliability, performance, and cost to the old ones, so consumers voluntarily chose change. And, even when they satisfy these conditions, it takes many decades to carry out such transitions. They do not happen because governments set uninformed political targets, especially in support of technologies that have lousy performance, and are expensive and unreliable, as is presently the case in America, Canada, and, indeed, many Western nations.

For these reasons, the U.S. and Canada are just as reliant on reliable, inexpensive fossil fuels today as they were 30 years ago, as demonstrated by the figure below.

 

 

The economic contribution of oil, gas, and coal, directly and indirectly, to our economies, and so our social support networks, health care, first responders, education, indeed everything that has made our nations the peaceful, prosperous countries we hope they will continue to be for future generations, dwarfs that of renewables. Sensible leaders recognize this and so are reluctant to forego the economic benefits of fossil fuel development.

Despite huge investments in renewable energy and countless climate change agreements, fossil fuels remain the world’s dominant energy source.

By 2019, $3.7 trillion had been spent globally on climate measures over the previous decade, including hundreds of billions in support of wind and solar power. Besides huge subsidies to these energy sources, governments have also given them enormous grants and tax breaks and forced utilities to use wind and solar power in ways they otherwise would not have.

Our leaders have also agreed to numerous climate change policies that favor wind and solar. Consequently, there are more than a third of a million industrial wind turbines operating across the world and approximately 707.5 gigawatts of installed solar photovoltaic capacity globally in 2020. Yet, their share of direct primary energy consumption across the world remains tiny. In 2019, fossil fuels supplied 84% of the world’s primary energy consumption. Renewables supplied 5%; wind and solar energy supplied 2%, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2019.

This overall trend will not change in the foreseeable future.

The United Nations asserted that the global population will rise by more than two billion people between 2018 and 2050, and almost all of this growth will be in Asia and Africa. Europe and North America, which had 15% of the world’s population in 2018, will see that share diminish to 11% by 2050.

In its 2021 International Energy Outlook report, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected trends in global energy supply, demand, and emissions to 2050. They projected world energy consumption to rise about 50% between 2021 and 2050, due almost entirely to increased access to marketed energy, strong economic growth, and rapid population growth in non-OECD nations. World energy-related “CO₂ equivalent” emissions (excluding emission changes from land use changes and forestry) are projected to grow in the OECD countries by about 5% and in the non-OECD countries by 35% between 2019 and 2050. So, the EIA projects global CO₂e emissions to grow from about 35 billion tonnes in 2022 to 43 billion tonnes in 2050.

This is a long way from the “net-zero emissions” targets that environmental groups promote, and that some Western governments are imposing on their citizens. If such emissions reductions were realistic, and if all OECD countries achieved them but emissions growth continued in the non-OECD as now projected, by 2050, global emissions would be ~29 billion tonnes per year, a mere 16% below the 34.2 billion tonnes of global emissions in 2019.

With its ever-declining proportion of global population and income, “the West” will not be able to restrain the energy use or the emissions of the emerging non-OECD economic and population giants. EnergyNow.ca reported:

“As of January 2021 there were 201 coal plants under construction globally [70% of which are financed by China], including 92 in China, 30 in India and 24 in Indonesia, according to Global Energy Monitor. That’s in addition to 345 coal-fired power plants in the pre-construction phase, including 135 in China.”

Clearly, fossil fuels will continue to rule, and global emissions will continue to increase, no matter what Canada and the U.S. does. Next week, I will explain why the Paris Agreement will fail to significantly change this situation.