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Canada not on track to hit net-zero by 2050, or meet any climate targets: study (ca.news.yahoo.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said the Carney government is not serious about climate change. May, who supported Carney's budget in December, has since questioned the prime minister's word after accusing him of a climate policy flip-flop.

"If we're serious about emissions reduction, then we have to actually revisit some of the measures that have been eliminated since (Carney) took over," May told The Canadian Press.

"They're miles from hitting any of the Paris Agreement targets, and the prime minister did recommit to me on the floor of the House on Nov. 17 that this government is committed to the Paris Agreement and achieving its targets. So the emissions reduction update, the so-called climate competitiveness strategy — there's lots of highfalutin titles for what boils down to...(no) climate plan.""

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[–] 0 points 9 months ago (11 children)

Are any party running on taking away municipal zoning laws and forcing density and mass transit? Or what about ending imports from China and forcing reliability standards in the goods we buy?

If not I won't believe they are actually environmentalists, they are grifters and opportunists. They will gladly run mass immigration into massive urban sprawl, ballooning traffic and emissions, as they then tax fuel usage to raise home values near jobs.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    In what way would ending imports from China reduce emissions? Giving up buying from the most efficient manufacturing ecosystem in the world that also happens to be electrifying and moving to nuclear and renewables at an unmatched pace is not going to increaseefficiency. What more efficient alternative would we switch to? Canada will not be more likely to hit goals by moving currently outsourced industrial manufacturing from an extremely effecient ecosystem with economies of scale to somewhere like here that has no comparable efficiencies of scale, grid development, or ecosystem development. We would need massive industrial expansion here, including with our grid. Dramatically expanding hydro is going to require huge new projects in places that are harder to develop than our existing hydro. Trying to build out solar while not buying from China? Let's see how efficient that is. We should be taking advantage of China's efficiencies to complement and build out our own systems, not cutting them off. It's one planet we share, and efficiencies and harm reduction in the global manufacturing ecosystem is what we should aim for, which requires leveraging complimentarities, not reducing them.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (2 children)

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/China-electricity-prod-source-stacked.svg/1920px-China-electricity-prod-source-stacked.svg.png

    I think its a lot more coal. I am also unsure why we would carbon tax ourselves, making our own production more expensive, but maintain free trade with the largest coal user on the planet with little to no environmental laws. If you saw and smelt the rivers in China I think you'd realize what a dirty place it is.

    Heres a nice looking documentary on it that I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN0AVXZ_RrQ

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    Chinese emissions have plateaued and started falling. They actually dropped in 2025, including a 1% drop in Q4.

    Cutting off Chinese manufacturing and bringing it all here, including cutting out Chinese inputs to Canadian manufacturing, would not be more efficient at all. It would not be better for the environment. This is a fantasy. We would need massive industrial expansion. We would be making the global situation less efficient and more harmful by reducing complementary systems, increasing redundancies, and increasing industrial inefficiencies.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

    Ending imports from China is not realistic with our economic landscape but we absolutely need denser cities and mass transit.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago* (3 children)

    Its also not realistic to compete with a place that subsidizes its dirty energy it uses to manufacture goods. We need to stop cosplaying as green by exporting emissions while our per-capita living standards fall.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

    China is making strides in cleaning up their grid, it is by no means perfect. They still depend on coal for about 55% of their grid based on the most recently available data I could find, that dropped about 3% last year thanks to their expanding solar network.

    I do think our grid is much cleaner especially with our plans for new nuclear reactors. However we do not have the complex manufacturing network that China has.

    In saying that we should expand domestic production to strengthen our economic resiliency, especially for needs like housing, food and transportation. This transition can't be done quickly, doubly so if we're looking to minimize ecological impact, so in my mind China remains a necessary strategic partner.

    Edit: Fixed the statistic for coal use by China, the first source I used wildly underestimated it.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)
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