Thank you to the committee for inviting me to appear today.
Canada's declared goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 was incorporated into law in June 2021.
Mr. Chairman, I submit that the existing legal framework is wholly inadequate to address the extreme gravity of the challenges we are facing. That is the framework of the existing legal set-up. Canada's net-zero plan envisions that by 2050, Canada's remaining annual emissions will be offset or balanced by carbon capture and storage and by carbon removal, or CDR, technologies that will have the capability to remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere by negative emissions.
A crucial unknown in this scheme is the level of Canada's remaining emissions in 2050. The plan is based on the presumption that by 2050, the remaining emissions, whatever they are, will be fully offset by CCS and CDR. The political promise is that large-scale CCS deployment, for example, will allow us to defer any near-term deep cuts in Canada's oil and gas production.
Developments since 2021 compel us to reconsider this policy framework and its assumptions. The International Energy Agency released its global “Net Zero by 2050” scenario in May 2021. The IEA concluded that to give us any realistic chance to limit increased warming to 1.5°C, global oil production must decline 50% by 2040 and 73% by 2050.
The Canada Energy Regulator's 1.5°C-aligned scenario published in June 2023 accepts the accuracy of that finding by the IEA. The CER acknowledges that to align with 1.5°C, Canada's oil production must decline from 5.5 million barrels in 2030 to 2.8 million barrels by 2040.
Further, in the fall of 2023, the IEA and several other research bodies published a series of new studies that have examined in detail the feasibility of achieving, by 2050, large-scale deployment of envisioned carbon dioxide removal technologies. They conclude that on a global scale, annual CCS capacity could possibly increase to as much as three billion by 2040 and as much as six billion per year by 2050. With respect to envisioned CDR technologies that have the capacity to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, the IEA has cautioned that the annual removal of 1.7 billion tonnes per year are likely close to the upper bound of what is practicable by 2050. Other sources accept that it might be as much as three billion per year.
In contrast, the annual level of emissions from oil, gas and coal use reached 37 billion tonnes CO2 in 2022. Under the IEA's steps scenario, the projected annual level declines only slightly by 2050, to 29.5 billion tonnes. Measured against those numbers, negative emissions in the range of six billion to eight billion tonnes per year are inconsequential.
The opaque character of the net-zero emissions concept has unfortunately allowed us to put aside any detailed public scrutiny of the hard reality, which is that meeting net-zero by 2050 pledges, in the absence of deep near-term reductions in oil, gas and coal production, would require deploying CDR technologies on an extraordinary scale by 2050—a scale that the IEA has described as “inconceivable”.
I would urge this committee to undertake a full reconsideration of whether Canada's legal framework for net zero by 2050 should now be redesigned. The existing single goal, which subsumes both future reductions and removals, would be disaggregated to provide separate goals. Targets and timetables for achieving negative emissions would be separately and explicitly set out, leaving us with a separate emissions reduction target for 2050.
To conclude, promises that the CCS and CDR deployment in Canada can protect our children from warming above 1.5°C while we continue to increase our oil production in line with rising global demand are untethered from the reality we are facing.
The essential and immediate requirement to give us any remaining chance to limit warming to 1.5°C is that global oil production must be sharply reduced by 2040. Equivalent cuts must be achieved in the case of natural gas.
To conclude, if that does not happen, no feasible amount of CCS technology or CDR deployment can alter the outcome.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.