Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation.
I'm speaking with you from the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. I am on the island of Newfoundland, which is the unceded traditional territory of the Beothuk and the Mi'kmaq people.
My province has become heavily economically dependent on oil production over the last 20 years. This was after tremendous upheaval from the collapse of the cod fishery. Today, as you know, we face great economic distress.
I want to give you a sense of my perspective before we get in, because I think perspectives matter for the information that's coming forward.
I'm from a working-class family. All the men in my immediate family have worked directly in oil as tradespeople in Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador. Today I am a university researcher. That means I have the privilege of choosing my research areas freely and independently. I'm not paid to deliver a particular message, but rather to conduct research based on evidence.
Regarding the Prime Minister’s promise to cap oil and gas emissions today and ensure that they decrease tomorrow to reach that net zero by 2050, I have two points to make.
The first is on structuring that cap and cut. This is urgently important. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change signalled this summer, the intensifying climate crisis is a “code red for humanity”. Humans' emissions are causing all of the things we've grown to find really distressing, like heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, extreme storms and so on. This is just a pre-show because emissions and temperature continue to rise.
The key point is that the vast majority of emissions causing the climate crisis are from oil, gas and coal. In fact, that sector was responsible for 86% of global emissions over the last decade.
That climate and fossil fuel problem is really clear in Canada. As you’ve heard, the oil and gas sector is the largest and fastest-growing source of emissions in the country. It is outpacing ambitious efforts to reduce emissions in other sectors. It's the primary reason why we haven't hit one of our climate targets in 30 years.
The cap is one way to ensure the oil and gas sector does its part, but to be effective and credible it has to start soon—by 2023. We need to cap emissions at 2019 levels and then ratchet them down every year, ideally faster in the first years in order to front-load.
At a minimum, to meet the federal government's targets of a 45% reduction from 2005 levels, that signals about an 88 megatonne cap by 2030. More should be expected of the oil and gas sector, given the sector's out-sized contribution to emissions and also given that Canada is expected to strengthen its climate commitments over time.
The Climate Action Network Canada’s analysis gives us a much lower cap of about 64 megatonnes by 2030. This cap has to be a hard cap and not based on the emissions-intensity, but on absolute emissions. It has to cover all of them, from fugitive emissions, production, upgrading, refining to orphaned wells—the whole cycle—with enforcement that's significant enough to deter non-compliance and without financial support or subsidies.
Importantly, and I look forward to hearing what Mr. McGowan has to say about this, it has to be integrated within just transition policies to ensure that oil-dependent workers and communities, particularly indigenous communities, don't experience hardship because of the cap.
My second point is about an extension of the cap. It's about skating to where that climate policy puck is going. More is needed than a cap on emissions because it doesn't address the elephant in the room, which is production. The global community has a carbon budget to keep within that 1.5° warming limit. That translates into fossil fuel production limits.
By updated analysis, to have just a 50% chance of keeping warming to 1.5°, global oil and gas production has to decline 4% a year every year until 2050. Based on the International Energy Agency's “Net Zero by 2050” report, which just came out recently, this means there can be be no further exploration nor expansion of production of fossil fuels.
This reality is reshaping global climate policy. We're seeing this now in rising national bans on fossil fuel extraction, the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty and the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, of which Quebec is a joining signatory.
Yet the Canada Energy Regulator is anticipating increasing production. Canada is going in the wrong direction at full speed. This is a climate problem, but it's also a missed opportunity for workers and communities who would gain from a low-carbon transition or be put at risk by not implementing that transition.
I look forward to the chance to really dig into this with you folks further over the next hour and a half.
Thank you again.