A Simple Litmus Test for Climate Policy

Author’s note: this was written in the context of the 2021 Canadian election but is relevant to all oil-producing nations.

“Majority of remaining fossil fuels must stay underground.” “Climate change: Fossil fuels must stay underground, scientists say.” “To Avoid Climate Meltdown, Most Fossil Fuels Must Stay In The Ground.“

These were some of the headlines last week referring to a new paper published in Nature that quantified and regionally allocated what portion of proven fossil fuel reserves could be extracted while retaining a 50% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

In this pandemic era where “follow the science” has become an almost religious mantra for centrist politicians and in an election where candidates are insisting that we “listen to the experts” on climate, the response to this new study ought to be clear. “Science,” as it were, has found that 84% of Canada’s tar sands reserves, and in fact, 83% of all Canadian fossil fuel resources, must remain in the ground.

Following the science ought to mean a sharp U-turn for a Prime Minister who in 2016 said, “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.”

But you could’ve easily confused these headlines for ones we’ve seen countless times over the last two and a half decades. This paper is just the latest addition to a veritable library of research finding that the majority of known fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground if we hope to retain a livable planet.

A few months ago, the International Energy Agency — an institution born out of the 1970s oil shock and very much an energy industry insider — published a report called Net Zero by 2050 that argued that the world could not afford to invest in new fossil fuel projects. One headline read, “No new fossil fuel projects for net-zero: IEA.”

The UN Environment Programme started publishing something called the Production Gap Report annually in 2019 that compares planned fossil fuel expansion with the required emissions reductions for 1.5C and 2C targets.

In 2020, the Production Gap Report found that, “To follow a 1.5°C-consistent pathway, the world will need to decrease fossil fuel production by roughly 6% per year between 2020 and 2030. Countries are instead planning and projecting an average annual increase of 2%, which by 2030 would result in more than double the production consistent with the 1.5°C limit.”

In 2019, Nature published a paper about “committed emissions” — the lifetime emissions expected from energy infrastructure, including oil and gas fields, pipelines, and more. That paper found that “committed emissions from existing and proposed energy infrastructure…represent more than the entire carbon budget that remains” for 1.5C.

In 2015, the Australian Climate Council published a report titled, “Unburnable Carbon: Why We Need to Leave Fossil Fuels in the Ground.” They concluded that, even with the far more dangerous 2C target (instead of 1.5C), “tackling climate change requires that most of the world’s fossil fuels be left in the ground, unburned.”

In 2011, Carbon Tracker published a report also titled “Unburnable Carbon” that coined the “carbon bubble” concept, arguing that financial markets face growing systemic risk because of a failure to price in the prospect of not burning known reserves. They found that as much as 80% of proven fossil fuel assets cannot be burned to avoid exceeding the world’s carbon budget for limiting warming to 2C.

In 1997, a report published by Greenpeace International found that burning all estimated fossil fuel reserves — and estimated reserves in the 1990s were substantially lower than today — could warm the world by more than 5C, rendering organized civilization as we know it impossible.

So when The Guardian and others report on this new study with headlines suggesting that the existence of “unburnable carbon” is new information, I feel like I’m having déjà vu.

We’ve known that climate change is caused by the burning of fossil fuels for more than half a century. We’ve known that we cannot burn all known fossil fuel assets for more than 25 years. We’ve known that our remarkably brittle global financial system faces immense risk because of the overvaluation of unburnable assets for a decade. And we’ve known that building any new fossil fuel infrastructure virtually eliminates our chances of limiting warming to 1.5C for years.

Despite knowing all of this, Canada’s Liberal government has the gall to tell us that they are following science. That they have the most “sincere” climate plan.

If policymakers were following science, we would have invested in a just transition in the late ’80s when scientists began warning publicly about the risks of and solutions to climate change. We would be well on our way to a fossil-free world by now and wouldn’t have experienced many of the devastating impacts we are facing in Canada today.

Instead, the federal government is building a pipeline that serves no purpose other than to make expanded production economically viable in Alberta’s oil sands, something that climate scientist James Hansen called “game over for climate” in 2012. And it’s supporting the development of Canada’s nascent LNG export industry, supplied with fracked gas from an area of northeast BC and Alberta accurately but heartbreakingly referred to as “the sacrifice zone.”

We don’t need more science to understand what the most basic litmus test for a serious climate plan should be in 2021: will you pursue a rapid, managed decline of the fossil fuel industry? If not, your plan is just gaslighting — and, I would argue, a crime against humanity and against life itself.