This is one of the 26 segments of Guy Dauncey’s Climate Emergency: A 26-Week Transition Program for Canada. Excerpted by permission.
In 2017 heavy industry produced 73 Mt of CO2e, accounting for 10% of Canada’s emissions, including non-fossil-fuel mining, smelting and refining, and the production and processing of industrial goods such as fertilizer, paper and cement.
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- We will reduce the allowed emissions-intensity for heavy industrial polluters annually. Working with the provinces, we will introduce our government’s planned domestic carbon-trading system for industrial operations that emit more than 50,000 tonnes of CO2e a year, enabling them to purchase credits for emissions above the regulated level from another heavy emitter, or to pay the carbon tax on their excess emissions.
- To accelerate solutions, we will expand Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund by investing an additional C$200 million a year in Canada’s Industrial Bio-Economy and in GHG-reducing solutions including biomaterials, bio-hydrogen, green electro-hydrogen, electric arc furnaces, cement and concrete alternatives, hydrogen blast furnaces, halocarbon alternatives, electric battery development, direct air CO2 capture, and other climate critical technologies. The German company Thyssenkrupp Steel has succeeded in powering a blast furnace using hydrogen instead of coal, producing only water vapour. Climeworks, based in Zurich, is capturing carbon from the air, mixing it with wastewater and storing it deep underground in basaltic rock. Carbon Engineering, based in Squamish, BC.., is doing similar work. The Fund will no longer support any fossil fuel-related projects, such as LNG Canada, which received $220 million from the Fund in 2019. Cost: $200 million per year (#41)
- Refrigerants, fire retardants, halocarbon products and synthetic gases (HFCs, PFCs, SF6 and NF3) generate just under 2% of Canada’s GHG emissions. We will update Canada’s halocarbon regulations and phase in a Halocarbon Tax, targeting zero emissions by 2040, using the revenue to assist companies to develop alternatives. HFCs’ Global Warming Potential is 1,000 to 9,000 times larger than CO2. Project Drawdown identifies refrigerant management as its top option for reducing GHGs, with the global potential to eliminate the equivalent of 90 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2050.
