As Canada congratulated itself in Dubai on climate leadership, its oil executives milled about the climate conference.
Like the draft agreement that came out yesterday at COP28, in Dubai—which softened language about phasing out fossil fuels to “reducing” them and “efforts towards” substituting “unabated” fossil fuels—Canada is awkwardly trying to live with two contradictory ideas about climate change. The world has to stop using fossil fuels, and yet, for a petrostate, letting go isn’t easy.
During the United Nations’ climate meeting, Canada has been busy doubling down on its climate bona fides. Late last week, the environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, held an impromptu press huddle in the glaring sun outside the plenary halls, the national flags of dozens of countries fluttering around the gathered reporters. Canada had just been appointed by Sultan Al Jaber, the president of the conference, to push countries negotiating on fossil fuels to come to some sort of agreement, and Guilbeault said that Canada had already begun working with a number of delegations on that front. He also wanted to talk about the country’s announcement that it would put an old-fashioned emissions cap on its fossil-fuel sector, which would require companies to cut emissions by at least 35 percent by 2030, through direct reductions and emissions trading. Environmental groups have been pushing the idea for years, and some members have been seen around COP wearing blue baseball caps with EMISSIONS embroidered in white thread. (An emissions cap, get it?) Caroline Brouillette, the executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, ceremonially handed a hat to the environment minister, who accepted it but didn’t put it on.
Canada has been taking steps to decrease fossil fuels; it also comes fourth in the world for the volume of oil it produces. Much of that oil is bitumen oil (also known as oil sands or “tar sands” crude), which is among the heaviest, stickiest, dirtiest form of crude oil, so viscous that it needs to be diluted in order to flow through pipelines. Producing this oil means that Canada has one of the highest rates of emissions per barrel in the world.
This type of doublethink is at the foundation of this year’s COP. Any language to come out of the negotiations about decreasing fossil-fuel use would go further than the world ever has on this point; at the same time, the conference has essentially doubled as a trade show for the energy industry, with oil executives holding sessions on carbon capture and OPEC hosting a pavilion. It has been a strange portmanteau of visions for the future, but in the final days, the outcome has seemed to lurch to the side of oil interests. Some amount of change may still yet come out of COP, but for now it is still minimal and incremental enough that one Canadian oil-industry group executive, Mark Cameron, told me that “we’re not losing sleep” over any agreement that nudges the world to decrease its use only of “unabated” fossil fuel.
Read: What is anyone really doing at COP?
Canada’s “party overflow” list included 28 employees of fossil-fuel companies, who would be allowed to observe some negotiations. Several more Canadian industry representatives got badges as part of the host country’s initiative to welcome more industry to the table. Cameron, the vice president of external relations for the Pathways Alliance, an industry group for Canada’s six major oil-sands producers that focuses on emissions reductions, was hanging around the sidelines of Guilbeault’s Friday press conference. He wanted to hear what the minister would say but would rather not be seen directly in the mix, he told me. He didn’t say why, but I noticed that members of the Canadian group Environmental Defence were also in the huddle, a group that recently called out the Pathways Alliance’s financial investment in emissions-cutting technology as “negligible.”
Cameron and I sat down in the shade just before the huddle started, and talked about what he, a fossil-fuel employee, was doing here. The idea that fossil-fuel executives were present to influence the meeting’s outcome was a “misunderstanding,” he told me. Instead, for oil execs, COP is “much like CERAWeek,” the big annual oil-and-gas conference in Houston—an opportunity to compare notes. “I haven’t talked to any government officials about the actual negotiations,” he said. Still, I figured he must have thoughts on the talks happening in the building behind us. The central debate at COP is whether countries will agree to a “phase out” of fossil fuels—which scientists say is necessary to avert catastrophic global warming—or a more diluted agreement. “I think if the language was ‘phase down’ or ‘phase out’ of fossil fuels, we’d be quite concerned,” Cameron said. “But phase down of ‘unabated’ fossil fuels?… That aligns with our strategy.” The Pathways Alliance members have said that they will strive for net-zero emissions from their drilling by 2050, largely through carbon capture and storage projects.
As of yesterday, the draft agreement does seem to align with that strategy: It calls for “enhanced efforts” toward “substitution of unabated fossil fuels,” which would leave room for countries to continue and even increase their production of fossil fuels, so long as a plan was in place to “abate” the emissions from drilling at some point. But the technology to capture carbon from oil drilling and store it long-term is not available on a commercial scale and would cost some $30 trillion more by 2050 than switching to renewable energy, according to an Oxford University study published this month. Still, it is the industry’s preferred caveat to any restriction on its business.
I asked Cameron what he thought of Canada’s new emissions cap. “It’s a stretch goal,” he said, but “technically, it’s achievable.” Then he rattled off everything still in the way of it actually taking effect: cooperation with federal and provincial government, a fiscal framework, a policy framework, a regulatory framework.
So you’re expecting it to take quite a while, I said.
“Yup,” he replied. “We’re not planning a voluntary phase-down. I don’t expect the government of Canada to do that either.” In fact, oil-sands companies plan to increase production in Canada. “We’re obviously responsive to the market,” Cameron said. “Our market is mostly U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast refineries. If they’re continuing to buy it, we’ll continue to sell it.”
Even an agreement among countries at this COP to a fossil-fuel phase-out would not be legally binding. Rather it would inform how those countries decide to meet their commitments under the Paris Agreement, and it might make weaning off fossil fuels an easier process if many countries are doing it in tandem. But without clear timelines and specific targets in the agreement, the group project would devolve into status quo.
Read: A radical idea to break the logic of oil drilling
Rhona DelFrari, the head of sustainability for Cenovus, a major Canadian oil-sands company, echoed the same idea when I spoke with her by phone: If Canada stopped producing oil, she told me, someone would take its place. She had just landed in Toronto; she had been on Canada’s official “party overflow” list in Dubai and had met with other countries to see how they were cleaning up their heaviest-emitting sectors, she said. “The entire Canadian industry could shut down, and that’s not going to have any impact on climate change as long as the demand for the products is still there,” she told me. All that would do, in her view, is chase production to countries with worse human-rights standards. If oil is still going to be produced, shouldn’t it be in a country with strong human-rights laws? Plus, her company is planning to cut emissions dramatically, she said: “We feel that we are earning the right to be the oil that is produced for decades to come.” The small island nations, several of which form an important negotiating bloc at COP, say that their countries will literally disappear if fossil-fuel production continues apace for that long. I asked if their concerns had reached her. They had, she said: “They share the same concerns that we do when it comes to climate change.” But, she said, that’s why her company is cutting emissions.
But most emissions from fossil fuels—80 to 90 percent—come after they’re burned for fuel, not at the point of drilling. I brought this up with Cameron, who told me, “We can’t control the way that our product is used once it leaves our plant gates or our pipelines.” Julia Levin, Environmental Defence’s associate director of national climate, likened this to an argument tobacco companies once made—that they weren’t responsible for the cancer caused by smoking—and reminded me that the oil-and-gas industry has spent millions of dollars on influence campaigns to sow doubt about climate science. “They’ve known their products do that, and they’ve done everything in their power to continue to delay the climate transition,” she told me.
Both Cameron and DelFrari acknowledged that oil demand for gasoline and diesel will probably decline as electric vehicles become more popular; both see a rosy future for oil sands in “noncombustibles”—making asphalt, for instance, or more plastic, especially to help give people in developing countries the standard of living they “deserve,” DelFrari said, as demand for phones, computers, and other such products climbs. I was reminded of the American oil companies discovered to be lobbying Kenya to reverse its strict plastic bans, and which see Africa as central to plastic growth as backlash in the U.S. leads to less American plastic consumption.
Then I thought of the Canadian wildfires this past summer, which ravaged the country, sending thick smoke over cities and destroying 37 million acres of forest. Scientists found that the conditions for those fires were made twice as common by climate change, driven by burning fossil fuels. Did living through that hellish summer ever make DelFrari second-guess her job? “No,” she said. “It makes me even more focused on doing what’s within our control to address emissions, which we are. And I just know that, you know, as this energy transition happens, there’s still going to be a need for our product for a long time to come.”
So if the world is still burning oil, she wants it to be Canada’s? I asked her.
“You bet,” she said.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
visit website
