Source: www.circleofblue.org

As Canadian politicians promise a carbon emissions fix, the country burns. Here’s what you need to know

Fetched 2026-07-29 08:00 from www.circleofblue.org

Reading Summary (AI-generated)

Reading Summary: Canada’s Wildfires, Emissions, and Carbon Capture Promises

Key Facts

• Canadian oilsands emissions more than doubled from 41 million tonnes (2007) to 92 million tonnes (2024), making oil and gas Canada’s largest source of emissions
• Over 24 years, carbon capture across all Canadian commercial operations removed only 68.7 million tonnes — less than one year of oilsands emissions
• PM Mark Carney’s deal with Alberta commits five oilsands companies to capture only 6 million tonnes/year by 2035, against an estimated 20 million tonnes/year in new emissions from increased production tied to the new pipeline
• Canada has nine commercial carbon capture operations; a government report once claimed Canada could theoretically capture 600 million tonnes/year — a figure vastly unmet
• Wildfires are currently burning in every province and territory in Canada, sending toxic smoke to cities including Toronto and New York

Who Is Affected

• First Nations communities — described as having been burned out entirely by wildfires
• Evacuees across Canada from active fire zones
• Urban populations in Toronto and New York experiencing toxic air quality
• Alberta oilsands producers (five unnamed companies party to Carney’s deal)
• Canadian Climate Institute — cited for emissions projections

Policy/Legal Angle

• The Trudeau-era oil and gas emissions cap — proposed but never implemented — was explicitly rejected by PM Mark Carney as part of a deal with Alberta
• In 2022, a group of oilsands producers voluntarily proposed cutting 22 million tonnes/year by 2030 through carbon capture, but fought the government cap designed to enforce that commitment
• Carney’s Alberta deal substitutes the cap with a carbon capture and storage network, with scaled-back targets and a 2045 horizon
• Pattern of federal promises on carbon capture stretches from Stephen Harper (2007) through Trudeau to Carney — with no binding regulatory mechanism ever enacted

Blog Angles

1. Wildfires and Water Supply: The article focuses on air quality and emissions, but California water bloggers could ask — how are Canada’s record fire seasons affecting watersheds, reservoir sedimentation, and transboundary water quality in the Great Lakes basin? The Circle of Blue placement in the Great Lakes section signals this connection is underexplored.
2. Carbon Capture vs. Real Emissions Reductions — A Water Infrastructure Parallel: Canada’s pattern of favoring expensive, unproven technological fixes over direct regulation mirrors debates in California water policy (e.g., desalination vs. conservation). Does relying on carbon capture delay the emissions reductions needed to protect snowpack and freshwater supplies in the American West?
3. Smoke, Air Quality, and the Water-Energy Nexus: Wildfire smoke reaching New York raises questions about how cross-border pollution events stress municipal water systems and public health infrastructure — a direct angle for policy-focused water bloggers tracking climate-driven cascading failures.

Full Text

By Carl Meyer ; This article was originally published by The Narwhal

Wildfires are raging in every province and territory across Canada, leaving entire First Nations communities burnt, upending the lives of thousands of evacuees and creating plumes of toxic smoke dirtying the air in major cities like Toronto and New York .

While some politicians claim the out-of-control wildfires are being primarily caused by improper forest management, scientists agree that climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, is the main culprit.

To stop contributing to the problem, the Canadian government could be implementing strict limits on the oil and gas industry for their carbon dioxide emissions. But Prime Minister Mark Carney has rejected that idea , opting instead for an unproven technological fix.

In doing so, The Narwhal reported this week , the prime minister has become the latest in a long line of politicians to make big promises about carbon capture and storage to cut industrial emissions, despite the technology’s meager track record in Canada.

Read on to learn more.

1. Climate change from fossil fuels is making wildfires more severe and more frequent

Climate change is altering rainfall and storm patterns, creating hotter and drier conditions and more lighting strikes, causing fire seasons to start earlier and last longer and making those fires burn hotter, grow bigger and spread quicker. The result: Canada’s most recent fire seasons have been among the worst on record .

There’s only one real way to slow this escalating problem, scientists say: stop using so much coal, oil and natural gas, the fossil fuels that generate the emissions that are trapping heat in the atmosphere, changing the climate and leading to more extreme weather.

In Canada, the oil and gas industry is the country’s largest source of emissions. That’s partly because the type of petroleum in Alberta’s oilsands, the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserve, requires extra electricity, steam, fuel and machines to turn it into usable products like gasoline compared to some other oil deposits. Oilsands emissions have grown from 41 million tonnes in 2007 to 92 million tonnes in 2024.

To stop contributing to the problem, the Canadian government could be implementing strict limits on the oil and gas industry for their carbon dioxide emissions. But Prime Minister Mark Carney has rejected that idea , opting instead for an unproven technological fix.

In doing so, The Narwhal reported this week , the prime minister has become the latest in a long line of politicians to make big promises about carbon capture and storage to cut industrial emissions, despite the technology’s meager track record in Canada.

Read on to learn more.

1. Climate change from fossil fuels is making wildfires more severe and more frequent

Climate change is altering rainfall and storm patterns, creating hotter and drier conditions and more lighting strikes, causing fire seasons to start earlier and last longer and making those fires burn hotter, grow bigger and spread quicker. The result: Canada’s most recent fire seasons have been among the worst on record .

There’s only one real way to slow this escalating problem, scientists say: stop using so much coal, oil and natural gas, the fossil fuels that generate the emissions that are trapping heat in the atmosphere, changing the climate and leading to more extreme weather.

In Canada, the oil and gas industry is the country’s largest source of emissions. That’s partly because the type of petroleum in Alberta’s oilsands, the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserve, requires extra electricity, steam, fuel and machines to turn it into usable products like gasoline compared to some other oil deposits. Oilsands emissions have grown from 41 million tonnes in 2007 to 92 million tonnes in 2024.

3. Instead of capping emissions, Carney is betting on carbon capture technology

Carney’s deal with Alberta promises not to follow through with a proposal, first made during the government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau, to implement an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector.

A cap is a government mandate to prevent emissions from rising beyond a certain point. It’s something the industry itself previously said was achievable: in 2022 a group of oilsands producers came out with a plan they said could cut 22 million tonnes of annual emissions by 2030. That plan involved carbon capture, a technology that filters out carbon dioxide from industrial exhaust streams and stores it so it doesn’t get released into the air.

But even though the Trudeau government proposed the emissions cap as a way to ensure the industry followed through with that plan, oil companies fought the cap proposal and Carney eventually agreed not to implement it.

Now, Carney’s deal with Alberta includes an agreement to build a carbon capture and storage network in the province, but the ambition has been dialed back considerably . Five oilsands companies agreed in July to use carbon capture technology to remove just six million tonnes of emissions per year by 2035, and a “range of technologies” to eventually capture 16 million tonnes per year by 2045.

Compare that with an average of 20 million tonnes a year in new emissions from the oilsands that the Canadian Climate Institute has estimated will result from higher production levels to feed the new oil pipeline in the deal.

4. The track record for carbon capture of industrial emissions in Canada is bleak

Carbon capture and storage is real, and in use at nine commercial operations in Canada. But the technology is expensive and requires lots of new construction to scale up, while globally it has underperformed , according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

The results speak for themselves. Over a 24-year period, 68.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide was captured across Canada, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. That means the oilsands added more to the atmosphere in one year than carbon capture technology has ever stopped from industrial sources over more than two decades.

While oilsands emissions more than doubled from 2007 to 2024, the cumulative amount of carbon being captured from industrial sources is still “on the order of several [million] tonnes per year,” a Natural Resources Canada spokesperson told The Narwhal.

But that’s relatively tiny, compared to the eye-popping figure of 600 million tonnes a year that a government report had once claimed Canada could theoretically capture.

5. Carney’s support for carbon capture makes him the latest in a long line of politicians to tout its benefits

Despite this underperformance, both Liberal and Conservative federal governments in Canada keep projecting optimism about carbon capture’s prospects, dating back to former prime minister Stephen Harper, who gave a speech in Edmonton in 2007 that sounds strangely familiar now. This week, The Narwhal peered into the historical public record — and the national archives — to show just how real the enthusiasm has been.

In Edmonton, Harper talked about “the exciting new technology called carbon capture and storage.” He told Canadians that, “instead of pumping tonnes of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, we may be able to collect it from our oilsands … and pump it deep underground where it will remain for eternity.” He projected confidence, saying he felt “the era of empty rhetoric on the environment is over” and “we’re taking real action that will produce real, tangible results.”

In 2011, his then-natural resources minister Joe Oliver called Canada “a world leader in carbon capture and storage” and “in an excellent position to use this technology on a wide scale.” (Oliver recently wrote an op-ed opposing the latest carbon capture proposal in the oilsands, in part because of the technology’s spotty track record.)

After Trudeau won power in 2015, his first natural resources minister, Jim Carr, told a ballroom full of people in New York in 2016 that carbon capture is one of “the most pressing issues of the day.” One of Carr’s successors, Seamus O’Regan, would go on to describe carbon capture as “an integral part of lowering emissions” that was part of “how we get to net zero.” In 2021, he said Canada was “on the cusp of doing a lot of these things.”

Last year, Carney’s minister of energy and natural resources, Tim Hodgson, a former oilsands company board member, told a Calgary business crowd that the government, as much as private industry, should be pulling for the carbon capture project in the oilsands. In a faint echo of Harper, he said this government “will not be a government of talk, but a government of action.”

Lead image: Smoke from wildfires has clouded the skies in much of Canada and parts of the northeastern United States this summer, reminding residents of the consequences of continued fossil fuel dependence. Photo: © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

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