Trump win no excuse to back out of climate commitments, Catherine McKenna says from COP29
‘The science on climate hasn't changed and the energy transition that's underway hasn't stopped'
The world must work together to fight climate change regardless of who's in the White House, former environment minister Catherine McKenna said Wednesday at the United Nations climate conference.
McKenna is at at the UN Conference of Parties' 29th annual climate conference, better known as COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
The conference, so far, has been mired in controversy.
BBC News reported that a senior member of Azerbaijan's COP29 team was caught on film using the conference to arrange potential deals for fossil fuel expansion. In a speech to world leaders, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev called his country's oil reserves "a gift of the God."
What's more, it's all taking place in the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, which saw the pro-fossil fuel Republican Donald Trump beat Democrat Kamala Harris.
Trump — who campaigned on slogans such as "Drill, baby, drill!" and "Frack, frack, frack!" — has promised to boost his country's fossil fuel production. His transition team is already working on a plan to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, a global climate treaty negotiated at the 2015 COP conference, reports the New York Times.
Nevertheless, McKenna says delegates are moving forward. She's there in her role as chair of the UN's net-zero working group, and will present a report on Thursday examining where corporations stand on their climate commitments.
Here is part of her conversation As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
What is the energy and mood like [at COP29]?
Look, I mean, it's hard. I'm not going to sugarcoat it with the Trump administration. We have seen this story before. I was minister when Trump was elected before. So it's not new. It does take a little bit of the energy out of the room.
Although, I was just at an event with Secretary [Yana] Garcia from California, head of their environmental agency, and California's all in, and they're the fifth largest economy in the world. So, I mean, I think people are getting on with things.
Just because there's a new government in the United States federally, it doesn't mean that the climate crisis isn't accelerating. At the same time, the energy transition is well underway.
We don't have a choice but to move forward.
As you move forward, and given what happened in the U.S. election and what the president-elect has said about this issue, how do you calibrate or change the conversations you're having in those rooms?
Not one country can stop progress. And the real difference, actually, between this time and last time is the energy transition had not accelerated the way we've seen it now.
Fossil fuels are going to peak by 2030, and this is [according to] the International Energy Agency. And why is that? It's largely because China has super scaled electric vehicles … [and] the renewable energy revolution is well underway. It's cheaper actually to go forward with renewable energy than it is with other options, especially wind and solar.
It would be better, for sure, to have a Harris administration than a Trump administration. But the science on climate hasn't changed and the energy transition that's underway hasn't stopped.
Your former cabinet colleague, former finance minister Bill Morneau, [told CTV News] he's not convinced now is ... the right time for the Trudeau government to be setting an emissions cap on oil and gas companies, given what the president-elect has said his priorities are and the importance of energy security. How do you respond?
Well, we're in a climate crisis, so that's No. 1.
No. 2, the oilsands — because that's really what we're talking about — has its own net-zero target, but its emissions continue to go up. And it made massive historic record profits, largely off of the back of an illegal war, Russia's war in Ukraine, and gave that money back to shareholders largely outside of Canada, and then invested in new fossil fuel infrastructure.
If they were able to reduce their emissions in the way that they said they would do, like every single other sector in Canada, then there wouldn't be a need to do this. They haven't. In fact, they're greenwashing.
That's what my report was to the [UN] secretary general. It was about what does it mean when you say "net zero"? What are the criteria and standards? Your emissions need to go down. Your money needs to go to clean [energy].
Oil and gas has not done it.
I think Canadian taxpayers should be quite outraged, to be honest. We're giving massive subsidies [to the oilsands]. And in good times, when they make a lot of money, they're not reinvesting that money to reduce their own emissions.
[COP host nations] are often controversial. Last year was Dubai. This year, Azerbaijan, as we said, is a nation that attributes more than 90 per cent of its export revenues to oil and gas. Are selections like that smart or a mistake?
For the regular public, I'm sure they think, what the heck are you doing here? It's not also just in terms of we're in a petrol state, it's also in terms of massive human rights abuses.
But that's not how they choose venues, unfortunately. It's not like the UN actually decides this. It's the whole international community. And in this case, which is actually very infuriating … Russia vetoed any other location, and that's why we ended up here in Azerbaijan.
Having said that, I mean, you can't throw the baby with the bathwater. We need the international community, everyone, to come together.
Someone said this to me, that imagine you're a small island developing state. If you don't have a COP to go to, when will anyone hear from you about the impacts of climate change on your community? And some of these countries will be underwater if we go above 1.5°C [over pre-industrial levels], which is the Paris Agreement target.
I can understand why people are cynical. I can tell you that I wasn't delighted. You know, next year in Brazil, and Brazil's been a great ally on climate change, so I think that's great.
But the reality is we don't have any other option. We need the whole world to come together. And so that's why I'm here.
Interview produced by Kevin Robertson. Q&A edited for length and clarity
