Canada Environment Minister, Steven Guilbeault on Monday said the country will take a “hard long look” at a call from global climate scientists to hit its long-term greenhouse gas emissions targets 10 years earlier than planned.
This is coming after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world is teetering dangerously close to missing its critical targets to keep global warming in check in its latest report issued on Monday.
The panel’s previous reports have warned that global warming must be limited to less than 2 C, and as close to 1.5 C as possible to avoid more severe climate crisis.
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The Monday report said the world is getting close to its last chance to prevent the worst of climate change’s future harms.
According to the panel which was made of dozens of international climate scientists, worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions by 2035 need to be less than half of what they were in 2019, and wealthy nations need to aim for net-zero emissions by 2040.
Most of them, including Canada, have targeted 2050 for their net-zero commitment, which means that emissions are reduced so much that whatever is left is captured by technology or nature.
Guilbeault says Canada will take its time to study the report as it can’t change its targets on a whim, because a target is meaningless without a realistic plan to reach it.
“It’s one thing to simply say, ‘Well, you know, we want to reach this goal,’ but we have to give ourselves the means to get there. We do that now in Canada for 2050. We will obviously need to take a second hard long look at what the IPCC is proposing for 2040,” he said.
Canada has set at least eight different emissions targets since 1988, and has failed to meet any of them to date. Its next target in 2030 hinges heavily on being able to ratchet down emissions from the oil and gas sector so they are between 55 and 60 per cent of what they were in 2005. Based on emissions levels in 2020, meeting the 2030 goal would mean cutting about 23 million tonnes of emissions a year, on average.
Story was adapted from Global News.
