I'm sorry I couldn't prepare a specific submission for my presentation today, but I'll basically be presenting some highlights of a collaborative and multidisciplinary research project on how to translate our international climate commitments into guidance for how we assess projects, policies, and programs in this country. It's a project that was funded by the Metcalf Foundation.
I'll also try not to repeat what my colleagues have said, because some of the materials covered by Ms. Vaillancourt and Mr. DeRochie overlap with what I was going to present. I'll mostly focus on climate information, which to me is the flip side or the dark side of energy information, in the sense that it's the side of the cost and the damages that are overall still invisibly being offloaded on to society as a whole. I think what passes as economic analysis in this country could be more accurately described as a listing of benefits. Unless we're disclosing the costs and the damages that are being socialized through the privatization of those benefits, we're only just listing benefits, not doing actual economic analyses.
I have two preliminary remarks before diving in on climate. I guess the gold standard in law—because I am a lawyer—in terms of providing information would probably be to adopt the Aarhus Convention, which was adopted by European countries. It provides for a right to information, a human right to information in environmental matters.
I also support, as Mr. DeRochie pointed out, one of the main recommendations of the expert panel on the NEB modernization, which is the creation of an independent energy information agency that could provide credible and critical data information and analysis for informing energy policy and strategy. I fully support this recommendation, and I'm somewhat sad that it has not been picked up in the current law reform exercise being undertaken by the federal government.
Put simply, I fear that not having good climate information allows what I call the second wave of climate denialism, in the sense that now pretty much everyone seems to agree that the problem is real—well, maybe not everyone south of the border—but we still fail to recognize the scale and the pace of change that is required to try to avoid the most dangerous aspects of climate change. That means we risk focusing our actions on the wrong priorities. We risk focusing on making reductions at the margin, trying to make our oil slightly greener, slightly more efficient; whereas what's actually required right now is transformational change.
We risk locking in “greenhouse gas intensive” infrastructure, which will make it almost impossible for us to reach our commitments in the future. As an example—one that is in the news a lot these days—the existing Trans Mountain pipeline has been in the ground since 1950. That's roughly 70 years. If we put a new one in the ground, I'm guessing the company will expect to exploit it for the next 50 to 70 years, and that's way past the deadline by which we need to be fully decarbonized. Not having that information allows some to make propositions that say this pipeline goes hand in hand with the environment. I think having good information would disqualify that statement.
Very briefly, we can understand climate change and what we can do about it by using models. I'm very happy to see that Madam Vaillancourt was testifying for the Trottier project. I'll skip the quotes that I was going to use from them.
Basically, models are essential to understanding the climate and energy systems. However, the outputs of those models are greatly impacted by the parameters, the data, and the assumptions that feed into them. In this space, transparency is absolutely crucial.
I won't repeat what the Trottier foundation had said, but I will summarize the words of Catherine Potvin and the scholars who were behind “Re-energizing Canada: Pathways to a Low-Carbon Future”. Their key finding number two was that governments should “support the establishment and improvement of technology-rich, open source, well-documented scenarios and optimization models that can be used by researchers to explore pathways and inform policy and investment decisions.”
As has been stated, the models that are being used in Canada, whether it's the National Energy Board or Environment and Climate Change Canada, are more like black boxes. They are considered proprietary and we cannot really see what went into the machine. We just get an output and we can't test its robustness. That leads to less than ideal assessments of decisions.
Noteworthy, in our research project we reached out to all the teams that do modelling of decarbonization pathways like the Trottier energy futures project. They all gladly shared their data with us so that we could compare. The only one that did not answer our call was Environment and Climate Change Canada. The devil is in the details, and the details are not accessible.
To contrast with that, I would briefly say that best practices in this field seem to be how the U.K. approaches its climate policy based on carbon budgets, and how it teams up with universities about using models. I will also refer to resources by the California Air Resources Board, which seemed more transparent than what we have available in this country right now.
Another aspect—now leaving the technicalities aside—that is missing is an analysis of the political economy of energy systems, power structures, vested interests, and so on. It has been found to be a very important factor in the transition towards low-carbon energy in Germany, and it seems to be an issue that Canada grapples with. There are legal scholars, like Jason MacLean, who are writing about the problem of regulatory capture. Some are now saying that the oil industry may have created a deep state in Canada. I think these are statements deserving of investigation and may be one of the reasons we don't have such good information.
Now, trying to get more into the weeds and details, there are two issues which, I think, highlight some important deficiencies in the Canadian system when it comes to climate. One is land-based carbon. Internationally it is becoming more evident that carbon stored in forests and biomass is very important, and increasingly the importance of soils is being recognized as a very important source of carbon storage.
Canada with its huge land mass is the second-largest holder of peatlands. We store up to 150 gigatonnes of carbon, and that's probably an underestimate because our mapping of peatland in Canada is lacking. I think efforts have been started in Quebec and will be soon in Ontario, but overall, we don't really know where they are. Some other jurisdictions know where they are. One area that is particularly rich in peatland and, therefore, is an important carbon reservoir is the area where the oil sands are being exploited.
It's an important issue. Land use emissions associated with the exploitation of the oil sands was assessed in the United States by the Obama administration when they assessed the upstream emissions associated with the Keystone pipeline way back when. It is also included in the way that California designed its clean fuel standards, by assessing the whole life cycle of fuels in an open source, transparent, and accessible model. It has reviewed 67 types of Canadian crudes only, and their values for carbon intensity are among the highest in the world. Maybe some in Nigeria are higher, but we have the highest in the world. One of the reasons is the importance of those land use emissions associated with the exploitation.
The most recent research I saw from 2015, still in the U.S., said that they had previously underestimated the greenhouse gas association with land use disturbance. They forecasted that based on the forecasted production from open pit mines and in situ installations in Alberta between 2012 and 2030, the result would be between 107 million tonnes and 187 million tonnes of greenhouse gases only from land use disturbance. I repeat, no jurisdiction in Canada is assessing these emissions or counting them, and these emissions were also not included in the assessment of upstream emissions for the Trans Mountain pipeline. I fail to see how a foreign jurisdiction is better placed than we are to assess things that happen on our territory.
Another example—