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

Tzeporah Berman is the co-founder of environmental nonprofit Stand.earth and the chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.
About 10 years ago, in a meeting with oil CEOs in Calgary, I heard it for the first time. “It’s not about production, it’s about emissions.” The statement had appeal. The idea was that if we focus not on limiting production of fossil fuels but on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, industry could work with environmentalists to mitigate climate change.
For a while it seemed to work. We built a consensus around policies that would cap emissions but not limit production if industry could crack the nut on affordable technologies that could reduce emissions per barrel. We could have our cake and eat it, too. And all the while avoid having to come to agreement on thornier issues of pipeline expansion projects, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and deep-water drilling.
Like all things that seem too good to be true, the promise of “let’s work together to focus on emissions not production” was, in fact, too good to be true.
Now, this mantra is everywhere, directing huge pools of government spending and setting the agenda for climate policy in Canada and beyond.
The mantra has been taken up by provinces regardless of political stripe. Alberta’s oil and gas production is at record levels and they are still fighting climate policy, while British Columbia is promoting its climate leadership and simultaneously expanding fracking and LNG. The common denominator is that whatever their position on climate policy, all of our governments seem hell-bent on boosting the root cause of the problem. Literally throwing gas on the fire.
It’s become the implicit rallying cry for the Trudeau Liberals, who have celebrated plans to plant two billion trees, launch carbon pricing and invest in carbon capture technology. Their national climate strategy revolves around sucking up mythical amounts of carbon from the sky like some kind of titanic, Spandex-clad superhero.
The trouble is the math doesn’t add up and today this mantra is not only unrealistic, it’s dangerous.
It took me a while to realize that this line of thinking is actually underpinned by a sophisticated postdenial strategy of the big oil and gas companies. After nearly 50 years of indisputable climate science (which oil companies buried and denied), Big Oil has conceded that, yes, climate change is real, it’s here, and carbon emissions are its primary cause. But rather than limiting production of their toxic products or investing in safer and cheaper alternatives, they’ve distracted us with inflated projections for technologies that have failed to deliver for decades.
Exxon chief executive Darren Woods perfectly encapsulated this ethos when he confidently told a global climate conference that the path forward from climate catastrophe was more sophisticated projections of technological climate fixes. “Our view is there’s a need to do more math in this space,” he said, propping up a popular oil strategy to use factually suspect calculations for failed carbon capture and storage tech (CCS) to sow uncertainty and undermine proven climate science.
It’s a very similar PR strategy to when 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.
In other words, Ottawa’s current climate mantra prevents us from reducing production of the three products that actually underpin runaway global warming: oil, gas and coal. It’s putting a filter on the climate crisis and saying the risks of the oil-soaked status quo are over. Unless we change our tune, this slippery phrase will condemn us to apocalyptic world warmed far past 2 degrees because these tactics are not working.
So-called “natural solutions” such as planting trees may exalt vegetation with Christ-like abilities to turn carbon into clean air. But the fact of the matter is that slapping a few saplings into razed old-growth rubble, (which is the on-the-ground practice of Justin Trudeau’s flashy tree slogan) only enables Canadian logging to destroy precious ecosystems that would have otherwise worked quite well as natural carbon sinks. Those monocultures of tiny trees (typically black spruce) that the Liberals laud as climate action are vulnerable to forest fire, inefficient at capturing carbon and, in fact, often die in the ground because they can’t survive the degraded soil conditions destroyed by continuing logging activity.
Carbon capture and storage is even more of a pipe dream. Many existing CCS plants have failed or are dramatically underperforming. In May, Edmonton-based Capital Power shuttered its $2.4-billion CCS project and the CCS project installed at SaskPower’s Boundary Dam 3 was declared an “underperforming failure.”
These two examples are hardly the only ones. Globally, CCS projects are proving slow, expensive and inefficient. For this reason, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the largest group of climate scientists, recently denounced CCS as having the highest cost and the lowest possible contribution to reducing new emissions. And the International Energy Agency encouraged global leaders to focus on “most cost-effective” solutions, not expensive and unpredictable techno fixes such as CCS. From the lion’s own mouth, BP, Shell and Exxon have dialled back their climate commitments, walking back some of their promises to reduce emissions and research viable energy alternatives. These oil conglomerates know CCS is failing and, as 2030 approaches, they’ve realized they can’t keep pretending speculative tech will balance their unchecked emissions.
Yet, despite the ample evidence that CCS isn’t working, Canada continues to invest in these projects and the fossil fuel corporations that peddle them. In 2023, Canada put more than $1.3-billion in the pockets of oil and gas companies for CCS. Just last month Ottawa committed another $1-billion of taxpayers money to the new CCS project proposed by Strathcona Resources Ltd. Along with the many other billions spent to prop up the industry, federal spending on fossil fuel corporations in the past four years could have fully funded every major wind and solar project in Canada from 2019 to 2021 12 times over, according to the organization Environmental Defence. If these companies wish to pour their own windfall profits back into these experiments, by all means go ahead. But public money should go toward actual climate solutions and emergency preparedness, not the delusional whims of oil CEOs turned mad scientists.
I could go on about how disappointing these approaches are, and how big polluters know it. But what’s equally dangerous about the current climate mantra isn’t just how much its tactics are falling, but which policies this obsession with removing emissions is crowding out.
Ottawa’s approach focuses almost entirely on the demand side of the emissions problems: soak up the carbon in the air and ask Canadians to pay for their consumption. Political scientists and economists have critiqued this move by likening it to ”cutting with one half of the scissors.” Meanwhile, more serious regulation (like that which would deter climate meltdown) of polluting industries, such as the long-delayed promise for an emissions cap, seem lost adrift on a sea of inaction and weaker everyday.
This is no coincidence. Decades of oil and gas lobbying, PR and ads have misled our leaders into believing we can endlessly expand fossil fuel production because unproven technologies or sublime trees will simply clean up after us, will save us. By having our national climate strategy rely on unsubstantiated carbon capture projections, Ottawa has drank the fossil fuel Kool-Aid and then asked for a refill.
What I’m going to call “magical tree sermons” and “fetishized CCS bad math” are distracting us from real climate solutions. And that’s their biggest danger. While Ottawa flusters over flashy carbon removal schemes, our emissions are only going up and up. We have spent 30 years saying we just need to regulate emissions and watching the parts-per-million of carbon trapped in the atmosphere tick upward. As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed in June, carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever before.
Focusing on capturing emissions is clearly failing us. What we produce today will be what we use tomorrow. 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.
We have to stop pretending we are “in a transition” and “phasing out fossil fuels” while we are building more of the problem. The obvious solution is to stop expanding fossil fuels in a world on fire. That is, it’s time to cut with both halves of the scissors: emissions and production. That means, as both the International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have confirmed, no new oil, gas or coal projects and a robust plan to decommission existing infrastructures. It means divesting from fossil fuels. It means absolute limits to emissions and a production decline. It means having the courage to break rank and lead with a new climate mantra, one that represents rather than buries the urgency of the crisis.