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.”"
Until these targets are month-to-month, they are greenwashing. A 24-year target is a mockery. Any kid planning for the olympics starts today and shows progress from day 1.
Too busy investigating seditious Flatlanders and building a defence plan, I guess.
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.
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.
Shipping. The reason is shipping.
Oh. Also mistrust of any comms gear built under influence of One Belt people.
It seems to me that you’re mistaken, the pagers blowing up and maiming children was an Israeli intelligence operation, not Chinese.
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
Without adding coal to the mix, China doesn’t have a reliable and independent way of increasing its energy generation to the necessary levels. However, China is also essentially the producer of all solar photovoltaics on Earth, the biggest producer of wind turbines and nuclear reactors, and it’s currently building the largest hydro plant on Earth. China is also the main supplier of electric batteries enabling electrification of buses and cars, and pioneers the installation of ultra high voltage electric transmission.
I’ve been to China and visited the yellow river, I don’t know what you mean by the smell. I live in Spain, you should visit the Tajo river going through Toledo and smell it before you judge China. If you’re from the US you could visit Flint.
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.
Ending imports from China is not realistic with our economic landscape but we absolutely need denser cities and mass transit.
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.
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.
5% is definitely too low, though they may have dropped some of its coal use when Russian energy suddenly became very cheap, their emissions continue to rise however.
Who could’ve known that abolishing the carbon tax, supporting the auto industry, cancelling the electric vehicle mandate, and subsidizing the oil industry would not lead to success in meeting those targets? It’s not as if we’ve all had thirty years to find out that getting to “net zero” is a difficult challenge that would require actual leadership in the right direction.
The carbon tax was never going to work. Making ordinary Canadians pay a tax to subsidize big oilsands producers was an own-goal of epic proportions by the Trudeau government. It didn’t matter at all that lower income families got a refund of that money later on. It’s a failure to understand basic human psychology: people will always prefer money NOW over a bit more money later, see Hyperbolic discounting.
That a carbon tax would work is pretty clear according to both conventional economics and common sense. It needed to be much higher to be effective enough to clearly demonstrate that. Persuading people to accept that is the kind of “leadership” I had in mind.
The largest Canadian cities use housing instead of raw energy exports, neither are wise. Canada has too much bureaucracy, high taxes, and too large a problem with oligopoly and NIMBY to be competitive with refining raw material.
Seriously. Can we stop fucking subsidizing oil? Solar is cheap now. The free market would handle the transition if we were weren’t giving them tax dollars.
Oil is an export that improves our current account balance and gives our dollar value, we only import solar for consumption, and we use the dollar value we get from our oil exports to do so. Oil is one of the most productive sectors of Canada with the highest productive hours per worker.
Free market? Sounds like communism to me.
Not only is solar dirt cheap and getting better (thanks China!) but battery technology is improving so drastically that any surplus energy we have can be easily stored for those (sometimes literal) rainy days. Wasn’t there a town in China that produced such a glut of electricity that they were exporting it to neighboring communities for free?
The problem is the massive opposition to all this by oil and automakers, and as time passed the Libertarians and worldwide conservatives all joined forced against the ‘bleeding heart liberal/Politically Correct/Woke’ forces to basically make it a point of their identity that they are as opposed to the environment and anything to help humanity. It is how we get people like RFK Jr. who makes a point of patronizing a burger joint that fries their stuff in beef tallow and uses disposable plastic straws (those straws have their uses for some people, but most people don’t really need them. I almost never use straws myself).
Is anyone at this point? Shits all fucked right now.
How can you without dramatically lowering living standards and getting voted out, exporting your emissions by buying Chinese coal produced products hardly makes you green, and that seems to be the main plan of green parties.
What makes you think even that would work? Sounds more like propaganda to prevent people from advocating for action. “The only way is to make your life worse!”
No one is serious about climate change anymore in politics.
Anti-woke politics in America have given complacent people carte blanche to ignore the problem at best, actively fight it at worst.
The new great dying has already begun, but we’re just barely getting started.
This is why I sometimes think ‘should I give up bad habits X or Y?’ part of me does, but the other part reminds me that my generation (elder millennials) are probably the last that will reach old age.
As Bernard Drainville of Québec’s CAQ once said, “lâchez-moi avec les GES”. Meaning something like “won’t you drop it with those greenhouse gases”. His last title was the head of the Ministry of Environment and Fight Against Climate Change. And he proudly announced that the ban on internal combustion vehicles planned in 2035 was scrapped. He cried on TV when his party announced that maybe building a third bridge over the St-Lawrence for $10G to save a few minutes may not entirely be a good idea.
He’s also the xenophobic idiot that introduced "“Québec’s Charter of Values”. It didn’t work but he still continues to this day to push his xenophobic agenda under the guise of secularism.
He is a despicable human being, and until recently he was responsible for the Ministry of Environment in our province, until he resigned. And the shittiest part is, he resigned to run as the next leader of the CAQ and could be our next premier.
In any way, whatever the next party in power, Québec probably won’t help. Nobody really wants to. Every election everyone just wants economic growth. Ask them what’s the most important every election? They’ll tell you the economy is the most important thing, obviously! And have you seen the price of gas?! It’s robbery! Gas should be cheaper!11!! That’s what’s important!
So no, we won’t meet any climate target.
oh well. Shrug.
Right now my primary concerns are not being at war and beong able to have a roof overhead and food for the family. Everything else will have to wait.
No country is on track, especially not the biggest polluters like China and Russia.
