Our strategy of reducing emissions but not fossil fuel production isn’t working

Tzeporah Berman draws on her years of Canadian and international climate change work to offer an insightful and biting critique of current Canadian efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We’ve been lulled into ineffective actions by the seductive idea that reducing emissions while not cutting fossil fuel production will allow us to have our cake and eat it too: industry and environmental groups working together, fossil fuel revenues while cleaning the air. Unfortunately, what sounds too good to be true is too good to be true.

Berman spells out in concrete terms how celebrated plans—whether to plant billions of trees or use new technologies to capture and store carbon—have failed. Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever. She likens it to how “cigarette companies responded to the U.S. surgeon-general’s lung cancer warning by launching filters. The filter didn’t solve the health risks; it only deceived consumers into believing it did.”

Our current, almost singular focus on the demand side of the emissions problem is like “cutting with one half of the scissors.” Berman makes a strong case that we need “to cut with both halves of the scissors: emissions and production.” And that this can be done responsibly. “This doesn’t mean turning off the taps overnight but it does mean stopping expansion of fossil fuels, and managing a planned wind down that leaves no one behind.”