Environment Professor Says Saskatchewan Climate Strategies Aren’t Tracking the Right Elements | Globalnews.ca

The Saskatchewan provincial government has covered a number of climate change topics in recent days, releasing the 2022 Resilience Report, the SaskPower Annual Report and addressing the 2022 Mines and Energy Ministers Conference.

But Dr. Oscar Zapata, an assistant professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan, pointed out that our climate change strategy may be hitting the wrong bullets.

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“We can look at the means to the ends, or we can look at the ends themselves. And I think most climate strategies are basically looking for means to ends. So we report what is happening with the media, but we don’t know exactly what is happening with the ends or the goals,” Zapata said.

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“Most of the targets are moving in the right direction, but we’re still just looking at the means, we’re not looking at the end goals.”

He noted that tracking progress in the means is relatively easy compared to tracking the ends, using the example of one of the measures being taken in the province’s climate resilience plan.

“Measure number five is the distribution of seedlings from SaskPower’s Shand Greenhouse. Those are just means to an end, which is climate change mitigation and adaptation. And in the case of measure number five, it would be more important to count the number of trees that reach maturity and how these trees help capture CO2 emissions.”

The province has 22 measures they are taking to try to address climate change, ranging from enforcing soil protection for forest harvesting to ensuring water quality as part of the Healthy Beach Program.

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Zapata also said that these strategies look at supply-side interventions, meaning things like promoting reforestation and switching to renewable energy instead of fossil fuels.

“We’re not paying enough attention to demand-side solutions, or what people can do on a daily basis.”

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He noted that whatever steps are taken on climate change, there will be those who benefit and those who don’t.

“Whatever is happening in an industry will have positive or negative effects on the economy and the rest of society. And the role of governments is to look at this big picture, taking into account all these considerations to make decisions.”

“Any public policy will leave winners and losers, and it is the government’s role to consider who wins and who loses,” Zapata added.

After the 2022 Mines and Energy Ministers Conference, Energy and Resources Minister Jim Reiter criticized the federal government’s approach.

“Unfortunately, federal environmental and energy policies continue to make life unaffordable for Canadians by inhibiting the industry’s ability to produce products from Canada’s world-class resources,” the statement read.

“Although there were productive discussions in some areas, unfortunately, it was a missed opportunity for the federal government to have important conversations about global energy shortages with the jurisdictions that are ultimately responsible for overseeing oil and gas production and regulations.

“Instead of imposing unattainable and unfounded limits and targets on the industry, the Trudeau government needs to work with them to build infrastructure and bring our sustainable products to market.”

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Reiter noted that Canada is a leader in clean energy, adding that the oil and gas industry has done everything it can to be more environmentally friendly.

“We are a large supplier of energy. We should be supplying our entire country, instead of importing it,” Reiter said.

“We are an exporter; that is what we have always done in this country, and particularly in this province, we want to sell our products all over the world, and we also import some things. But importing oil when we have a lot of oil in western Canada, importing it into eastern Canada just seems ridiculous.”

He added that as technology continues to evolve, emissions will decrease and that’s what we should focus on.

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