Canada sticking with 2050 net zero targets, but progress may come faster than expected, minister says
Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says the federal government is not ruling out finding ways to achieve net zero sooner than the existing 2050 goal, but would not say whether there would be a definitive commitment to move up the target.
The government’s current target is to hit net zero emissions — the point at which the amount of greenhouse gas emitted is equal to the amount that is removed from the atmosphere — by 2050, a goal shared by the other G7 countries. But in March, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prompted United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to encourage developed countries move up their net-zero timelines to 2040.
Net Zero Lunacy from the Times – Time’s up for Drax’s tree-burning racket
… The most heinous example of this racket is the way the government has subsidised the wood-chip burning (“biomass”) of Drax to the extent of many billions of pounds. This Yorkshire-based power station company does not burn a single British tree among the 27 million it gets through a year. It imports all its wood chips — mostly shipped in colossal diesel-powered vessels across the Atlantic from forests in Canada and Louisiana.
As I wrote here in February: “The CO2 ‘chimney emissions’ in the process are not recorded in the UK’s carbon accounts . . . they are on the American and Canadian carbon balance sheet.” Crazier still, more than £6 billion of subsidies have been funnelled to Drax — it would not have a viable business model otherwise — on the basis that its contribution to the national grid is “carbon neutral” because these millions of trees are replaced by newly planted ones that will absorb carbon in the atmosphere as they grow.
