Adedokun Waliyu 
While you seldom hear about it, Canada is a global leader in reducing the use of coal to generate electricity, the single largest source of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.
Forget about the so-called “carbon bomb” of Canada’s oil sands, a favourite target of Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault and other environmental radicals.
The oil sands generate 0.1% of global emissions, Canada’s entire oil and gas sector, 0.3%.
Canada’s emissions from all industrial energy sources, 1.5% of the global total, are too little to materially impact climate change, as Canada’s parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux has reported.
In 2012, Canadian climate scientists Andrew Weaver — a lead author for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former leader of B.C.’s Green party — and his colleague, Neil Swart, published research in Nature Climate Change concluding that while it was important to reduce emissions from oil, including the oil sands, the real global carbon bomb is coal.
The single largest source of rising emissions globally is the world’s thousands of coal-fired electricity plants, with countries like China, the world’s largest emitter, issuing permits to build the equivalent of two, large, coal-fired power plants per week.
If the rest of the world was as efficient as Canada at producing electricity without burning coal — the most carbon intensive fossil fuel — the global problem of rising emissions would be solved.
The reason is that we generate only 5.7% of our electricity from coal-fired power plants and we’re phasing them out.
By comparison, in Australia it’s 75%, in China almost 60%, South Korea more than 40%, Germany more than 30%, the U.S. 20%, Russia 18%.
Since 2005 — the Trudeau government’s base year for setting its emission reduction targets — emissions from Canada’s electricity sector have plummeted from 117.6 million tonnes annually to 51.7 million tonnes in 2021, the latest year for which government data are available.
That’s 56% below 2005 emissions — far surpassing the Liberal government’s 2030 target of 40% below 2005 levels.
On a per capita basis, Canada’s emissions from coal were 0.79 tonnes last year, according to independent global energy think tank Ember-climate.org.
That compares to 4.14 tonnes in Australia; 3.1 tonnes in China; 3.27 tonnes in South Korea; 1.77 tonnes in Germany; 2.02 tonnes in the U.S and 1.01 tonnes in Russia.
Canada is also well below the global average of 1.06 tonnes per capita.
A man cools off at a temporary misting station deployed by the city in the Downtown Eastside due to a heat wave, in Vancouver, Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2023.
The reasons for our low coal emissions are due to the fact non-emitting hydro and nuclear power are major sources of electricity generation in Canada.
Climate activists scoff at this by pointing out Canada’s emissions from coal are low because of an accident of geography — we live in a country with abundant hydro resources to generate electricity.
Of course, that’s the argument they avoid using when they complain Canada is among the world’s highest per capita industrial emitters from all energy sources.
Except that’s also an accident of geography — we live in the world’s second-largest, second-coldest country, with a relatively small population.
It’s not because everyone has an oil well in their backyard.
The most effective way Canada could help lower global emissions — as opposed to carbon taxes — would be to export our vast natural gas resources, which burn at half the carbon intensity of coal, to international markets, replacing coal-fired electricity and freeing Europe from its dependency on natural gas supplied by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
But because of the polices of the Trudeau government, we’re not even in the game.
