Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said the Carney government is not serious about climate change. May, who supported Carney’s budget in December, has since questioned the prime minister’s word after accusing him of a climate policy flip-flop.
“If we’re serious about emissions reduction, then we have to actually revisit some of the measures that have been eliminated since (Carney) took over,” May told The Canadian Press.
“They’re miles from hitting any of the Paris Agreement targets, and the prime minister did recommit to me on the floor of the House on Nov. 17 that this government is committed to the Paris Agreement and achieving its targets. So the emissions reduction update, the so-called climate competitiveness strategy — there’s lots of highfalutin titles for what boils down to…(no) climate plan.”"
Its also not realistic to compete with a place that subsidizes its dirty energy it uses to manufacture goods. We need to stop cosplaying as green by exporting emissions while our per-capita living standards fall.
China is making strides in cleaning up their grid, it is by no means perfect. They still depend on coal for about 55% of their grid based on the most recently available data I could find, that dropped about 3% last year thanks to their expanding solar network.
I do think our grid is much cleaner especially with our plans for new nuclear reactors. However we do not have the complex manufacturing network that China has.
In saying that we should expand domestic production to strengthen our economic resiliency, especially for needs like housing, food and transportation. This transition can’t be done quickly, doubly so if we’re looking to minimize ecological impact, so in my mind China remains a necessary strategic partner.
Edit: Fixed the statistic for coal use by China, the first source I used wildly underestimated it.
5% is definitely too low, though they may have dropped some of its coal use when Russian energy suddenly became very cheap, their emissions continue to rise however.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/China-energy-consumption-by-source.svg/1920px-China-energy-consumption-by-source.svg.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/CO2_emissions_of_China.svg/1920px-CO2_emissions_of_China.svg.png
I actually caught that one too! I had it edited before I even read it.