Canada falling well short of greenhouse-gas emission targets: environment advisory panel

As parting shots go, this one's a doozy. The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy is reporting that Canada is far from reaching its target for reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives announced they were abolishing the environment advisory board as part of the sweeping budget cuts. The government argued independent body, set up in 1988 to bring together environmental and economic stakeholders, had served its purpose. Critics suggested the Tories didn't like what the round table was telling them.

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But in what's probably its final report, released this week, the board warned Canada is likely to reach only half its 2020 target to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 17 per cent below 2005 levels.

According to The Canadian Press, the report found existing and proposed provincial and federal measures leave Canada far short of its promised goal.

"Canada will not achieve its 2020 GHG emissions reduction target unless significant new, additional measures are taken," the report said. "More will have to be done. No other conclusion is possible."

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If Ottawa wants to meet its self-impose target, it must take a lead role, collaborate more with the provinces and bring in new measures to rein in emissions, especially in Alberta, said the report, entitled Reality Check.

But the government appeared to shrug off the report.

"Our approach is the way to go. It's working," Adam Sweet, press secretary to Environment Minister Peter Kent, told The Canadian Press.

"The fact that we're 50 per cent of the way, that's supportive of what we've been saying the whole time. We are making significant progress. ... We recognize that more has to be done. We've always stated this."

Sweet added that Kent is in constant touch with the provinces working to harmonize regulation.

Opposition politicians and environmental critics have hammered the Harper government over legislation they say will gut the environmental review process for big industrial projects such as the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline and for cutting scientific research and monitoring.

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The 17 per cent reduction target was promised in 2009, when the government signed an international climate-change agreement in Copenhagen, Postmedia News reported.

Board president David McLaughlin, appointed to head the body after serving as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's chief of staff, said the report lays out what Canada needs to do to deal with climate change. It's not a matter of federal or provincial emissions, he said.

"They're Canadian emissions, and if it's Canada's target, you have to figure out how we move Canada down the path [and] with that fragmented, uneven approach, it's probably not surprising, therefore, that we're not on track. So we needed a reality check," McLaughlin told Postmedia News.

CBC News said that the report echoes the views of Canada's environment commissioner and internal Environment Canada documents that question whether the government's emission targets are achievable.

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Canada isn't the only major polluter to face an emission numbers crunch.

A controversy is developing over statistics coming from China, specifically a mismatch between national government numbers and the aggregate of provincial and municipal figures, according to the scientific journal Nature.

Carbon dioxide emission estimates for China's 30 provinces and municipalities are much higher than the estimates reported for the country as a whole, scientist Dabo Guan of the University of Leeds asserts.

The 2010 gap equalled five per cent of the world's emissions and all of Japan's. The difference has existed since the late 1990s and has widened dramatically in the last five years, Nature reported.

China has admitted that last year its emissions of nitrogen oxide increased dramatically, by 5.7 per cent, despite a goal of reducing it by 1.5 per cent for 2011.

Guan's research team found an 18 per cent gap between the provincial and municipal total and the figure reported by the national government. The results were published in Nature Climate Change this week.

But a Chinese expert argued China's greenhouse-gas emissions, highest in the world, could actually be much lower than estimated.

Wang Yi, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' climate-change research centre, told Reuters his group's research comes to a conclusion contradicting Guan's.

Wang said the formula used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to arrive at carbon emissions does not take into account the big differences in energy content of China's many grades of coal.

"We have some preliminary calculations and current emissions may be 10-20 percent less than the result based on IPCC methodology," he said.

But Wang conceded the findings would not change the fact that China emits about 22 per cent of the world's carbon.

"I don't think it would have much of an influence on the debate," he said.