EXCLUSIVE: 'World Will Be Watching' Carney's Fast-Tracked Megaprojects as Carbon Budget Shrinks

Canada News.Net

5 days ago

With a wave of new "nationally significant" projects on the way after the Carney government's Building Canada Act (Bill C-5) becomes law, the world will be watching how Canada meets its climate responsibilities, said the UK's former chief scientific advisor Sir David King.
"Every country in the world is now wondering how to handle the new president in the United States. Every country feels under threat," King told The Energy Mix in an exclusive interview Friday.
But "climate change is the biggest challenge humanity has ever had to face up to, and because it's a global problem, every country needs to handle the problem," he said. "It's not something we can just put aside for a period. This is an issue that is right up front, something we cannot abandon, and I do think Mark Carney is somebody who understand that."
So "we over in the rest of the world are going to be watching how Canada handles that problem," added King, who said he knew Carney well during the prime minister's term as governor of the Bank of England.
King was commenting after more than 60 of the world's top climate scientists warned that humanity is on track to exceed the available carbon budget to limit average global warming to 1.5C, in a paper published in the journal Earth System Science Data. By the beginning of this year, that budget "had shrunk to 130 billion tonnes," the British Broadcasting Corporation reports, "largely due to continued record emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming greenhouse gases like methane, but also improvements in the scientific estimates."
If countries keep up their current pace of about 40 billion tonnes of emissions per year, "130 billion tonnes gives the world roughly three years until that carbon budget is exhausted," BBC adds.
The remaining carbon budget for a 1.6 or 1.7 threshold could be exceeded within nine years, Phys.org says.
"Things are all moving in the wrong direction," warned lead author Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds. "We're seeing some unprecedented changes and we're also seeing the heating of the Earth and sea-level rise accelerating as well."
Those shifts "have been predicted for some time," he added, "and we can directly place them back to the very high level of emissions."
"Under any course of action, there is a very high chance we will reach and even exceed 1.5C and even higher," added study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London. "We are currently already in crunch time for higher levels of warming."
The news prompted an urgent call to action from King, now chair of the 18-member Climate Crisis Advisory Group.
The findings "make one thing clear-there is effectively no carbon budget remaining for either CO2 or methane emissions if humanity is to achieve a safe and manageable future," he said in an email release. "Policy-makers must adopt a comprehensive strategy focused on deep and rapid emissions reduction and removal, whilst also developing resilience against increasing extreme weather events."
With this year's UN climate summit, COP30, just a few months away in Belem, Brazil, "governments, financiers, and businesses must put this in focus," King added. "We do not have time to delay any further."
Carney must approach the dual challenges of climate change and Trump's aggression "with clarity, to demonstrate that Canada means business," King told The Mix.
"There is a real culture in Canada that is distinct from the culture of the United States," he said. So "protect your culture. Do what you can. But don't do it at any cost."
Climate change has been accelerating over the last five years, along with the loss and damage from an uptick in extreme weather events, and "the result of the election in the United States producing Trump as the president means the onus is now on all other countries to make much better commitments." The United Kingdom has already reduced its emissions by 54% from 1990 levels, and has set a target of 81% by 2035.
King said the Canadian prime minister "understands very clearly that in the UK, we have reduced our carbon dioxide footprint from 12 tonnes per person in 1995 to something like six tonnes, whereas you guys in Canada are well over 20 tonnes per person." So "Canada has an enormous amount of work to do to demonstrate that it understands why we're all suffering from these extreme weather events, and why the future of humanity is now severely at stake."
The European Union has set its sights on a 90% emissions reduction by 2040. And King rejected concerns that that target will be undercut by reliance on questionable carbon credits, or by member states that don't deliver on their promises-largely because renewable energy is now the cheapest form of electricity in any part of the world.
"That's the big driver for change," he said. But "we're seeing a terrible future unless we get action now from all progressive countries," and while "I have always admired Canada as a major progressive country, I can't say that on climate change," with its reliance on oil sands production that he cited as "probably the worst way of getting oil out of the ground."
But judging by Carney's record with the Bank of England, where he took "a very strong line" against banks investing in fossil fuel projects destined to become stranded assets, "he understands the risks of climate change. He doesn't need a lecture on this issue. So you are very fortunate to have Mark Carney in place....For any economy that is now based on oil, gas, or coal, there has to be a shift away from that, and Carney is frankly the right person to lead it."
King said he saw no need to connect trade and climate policy. But Carney has been musing about replacing carbon pricing with a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) with other "like-minded" countries, and the Liberal Party platform in the recent federal election said a Carney government would "promote fair competition with our trading partners" through a CBAM.