Two Pipelines, One Story of “Climate Leaders”
With last year’s COP 26 held in Glasgow, we have seen many world leaders make lofty claims and goals, telling us all how much they care about and are going to do about climate change. With all this attention and high-minded rhetoric, it is important to look at what politicians and world leaders are actually doing about climate change, to see if their high-minded values and goals are more than just words.
Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau’s “darling image” has seen a large shift throughout his terms as PM, especially with the green energy movement and climate change activists. Coming in against oil pipelines and a promise to effectively kill the Northern Gateway Pipeline project, (which to his credit he did do) Trudeau seems to have reversed his position on another pipeline. In 2019 the PM’s cabinet approved the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, an action that as a “committed partner in the fight against climate change” is completely contradictory.
Justin Trudeau and his Liberal party may claim that Canada is a “climate leader” but our actions contradict that bold claim. Throughout his time as prime minister, Justin Trudeau has been compromising on his green agenda time and time again, on oil subsidies and pipelines, and with a new promise to end deforestation, one would be right to be skeptical about any promises Trudeau’s government makes with regards to climate change. Canada’s Liberal party is a clear piece of evidence that given the chance politicians will compromise on their climate promises because their priority is never action and real change.
Germany may seem like one of the greenest states in Europe and is often touted for its use of renewable energy, typically solar, however, due to recent developments this image of a green Germany does not square with reality. The country has a new government with its chancellor Olaf Scholz and an SPD-led (Social Democratic Party of Germany) coalition including the Green Party and Germany’s liberal FDP (Free Democratic Party). The inclusion of the Green Party is positive for climate change action, with the government agreeing to quickly phase out their nuclear power plants (something I would argue to be a mistake) and to slowly phase out their coal power plants by 2030 as a part of their coalition negotiations. This all shows that this system of agreement, negotiations, and concessions that is found in German politics has allowed for good forward steps to addressing climate change. This commitment to end coal power would cut down on emissions, so what is the problem here?
While they may be getting rid of coal, what they replace coal with matters as well. The replacement for that coal is going to be natural gas, replacing emissions with only more carbon emissions is not a solution to climate change. This is not a new development either; Germany and Russia have already built a gas pipeline and Germany (and Europe as a whole) already buy large amounts of Russian gas. This new pipeline expansion only makes this problem worse, “doubling capacity for Russian gas exports to the country.”
Proponents of this pipeline trying to make a case for it through a climate change lens might try and explain how natural gas is less carbon-dense than coal. However, while this is true this is an ignorant and untruthful point, because of an often ignored and inevitable part of natural gas. Leaks. Carbon dioxide is the largest greenhouse gas driving climate change, but not the only one. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas, up to 80 times more potent in fact, and it makes up for 70–90% of natural gases. As leaks are very commonplace and inevitable with gas pipelines, if less than 3.2% of natural gas is leaked, total emissions will be reduced, however around 9% of natural gas is leaked into the atmosphere, outweighing all the reduction in CO2 emitted. This “transition fuel,” as natural gas is often called, is less of a transition and just a mere continuation of the status quo. Not just in Germany either, with Trudeau’s approval of the Trans Moutain Pipeline, this status quo is only becoming more and more entrenched, if not making the problem worse by increasing the need for gas and with a potentially larger amount of greenhouse gases leaking into the atmosphere from “natural gas”.
Both countries and their leaders’ contradictions show us why we need better climate leaders and new governments with climate change as their chief concern. It shows us that career politicians and entrenched parties are not our friends and are constantly willing to compromise on all their so-called values and worries about climate change. From two different countries with two different pipelines, we see one same story play out. These two countries headed by Social Democratic leaders (the promise of phasing out coal only happened because of the German Green Party) prove the importance of continued, constant activism and pressure, to try and prevent politicians from compromising their agendas at the slightest inconvenience. These are not climate leaders, these are opportunists.
