Trudeau abandons green election promises, lacks real climate plan
With the recent National Energy Board approval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline and Justin Trudeau’s enthusiastic post-election remarks to the effect that Canada can build pipelines and address climate change concurrently, it is time to take stock of just where the current government is heading us.
Put bluntly, it remains questionable whether Canada can meet the very modest Conservative 2020 GHG reduction target should the Energy East and Kinder Morgan pipelines get the green light. Worse still, the Trudeau Liberals do not have a serious plan on climate change.
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Signs of the times
Like a dog hanging on to its bone, the Liberals seem to be oblivious to the clear signs of the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. This despite the staggering warning signs. Here are just a few of the biggest ones:
1) 90% of all new global electrical generation capacity in 2015 came from renewables
2) Global emissions have remained flat since 2013
3) China’s coal consumption declined in both 2014 and 2015
4) US coal producers representing 45% of US coal output have gone into bankruptcy
5) 21 countries have experienced economic growth while diminishing their respective emissions since 2000
6) The tipping point when an electric vehicle becomes comparably priced to a conventional one is predicted to occur as early as 2020 – with the overall cost to the consumer being cheaper due to lower fueling and maintenance costs.
7) China is a world-leader, with 331,000 electric vehicles sold in 2015. By 2020, it is expected to manufacture 2 million eco-vehicles/year and have 5 million on the road
8) Ford, Hyundai-Kia, Volkswagen and Volvo all have ambitious plans for a wide range of electric and hybrid models by 2020. Meanwhile, a full 10% of BMW’s North American sales in April 2016 were electric vehicles and 25% of all 2015 new vehicle sales in Norway were electric
9) The Chief Financial Officer of Suncor, Alister Cowan in April 2015 having candidly said that “The years of large, multi-billion projects are probably gone“
10) The Canadian oil and gas sector will see just $17 Billion in revenues for 2016 vs. $30 Billion in project spending (which is already a 62% decline from the previous year)