Study
| EST. READ TIME 2 MIN.Ottawa unlikely to hit 2026 or 2030 emission reduction targets due to technological limitations, population growth, and rising incomes
An Evaluation of Canada's Progress Towards Meeting 2026 and 2030 GHG Emission Reduction Targets
In its 2023 Emission Reduction Plan, the Government of Canada has committed to a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to at least 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, with an interim target set at 20 per cent below 2005 levels by 2026.
This essay evaluates Canada’s progress towards these targets by breaking down total GHG emissions into the key drivers: GHG intensity, population and incomes.
On a compound basis, if population grows on average by 1.2 per cent per year and real per capita income grows by 0.7 per cent per year, over the nine years from 2022 to 2030 they will contribute an increase of about 19 per cent to Canada’s GHG emissions. Hitting the 2030 target of 38 per cent below current emissions will require emissions intensity—the third key driver of emissions—to fall by 57 per cent over 9 years. Since it only fell by 32 per cent over the entire twenty year period between 2001 and 2022, this is an unprecedented undertaking.
Taking account of historical constraints on our ability to reduce GHG intensity and Canada’s ongoing desire to avoid both depopulation and collapsing real incomes, it is likely Canada will not meet either the 2026 or 2030 GHG targets as stated, and that any attempt to do so will cause such a large drop in living standards that the government will not be able to remain committed to the policy.
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Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics, University of GuelphRoss R. McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute. Heis the author of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy published by the University of Toronto Press in 2010. He has been actively studying climate change, climate policy and environmental economics since the mid-1990s. He built and published one of the first national-scale Computable General Equilibrium models for analysing the effect of carbon taxes on the Canadian economy in the 1990s. His academic publications have appeared in many top journals including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Journal of Geophysical Research, Climate Dynamics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, The Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, Energy Economics, Journal of Forecasting, Climatic Change, Climate Change Economics and Environmental Economics and Policy Studies. He has also written policy analyses for numerous Canadian and international think tanks. Professor McKitrick appears frequently in Canadian and international media and is a regular contributor to the Financial Post Comment page. In addition to his economics research his background in applied statistics has led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement and climate model evaluation. Professor McKitrick has made many invited academic presentations around the world, and has testified before the US Congress and committees of the Canadian House of Commons and Senate. Professor McKitrick is widely-cited in Canada and around the world as an expert on global warming and environmental policy issues. He has been interviewed by Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the CBC, BBC, ITV, Fox News, Bloomberg, Global TV, CTV, and others. His research has been discussed in such places as Nature, Science, The Economist, the MIT Technology Review, The National Post, The Globe and Mail and in a front page article in the The Wall Street Journal (Feb 14 2005).… Read more