Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is poised to miss his 2020 target to reduce Canada’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions linked to human-induced climate change by 99.2%, based on his government’s latest publicly available data.
So of course we should take his 2030 and 2050 emission reduction targets seriously, right?
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This is but one example of the fantasy world in which political discussions today about climate change are conducted in Canada and globally.
After the Trudeau government was elected in 2015, then environment and climate change minister Catherine McKenna said the emission reduction targets it inherited from the previous Stephen Harper government would be the minimum — “the floor” as she described it — of what Trudeau and Co. would achieve.
In 2016, Trudeau and McKenna amended that to simply achieving Harper’s targets — reducing emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030.