Members of Alberta’s governing United Conservative Party are debating whether to abandon existing net-zero targets at the party’s annual general meeting in Red Deer this week – a move that would further signal the province’s departure from global and national priorities for mitigating emissions.
Drawing on longstanding pro-CO2 rhetoric in climate denialism, Policy Resolution #12 asks the government to scrap its decarbonization goals, remove the designation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and recognize the greenhouse gas as a “foundational nutrient for all life on Earth.”
“I think it has a very good chance of passing,” says Debra Davidson, a researcher in climate change impacts at the University of Alberta. “It’s not at all out of step with the position of Alberta’s United Conservative Party with respect to climate change mitigation and the energy industry for quite some time now.”
If it passes, the effect of the policy would be mainly symbolic, Davidson says, not only because it would be non-binding, but also because the Alberta government has already signalled that it has little intention of achieving its net-zero targets. Last year, for example, the province imposed a moratorium on large wind and solar projects, which led to 53 projects being cancelled and the estimated loss of $91 million in tax revenues. In the past five years, the UCP has also repealed the former NDP government’s carbon levy, opened the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains to coal mines, and withdrawn funding for a public transit project in Calgary.
As Stephen Legault, senior manager of Alberta energy transition at Environmental Defence, has said, the resolution is “already de facto policy.”
On the other hand, Alberta did release its Emissions Reduction and Energy Development Plan (ERED) in April 2023, aiming for a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. However, despite these commitments, “There is no evidence that Alberta has taken any action to regulate oil sands emissions as noted in the ERED plan,” says Simon Dyer, deputy executive director at the Pembina Institute. This summer, the Alberta Energy Regulator projected a 17% increase in oil sands production by 2033.
Instead, the provincial government “has focused on criticizing the federal plan to reduce oil and gas emissions,” Dyer says. Premier Danielle Smith is an outspoken opponent of Ottawa’s planned emissions cap and has launched a national “scrap the cap” ad campaign.
Even if the policy proposal mainly serves to underscore existing inaction on emissions, what’s truly notable, Davidson says, is “the degree to which it indicates a full-scale legitimation of disinformation.”
An energy policy based on fiction
The rationale for the proposal is largely erroneous. It takes a few grains of truth – that the carbon cycle is necessary and that carbon dioxide benefits plants – and couches them in the mistaken ideas that current CO2 levels are near their lowest in more than 1,000 years and that “the earth needs more CO2 to support life.”
But the carbon in our atmosphere isn’t even close to being at its lowest levels, says James Miller, a researcher on global climate change at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
“Except for the recent period of increase, CO2 levels have been below 300 ppm for thousands of years,” he writes in an email to Corporate Knights. The atmospheric reading of CO2 reached 420 parts per million last year, according to the World Meteorological Association, which notes in a press release that “the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3–5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2–3°C warmer and sea level was 10–20 meters higher than now.”
And while increased carbon dioxide can be helpful for plants when everything else is equal, Miller explains, “everything else is not equal, and adding more CO2 leads to increasing temperatures, which can lead to less plant productivity.”