Carbon capture: a Canadian political history

Summary

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Front Burner: “Carbon capture: a Canadian political history”

CBC Front Burner | July 30, 2026
Host: Aaron Ware (in for Jayme Poisson)
Guest: Carl Meyer, Investigative Reporter for The Narwhal

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Episode Overview

This episode provides a deep dive into the political and industrial history of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology in Canada, its promised transformational impact on emissions reduction, and the reality of its limited results. Investigative reporter Carl Meyer traces the bipartisan appeal and promotional efforts around CCS from the Harper era to the present-day Carney government, highlighting the gap between decades of political rhetoric and slow, expensive progress on the ground.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Early Political Hopes and Origins of CCS in Canada

• 2006-2007 Oil Sands Boom & Political Climate

  • Stephen Harper’s Conservative government faces skyrocketing oil sands production and emissions.
  • Harper champions CCS as the main tool for reconciling Canada’s fossil fuel industry with climate obligations.
  • Carl Meyer: “Harper presents this as, you know, if we can perfect this technology, we can use it to curb our greenhouse gas emissions...export the technology around the world. And he says the era of empty rhetoric is over.” (01:56–03:00)
  • Annual government statements—across both major parties—praise the promise of CCS from 2006 through 2026.

• The Promise vs. Reality

  • Despite ongoing optimism, emissions from oil sands have risen every year:
    • 2007: ~40 million tons
    • 2024: ~92 million tons
  • Nationally, only 68 million tons have been captured over 24 years. That’s less than the oil sands emit in one year. (03:37–04:19)

2. What Is Carbon Capture and Storage?

• Tech in Brief
  • CCS captures CO₂ from industrial exhaust before atmosphere entry, then stores or uses it (e.g., for enhanced oil recovery or geological storage).
  • Newer projects include attempts to inject CO₂ into oceanic rock offshore BC.
  • Industry Voice: “A project off BC's coast is turning to a familiar friend to help remove carbon dioxide from the air by capturing the greenhouse gas and injecting it into ocean rock...” (05:00–05:20)

3. Political Appeal & Sustained Bipartisan Support

• CCS appeals because it allows continued fossil fuel production while promising environmental progress.
• Carl Meyer: “It's appealing to envision a technology that can help us remove the emissions, remove the bad stuff, while still being able to do the good stuff.” (05:47–06:28)
• CCS framed as “world-leading clean tech” by both Conservatives and Liberals—2008 task force claimed potential to capture 600 million tons per year, almost all of Canada’s then-total emissions (06:51–07:24).

4. Limited Results and Barriers

• Progress

  • Actual capacity: “On the order of a few million tons per year” (07:31)—nowhere near early ambitions.
  • Main barriers: cost, infrastructure, scale (piping, storage), and industry reluctance.
  • Carl Meyer: “It's not that the technology doesn't work, it has been proven to work. The issue is scale.” (07:31–07:56)

• Industry Position & Influence

  • Companies often promise big reductions, lobbying against regulation by pledging tech solutions.
  • Enhanced oil recovery (injecting CO₂ to extract more oil) is a major incentive for industry adoption.
  • Carl Meyer: “There’s evidence the industry has used it as a shield to portray themselves as doing something about their carbon pollution.” (14:31–16:23)

5. The Trudeau & Carney Era: From the Pathways Alliance to the 2026 Deal

• Pathways (now Oil Sands Alliance)

  • Coalition of oil and gas firms formed in response to Trudeau government signals on climate and emissions caps.
  • Pledged 22 million tons in cuts by 2030, “considerably more” by 2050, via technologies (including CCS) (11:44–13:04).
  • Recent government-industry deals have diluted commitments: current deal targets just 6 million tons by 2035.
  • Carl Meyer: “Now, the current deal has scaled that quite down to 6 million tons by 2035... we don’t know if they’re going to use carbon capture.” (13:23–14:11)

• The Carney Government’s Approach

  • Made the Pathways CCS project a condition for new pipeline approval.
  • Project now aims for 6 million tons/year cut by 2035, 60 million tons/year by 2045, with limited guarantees on CCS’s share (17:38–18:50).
  • However, the projected new emissions from oil sands expansion (20 million tons/year) will far exceed Pathways offsets.
  • Cost spirals from $16.5B to upwards of $30B—unknown share of public funding, but significant taxpayer involvement via tax credits and potential subsidies. (18:50–20:10)

6. Changing Conservative Position

• Pierre Poilievre’s Flip
  • Formerly a CCS champion; now calls it a “money losing proposition” and publicly questions its business case except for enhanced oil recovery.
  • Industry Quote: “He wants Alberta to spend $20 billion on a money-losing carbon capture project that has never been proven anywhere as a condition for building the actual pipeline.” (21:09–21:19)
  • Carl Meyer: “He only sees value in carbon capture if it’s used to extract more oil. Other than that, he described it as just putting air back into the ground and how is it going to make money?” (21:19–21:44)

7. Looking Forward: The Role of CCS and Broader Climate Policy

• Potential Future Role

  • Climate Institute: CCS could account for 1–29% of emissions reductions needed for net-zero by 2050.
  • Significant technological and policy uncertainty remains.
  • Alternatives like direct air capture, concrete trapping, or natural solutions are emerging.
  • Carl Meyer: “It is just logically easier to stop the stuff coming out of those exhaust streams in the first place than it is to try to capture it in between the exhaust and the atmosphere.” (22:32–24:07)

• Carney’s Climate Strategy—Contradictions and Criticisms

  • New electrification strategy—aim to double electricity supply by 2050.
  • Paused stricter clean electricity regs; continued oil/gas expansion.
  • Wildfires and rising emissions cast a shadow over incremental approaches.
  • Carl Meyer: “So you can imagine all the power that we'll need to run EVs, for example... there are also ways that emissions could continue to rise.” (24:36–25:51)

• Track Record & Changing Ambitions

  • Despite Trudeau-era focus, Canada has never actually met a climate target.
  • Carl Meyer: “You can take a look and say, well, they never achieved their goal. And so what's truly the difference here?” (26:18)
  • Detractors see little real difference in outcomes across governments.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Mark Carney (00:50):
  “Pathways Carbon Capture Initiative will make Alberta’s oil some of the lowest in carbon intensity in the world, while creating an entirely new industry built once again on Albertan drive and ingenuity...”

• Carl Meyer (03:37):
  “Emissions in the oil sands have been climbing and climbing... meanwhile, the ability of us to capture carbon has never gone beyond a few million tons per year.”

• Government Official (13:04):
  “We work closely to develop what is technically feasible for the sector, but also to keep the industry accountable to their own promise that they've committed to be carbon neutral by 2050.”

• Carl Meyer (14:31):
  “... evidence collected that the industry has used it as a shield to portray themselves as doing something about their carbon pollution.”

• Industry Representative (21:11):
  “... a money-losing carbon capture project that has never been proven anywhere as a condition for building the actual pipeline.”

• Carl Meyer (22:32):
  “It is just logically easier to stop the stuff coming out of those exhaust streams in the first place than it is to try to capture it in between the exhaust and the atmosphere.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:29] Introduction: Setting the scene for CCS in Canada
• [01:56] Harper’s government and the early CCS push
• [03:37] Emissions growth vs. CCS success
• [04:27] Defining carbon capture and storage
• [05:47] Political reasons for CCS’s appeal
• [06:51] Early task force ambitions (600 million tons/year)
• [07:31] Actual results: only a few million tons/year captured
• [08:12] Why CCS underdelivered: cost, infrastructure, scale
• [09:25] Industry posturing: tech promises vs. regulatory avoidance
• [11:02] Pathways Alliance and Trudeau’s climate platform
• [13:23] Pathways commitment dropped—from 22 million tons to 6 million
• [14:31] Industry uses CCS for PR, not just emissions
• [17:38] Carney’s 2026 Pathways pipeline-CCS deal
• [18:50] Projected emissions vs. Pathways’ impact
• [19:06] Public subsidies for carbon capture
• [20:30] Pierre Poilievre’s change of position
• [21:44] The reality of 20 years of CCS hype
• [22:32] Is there a future role for CCS?
• [24:36] Carney’s climate contradictions and shifting strategies
• [26:18] Has Canadian federal climate policy really changed?
• [27:29] Episode close

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Summary Flow and Tone

• Tone: Engaged, skeptical, and grounded in public policy realism; the episode is rich with historical context, contemporary analysis, and clear explanation of technical concepts.
• Flow: Walks chronologically through Canadian political cycles, leveraging the guest’s investigative work to challenge persistent optimism around CCS and examining why it’s proven so difficult to scale.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This episode offers a clear-eyed, well-sourced tour through two decades of Canadian CCS politics, policy, and industry hype. It highlights both the persistent, bipartisan hopes for a technological fix to oil sands emissions and the ongoing gap between bold official statements and the much less impressive reality. Packed with insights, hard numbers, and political context, this is essential listening for anyone seeking to understand the uneasy relationship between Canada’s energy sector, climate ambitions, and the limits of carbon capture technology.

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Transcript

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[Carl Meyer]

This is a CBC podcast.

[Aaron Ware]

Hi, I'm Aaron Ware, in for Jamie. A key part of Mark Carney's deal to get a new pipeline built in Alberta involved a project that promised to bring down emissions. It's a carbon capture project called Pathways, and he was talking it up just yesterday in Red Deer, Alberta.

[Mark Carney]

The associated Pathways Carbon Capture Initiative will make Alberta's oil some of the lowest in carbon intensity in the world, while creating an entirely new industry built once again on Albertan drive and ingenuity, just as Alberta did with the oil sands when I was growing up here.

[Aaron Ware]

But Carney is far from the first Canadian leader to pin great hopes on carbon capture. Conservatives and liberals alike have been pushing for this technology for two decades, though results have been limited so far. Investigative reporter Carl Meyer wrote a piece for the Narwhal tracing how politicians and oil companies have promoted carbon capture over the years and what we actually know or don't about how well it works. Hey, Carl, thanks for joining us.

[Carl Meyer]

Thanks for having me.

[Aaron Ware]

So in your piece, you traced how politicians have pitched the public on this technology, going all the way back to the earliest days of Stephen Harper's government. So take me back to that time. It's 2006, when the conservatives formed government. What's going on in the oil industry at that time?

[Carl Meyer]

Yeah, so there was a boom happening in the oil sands. Emissions were rising, production levels were rising. Harper had been elected in the spring of 2007. He flies out to Edmonton and meets with the premier of Alberta at the time, Ed Stelmak, to announce some money and to announce a joint panel with the government of Alberta would investigate the potential of carbon capture to clean up the emissions in the oil sands. And Harper presents this as, you know, if we can perfect this technology, we can use it to curb our greenhouse gas emissions. We can export the technology around the world. And he says the era of empty rhetoric is over. We are embarking on this new thing and kind of presents carbon capture as this promising technology. And I went back and looked at all the different statements, and this is all in the public record. We're talking about statements In Parliament, the House of Commons, at committees, statements to the press. The statements I found one every year from 2006 to this year, 2026, talking about the potential of carbon capture to lower emissions, the potential of us to be a world leader in this technology and to export it.

[Government Official]

Carbon capture and storage has the potential to help us balance our need for energy with our duty to protect the environment.

[Climate Expert]

This is the way the world is going. We are seeing it with global investment flows. We're seeing it with the opportunities to create new technologies and solutions that the world desperately needs.

[Carl Meyer]

All the while, emissions in the oil sands have been climbing and climbing. They were at 40 million tons a year in 2007 when Harper spoke. They're now at 92 million tons in 2024, the most recent data. But meanwhile, the ability of us to capture carbon has never gone beyond a few million tons per year. And you can actually look at our national inventory report out of Environment Canada that says we have captured a total of 68 million tons of emissions over 24 years. So from 2000 to 2024, oil sands are emitting much more than that over one year. So it adds much more than we've ever taken away over almost a quarter century.

[Aaron Ware]

Before we get too far down the road, we should probably define our terms. Just briefly, what is carbon capture and storage?

[Carl Meyer]

So, carbon capture and storage is technology that sucks carbon dioxide out of an exhaust stream. So if you can imagine an oil and gas facility that's producing carbon dioxide exhaust, this technology captures it before it enters the atmosphere and does something with it. So either it's used by the industry for other industrial applications, a common one is to inject it back into the ground to try to get more oil out, or you can inject it into reservoirs and try to store it.

[Industry Representative]

A project off BC's coast is turning to a familiar friend to help remove carbon dioxide from the air by capturing the greenhouse gas and injecting it into ocean rock. Engineers are looking at a region 300 km off the coast of Vancouver island with the capacity to hold 15 to 20 years worth of emissions.

[Carl Meyer]

There are other applications for carbon, but that's what we're talking about when we're using carbon capture in the oil sands, in the oil and gas industry.

[Aaron Ware]

And the political interest in this, as you say, wasn't just a kind of passing fancy. There was a sustained push, as you mentioned, by various members of the Harper government over the years to develop and adopt this technology to promote it. Why do you think it was important to them politically?

[Carl Meyer]

Practically, emissions have been rising pretty much every year, as I mentioned. And the oil and gas industry, in particular the oil sands, has been a big contributor to exports and to the economy and to particularly, you know, royalties in Alberta. And it's appealing to envision a technology that can help us remove the emissions, remove the bad stuff, while still being able to do the good stuff. There are other ways of limiting the emissions and particularly we can talk about that proposal by the Trudeau government to cap the emissions is another way to do it.

[Aaron Ware]

And then as you Also mentioned in 2007, the federal and Alberta governments create this task force to advise them on carbon capture and storage. And in 2008, the task force comes back with a report that says Canada has an opportunity to create, quote, a world leading technology that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and on a massive scale, unquote. What kind of results were they imagining?

[Carl Meyer]

Yeah, they proposed that we could theoretically capture 600 million tons per year of emissions. So they don't give a precise date on that, but they do say that the implementation of carbon capture technology could be done with, with current technology within a decade. So 600 million tons a year, just to give a perspective, that's a majority of the country's entire emissions profile.

[Climate Expert]

It would.

[Aaron Ware]

Yeah. As you say, like Canada's total ghg emissions in 2024 were 685 megatons. Yeah. So it's a huge number.

[Carl Meyer]

Yeah.

[Aaron Ware]

And you know, it's been nearly two decades since then. How much progress have we made?

[Carl Meyer]

Natural Resources Canada told me that we are able to capture on the order of a few million tons per year. They don't want to give a precise figure because they say that it goes up and down depending on different factors. But the point is it's not tens or hundreds of millions of tons of. And it's not that the technology doesn't work, it has been proven to work. And the issue is scale.

[Aaron Ware]

And do you have a sense, I guess, of why we haven't seen the results that were imagined? Why hasn't it been adopted widely? Why hasn't it kind of lived up to those ideas that we were hearing in 2008?

[Carl Meyer]

I think a couple things. I think, first of all, it's expensive. The more you try to scale it up, the more facilities you have to attach it to. You have to do something with all of that carbon. It's quite a bit of it, which means you have to build pipelines and storage facilities to, to deal with all of the stuff. It's a huge, huge infrastructure project doing Something on the scale of hundreds of millions of tons has never been done anywhere in the world. Another factor is that the oil sands companies themselves have told the government repeatedly that they will be able to take care of this.

[Industry Representative]

Global demand for energy is increasing, and the challenge is to meet this demand while reducing our carbon footprint. Part of Shell's solution involves carbon capture and storage, and that's why we built Quest at our Scotford upgrader.

[Carl Meyer]

They have come out with proposals saying that they can capture tens of millions of tons of emissions by 2030, which is now. Doesn't seem like it's going to happen. They have said, you know, we don't need other forms of limits on our emissions because we'll be able to use technology to take care of it ourselves.

[Aaron Ware]

So the Conservatives are replaced by Justin Trudeau's Liberals. In 2015, the Liberals obviously put a big focus on climate change, but they also still talked about carbon capture. Why do you think the push forward or the acceptance of it is bipartisan?

[Carl Meyer]

Yeah, so I talked with a few people for that piece I wrote. One of them was the former Environment Minister, Stephen Guibot. And I put that question to him. Why is this something that's been so appealing to politicians on both sides, on Liberal and conservative? And he said a couple of things. Global climate scientists have said that we need all the tools in the toolbox. We need to reduce emissions, we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels, and we also need technologies like carbon capture and other technologies in the carbon removal sphere, pulling it out of the atmosphere to achieve what we need to achieve to limit global warming. And he said that message has been confused with the message of using carbon capture as a technology to continue to pump oil and gas. And then he said, it's a very appealing message to politicians to think of it that way, but that's sort of a mischaracterization of what climate science says.

[Aaron Ware]

And then during Trudeau's tenure, there's this coalition of oil and gas companies started, called the Pathways alliance, with a stated goal of eliminating GHG emissions, greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands they recently rebranded as the Oil Sands Alliance. Can you talk us through a bit how that group and why that group formed?

[Carl Meyer]

Yeah. So the Trudeau government was reelected in 2019 as a minority government, and then the pandemic happened in 2020, and then they went for an election in 2021. Part of their reelection platform was trying to go further on environmental rules.

[Climate Expert]

And today, Canada is in a position to raise our climate ambition once again. Our new climate target for 2030 is to reduce our 2005 emission levels by 40 to 45%. And we will continually strengthen our plan and take even more actions on our journey to Net Zero by 2050.

[Carl Meyer]

And part of their platform included this emissions cap on the oil and gas sector. And shortly after they got elected, you can start to see the oilsense companies under the Pathways alliance label talk to the government about, we need a long time to prepare for this emissions cap. We need flexible rules to prepare for it, entering into a negotiation with the government over how could we reasonably do this. And that leads eventually to the oil sands companies saying we don't need a cap at all, publicly saying that we just think it's going to be a divisive thing, it's going to divide Canadians, and we can move forward with this technology ourselves. And when the late 2024, when the Trudeau government finally comes out with the draft rules for this emissions cap, we

[Government Official]

will create a cap and trade system for the sector. It will reward low polluting facilities and incentivize higher polluting facilities to invest.

[Carl Meyer]

They explicitly tie it to the promises of the oil sands companies at the time. They say they're the ones who are saying we can cut 22 million tons by 2030 and considerably more after that by 2050. At one point, they were saying they'd get to net zero operational emissions by 2050.

[Government Official]

We work closely to develop what is technically feasible for the sector, but also to keep the industry accountable to their own promise that they've committed to be carbon neutral by 2050. And it's also a form of insurance for Canadians that with this policy, we will continue moving towards the achievement of our goals.

[Carl Meyer]

And Jonathan Wilkinson, who was the Natural Resources Minister at the time, described the emissions cap as a backstop to ensure that the industry did what they said that they could already do. After the Carney government came in, there was a negotiation with the Alberta government where the end result was the deal that they have now, the MoU, which commits them to not moving forward with the emissions cap. So at the same time, the earlier comments from the oil sands companies about being able to cut 22 million tons, that's now gone. Now, the current deal has scaled that quite down to 6 million tons by 2035 and possibly more. But we don't know if they're going to use carbon capture. It might be, they say, a range of technologies.

[Aaron Ware]

So, and I guess help us understand a bit why it would be in the interest of an oil company to get behind carbon capture, which conceivably puts an additional burden on them. Is there a financial incentive for them or is that just that they know they need to address climate change and this is an acceptable path?

[Carl Meyer]

The original proposition from the oil sands companies was that they could install these carbon capture and storage network, this system in order to continue having viability in the global oil market, that they had seen that lower emissions oil would be more and more popular with more carbon pricing regimes around the world, carbon border adjustments possibly taking place around the world, and they saw that as a path to continue and they said that publicly. Another element I think is that they had already been using this technology for a number of years to do what they call enhanced oil recovery, which is injecting it into depleted wells to get more oil out. So they were familiar with it. And I think another aspect you have to talk about is there have been evidence collected that the industry has used it as a shield to portray themselves as doing something about their carbon pollution. I'm thinking of a congressional investigation a few years ago that talked about how oil companies were talking about carbon capture publicly as a way to reduce emissions and then behind closed doors they were talking about it as a way to continue having social license. And we continue to see evidence of that. There was a recent ProPublica investigation that talked in similar ways about an oil company funding a study that took a very rosy look at carbon capture.

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[Aaron Ware]

So we've, we've already talked about this a bit, but to get back to the present, Carney made the Pathways project a condition of getting a new pipeline built as part of the MOU with Alberta. Earlier this month he reached an agreement with the Oil Sands alliance, the government of Canada.

[Mark Carney]

The government of Alberta and the Oil Sands alliance have now agreed on the terms that to launch the Pathways Project, the world's largest carbon capture and utilization and storage project.

[Aaron Ware]

What is this project now promising to achieve?

[Carl Meyer]

It's part of a commitment to cut 6 million tons per year with carbon capture by 2035 and 60 million tons by 2045, using what they call a range of technologies. So it's unclear how much carbon capture will be used with that. So for some perspective, the Canadian Climate Institute says that the rise in emissions that will happen because of the new oil to put into the new pipeline will be 20 million tons per year. So it's not even offsetting that. And then you have to consider, you know, they're talking about expanding the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which is, was already twinned. There are other pipelines that are being discussed or enhancements to them that could increase emissions there. And this is all oil. There's also LNG facilities and that whole side of the story that will also increase emissions.

[Aaron Ware]

So there's also been this question about cost. The project was initially supposed to cost $16.5 billion, but now we're hearing it could be between 20 and 30 billion dollars. Do we have a sense at this point of how much of that will be publicly funded?

[Carl Meyer]

We don't have a sense specifically, I think you can say for sure that there'll be considerable amount. Let's talk about the obvious things. First, there's the tax benefit for carbon capture. That is 50% for the equipment and then 37% for related sort of transport equipment. The Kearney government extended that to 2035 and they also expanded it to allow companies to use it for enhanced oil production. In other words, to get more oil out of the ground. So you could see that as a subsidy. There are other elements like the oil pilot itself. There's a question of how much public financing will go into that too. It's being. There's a crown corporation that's heavily involved with that. There's a private company that has made a non binding commitment to hold a minority stakeholder. And the government has also sort of left the door open to other financial incentives or help, I think you can say significant taxpayer involvement. We just don't know how much.

[Aaron Ware]

And on the political side, the current conservative leader, Pierre Poliev, who was a minister in the Harper government, which as we've now gone over was fairly supportive of carbon capture. He has had some recent comments prompted, I believe by a question from you. What has he said and I guess how do you interpret those comments?

[Carl Meyer]

Yeah, soon after he became leader after 2022, he was quite vocal in the House of Commons about pushing the government, this was the Trudeau government at the time, to support carbon capture in the oil and gas industry more. He asked the government to throw their support behind it more.

[Industry Representative]

We have to focus on technology and not taxes first and foremost. We have to take back control of our economy.

[Carl Meyer]

And he has since flipped. And it was about the time after the Carney government talked about the MOU with Alberta. He's now described it as a money losing proposition.

[Mark Carney]

He wants Alberta to spend $20 billion

[Industry Representative]

on a money losing carbon capture project that has never been proven anywhere as a condition for building the actual pipeline.

[Carl Meyer]

And so I asked him why he flipped and he said he only sees value in carbon capture if it's used to extract more oil. And he said other than that, he described it as just putting air back into the ground and how is it going to make money? He said,

[Aaron Ware]

So we've covered Fairly quickly now 20 years of the promise and reality of carbon capture and the distance between those two things. But I guess we should say the Climate Institute has written that, quote, carbon capture could play a crucial role in decarbonizing the heavy industry and oil and gas sectors, unquote. In its modeling, some form of carbon capture had a role to play in getting Canada to NET 0 by 2050, though there was a pretty wide range of possibilities, accounting for somewhere between 1 and 29% of emissions. Between investment tax credits, carbon pricing and other policies. The government was also shoring up the business case for this technology, the Institute noted. So despite everything we've covered here, is it still possible that carbon capture plays a role in the path going forward?

[Carl Meyer]

Oh, yes. Like I said, it's a tremendous infrastructure undertaking. We're talking about a scale, I think, that is quite frankly hard to imagine 92 million tons a year coming out of just the oil sands. That's not even the whole oil and gas industry is just a tremendous amount to try to capture. It is just logically easier to stop the stuff coming out of those exhaust streams in the first place than it is to try to capture it in between the exhaust and the atmosphere. And I know, you know, we should mention there are a number of different factors that are at play play in the current government assessing whether to put strict limits on emissions And I don't want to suggest that any of those factors are more or less important. You know, Canada's in some respects, facing an existential crisis right now with threats from the United States and any number of other things I could mention. But we're just, I'm just looking at the, the, the history of this here. And this is technology that has never really gone before beyond a few million tons. We should also mention there are other forms of this technology to pull carbon out of the air or to inject it into concrete or to trap it in rocks that could be explored in the carbon. Carbon removal. Candidate says there's 11 million tons of that in the planning stages. So placing carbon capture equipment on industrial exhaust streams is not the only way of doing this. But there are other ways of trying to limit emissions.

[Aaron Ware]

There's also, I guess, the larger context of Carney's climate agenda and some of the criticism he is facing. We're experiencing devastating wildfires across the country while he just approved a new pipeline and conceded Canada's emissions will be higher in the next few years than previously projected. Where do you think the Pathways project fits into the sort of broader picture or the broader story of the government's approach to climate?

[Carl Meyer]

Yeah, I think we should mention that the government has come out with this electrification strategy. They want to double Canada's electricity production by 2050. And they've talked about wanting to make Canada the best place in the world to build and invest in clean energy. And so you can imagine all the power that we'll need to run EVs, for example. So I think there are a number of interesting goals there, but there are also ways that emissions could continue to rise based on that. So the previous government had this clean electricity regulations that had limits on basically all power plants, including natural gas power plants. And the current, the Kearney government's approach, especially with the Alberta deal, is to allow for that, in fact, the commit to a, quote, expansion of natural gas generation, meanwhile, sort of pausing the clean electricity regulations. The Kearney government also has a nature strategy that they are putting money and resources into to sort of protect biodiversity. So there are, there are a number of things that the government is doing at the same time. Backing off climate commitments that the Trudeau government has made.

[Aaron Ware]

Do you see in Pathways, or more broadly, a distinct difference in the way Justin Trudeau, his government, did climate policy and the way Mark Carney's doing climate policy? You've been around the hill. You also now are well acquainted with the Stephen Harper record within the climate story. Do you think there has been a marked change in the way the federal government is doing climate policy?

[Carl Meyer]

If you quote his detractors, they will tell you we've never met a climate target, even during the Trudeau government and all its various attempts to lower our emissions. And so in some respects, you can take a look and say, well, they never achieved their goal. And so what's truly the difference here? And I think you can counter that, you know, climate advocates counter that by saying we did make a significant dent. You know, Stephen Guibot himself says the most recent report shows that the policies were actually making a dent and, you know, they just need more, more time. So I think when it comes to, for example, climate targets striving towards the target, does that count? Even if you don't actually miss it, if you fall short, does that mean it doesn't count? Or is it still better to strive towards it at all? Prime Minister Carney has come out and said, you know, he's admitted that his policies are going to make admissions rise, that he's in this moment right now where he needs to focus on various other things. But, yeah, it's a pretty night and day, I'd say between.

[Aaron Ware]

I was going to say, you mentioned Stephen Guibel. I believe he would say it's pretty close to night and day. All right, thanks very much, Carlos. This has been really interesting.

[Carl Meyer]

Thanks, Aaron.

[Aaron Ware]

That's all for today. I'm Aaron Ware. Thanks for listening to Front Burner.

[Carl Meyer]

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