What about China?
Cool Tips for a Hot Planet
As I write this, my daughter is enjoying a vacation near the pristine north beach of Haida Gwaii off the coast of B.C. She drove there in late October, through the picturesque rocks and trees of Northern Ontario.
And past a bereft herd of elk standing in a fire-blackened forest near Jasper.
I love this beautiful country of ours, and the world it’s a big part of. When it’s threatened, I want to do everything I can to reduce that threat. We know the threat is huge. Worldwide, temperatures are soaring, fuelling stronger hurricanes, downpours and floods, droughts and fires. It’s a global problem, and we need all hands on deck to dial down the excess heat, much of which comes from burning fossil fuels.
Admittedly, we’re a bit player, with a contribution less than 2 per cent of total emissions. China, with its vast population, is about 26 per cent of the problem. However, there are more than 180 countries that pollute less than Canada. In total, their emissions are greater than China’s. We all need to do our fair share.
And Canada plays an oversized role in the problem. Consider:
• We’re the 11th largest emitter, globally.
• We’re number two in per person emissions. That number is calculated by totalling a country’s emissions and dividing by the population. Thanks to our oil and gas industry ‘s significant pollution, we look pretty bad on that score.
• We’re the fourth largest oil producer in the world. Most of it gets exported.
• Canada is the only member of the Group of Seven countries whose pollution is higher than it was in 1990. It’s up 17 per cent. Meanwhile the U.S. is slightly below 1990 levels and Great Britain has slashed emissions by more than 50 per cent.
Some argue we should wait until China takes action. For well over a decade, that’s been happening. Chinese electric vehicles make up almost 60 per cent of new car sales globally. This summer more than half of new cars sold in China were electric. They’re also surging ahead on battery technology. And China produces about 35 per cent of the world’s heat pumps, according to the International Energy Agency. Last year China added more solar power than the entire world did the year before. Today, wind and solar account for 37 per cent of its total power capacity, and they were expected to surpass coal this year.
So we can’t say China has been doing nothing. In fact, when it comes to clean tech, China is eating our lunch, one former Canadian Imperial Oil exec said recently.
It’s time for Canada to catch up. For starters, the federal government needs to cap planet-warming emissions from oil and gas production to bring our pollution in line with our G-7 partners. Those emissions are out of control, and rising. The industry has been saying for years that they’re working on reducing their pollution, so why the propaganda campaign fighting a cap, unless they were just kidding? A Leger poll in April showed the vast majority of Canadians support that kind of government regulation.
Many businesses, industries and families are doing what they can for the environment. All sectors need to do their fair share, and the fossil fuel industry’s share of the global warming problem is vast – as vast as the country my daughter just crossed. The same country we love.
Your admiration for China’s Communist Party reminds me of Trudeau’s. He said “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say, ‘We need to go green … we need to start investing in solar.’” That same dictatorship has arbitrarily detained over one million ethnically Turkic Uighurs in internment camps for “re-education”. Canada’s parliament has officially condemned that as a genocide. Like North Korea, China arbitrarily imprisons whole families of those it accuses of terrorism but often holds no trials. It brutally represses its intellectuals and human rights advocates like Liu Xiaobo and Jimmy Lai. And it interferes with our elections, our democracy, and our economy. Chastising poor residents of Kawartha Lakes who cannot afford electric cars let alone Haida Gwaii holidays for not applauding China for its efforts to dominate the global market in electric cars does nothing to stop climate change. What should we do? Turn a blind eye to Chinese Communist Party injustices and aggressive imperialism? Line up those we hate in front of firing squads and sell their organs to the highest bidder on the black market? We can’t stop climate change – it’s here whether we like it or not. And we can’t shirk our responsibility to humanity to not turn a blind eye to the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party, Putin, Iran, and similar others, to not abandon the vulnerable to brutality. That means conflict and conflict means carbon expenditure that means we can’t meet our goals to slow down climate change. It means humanity will need to adapt to what comes. We’ll need to stay nimble and think on our feet. And not take too seriously what ails us all – mortality.
I agree with your point that China is a brutal regime with horrific human rights abuses. But this is an environmental column. The point was that those who use “What About China” as an excuse for Canada to do nothing to reduce emissions might want to rethink that argument, given how much China has been doing to electrify their transportation sector and dramatically increase their use of solar power, etc. They have become a world leader when it comes to clean technology. We might not want to have all that power in one country, which, as you point out, has some horrible policies in the human rights sphere.
Yes, given the tipping points we’re reaching and have already reached, climate change is a fact of life for us. But everything we do to reduce global warming pollution reduces the amount of devastation down the road. Several years ago scientists projected we were heading toward 5 degrees C of extra global warming above pre-industrial levels. Today, because of work that has been done around the world to reduce emissions, that projection has dropped from 5 to about 3 degrees. Still devastating, but it’s moving in the right direction. We need to accelerate that as quickly as possible to keep it under 2 degrees.