While the Liberals have accelerated their national carbon pricing schedule through 2030 and introduced legislation establishing national carbon reduction targets through 2050, they don’t appear to be willing to impose the kind of rigour that has characterized British policy. Some European Union countries have adopted a carbon budget, but Canada has been a holdout. It is the climate-policy embodiment of the old accountant’s adage about not being able to manage what you don’t measure. The approach is relatable to anyone who’s ever had to stretch their savings from one payday to the next. But once used, the money won’t come back. You can spend it on trips or a condo or appliances you don’t need. You have a certain amount at your disposal. The U.K.’s sixth carbon budget was released last December, proposing accelerated reductions over the next 15 years.Ī carbon budget is basically like a savings account or an annuity that will one day run out. The act allows some flexibility, and also provides penalties. In a pioneering piece of legislation, the Climate Change Act, the British Parliament decreed that the government must establish “carbon budget” – a precise accounting of how much carbon can be emitted each year over a specified period, with the caps stepping down annually until the country reaches its net-zero target. In 2008, a Labour government in the United Kingdom came up with an elegant solution that was striking in its simplicity and has, in the 13 intervening years, illustrated why clarity of measurement leads to actual reductions in carbon emissions. Instead, we fudge the way we account for progress and then wonder why we fail to make any. What has been mostly absent, however, are actionable benchmarks that clearly articulate whether government policies are actually making a difference. For years, of course, there have been fraught political and scientific battles about how to divvy up responsibility, what mitigation efforts look like, what gets measured, appropriate policy levers and so on. The particular challenge with these sorts of mega-targets is disaggregating the big numbers so individual countries and their governments know what they need to do. Aware of the risk of drifting priorities, the IEA also urges national governments to set “near-term milestones to get back on track.” The IEA report calls for “nothing less than a complete transformation of how we produce, transport and consume energy.” Cleaving to the IEA’s 30-year-goal means a “massive expansion” in renewables, electric vehicles, battery storage, clean hydrogen, and an end, by as soon as 2021, of the approval and construction of any new oil, gas and coal production – a come-to-Jesus moment for Canada’s oil and gas industry. (One Gt is equivalent to 1 billion tonnes.) Canada emitted well over half a gigatonnes in 2019. Current global emissions come to about 4.3 Gt. The Paris-based organization took direct aim at the global energy sector by laying out a “roadmap” for the magnitude of carbon reduction – about 420 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide – that will be required to prevent average temperatures from rising by more than the 1.5☌ threshold, beyond which damage to the atmosphere becomes irreversible. The issue of the legibility of climate policy, always important, came into even starker relief this week with the release of the International Energy Agency’s hefty Net Zero by 2050 report. If we were supposed to get to 20% below 1992 levels, but then the baseline got shifted to 2006 with some smaller reduction target, was there progress or did we all somehow fall for that old statistical trick that involves resizing the units on the y-axis? This formulation dates to the Kyoto Protocol, from the early 1990s, but each iteration confuses a new generation of concerned humans, likely because the goalposts always seem to be shimmying around the field. You know the equation, of course: ’s target is to reduce emissions to below levels by. Maybe it’s me, but I’ve long found the standard policy shorthand for carbon reduction to be frustratingly inscrutable when it comes to figuring out just how well or poorly we’re doing relative to our climate change goals.
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