What Should Canada Do When We Use Up Our Budget?
Given that it is impossible for Canada emit zero greenhouse gases in the near future, until we do, we have some options:
- follow a program of aggressively reducing emissions
- rapidly generate negative emissions (sinks) - often Carbon Capture and Storage is suggested (but at present it does not capture enough carbon to be effective) or plant lots of trees
- swap our emissions with a developing country in return for paying them to convert rapidly to renewable energy. See the discussion of Fair Shares here. (Possibly we could tax our excess emissions, accumulate the collected taxes into a revenue neutral fund which would be distributed to developing countries to build at least enough sources of zero carbon energy to compensate for our excess emissions.)
Canada should submit a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) based on our fair share of a carbon budget for a likely temperature increase below 1.5C. In our opinion, an NDC based on annual emissions is wrong.
All of the above are our thoughts on the subject of Canada's share of global cumulative emissions and NDC submission. Please email any feedback to us.