Critics of the Ontario government would tell you that it doesn’t have a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A more nuanced or sophisticated analysis would necessarily include the list of various projects and announcements the government has made that are climate-adjacent, like handing piles of cash to steel companies or automakers with some vague promises that climate policy will result. But the simpler analysis is the more accurate one, according to the most recent report from the Auditor General.
It's not just that the government’s only set target for GHG reductions is for 2030 (only five years from now), with no longer-range target announced. It’s that government is extremely likely to miss even that target, and doesn’t intend to formulate a Plan B. The Auditor General’s report this week makes some pretty basic (even anodyne) recommendations; namely, that the government set a new post-2030 target as well as a plan to meet its current target. The Ford government says: nope.
“Ontario will maintain an adaptable and agile approach that is responsive to the opportunities, needs, and circumstances of Ontario’s economy and job creators, rather than strictly adhere to a path or actions that do not account for current, future, and unknown economic opportunities and challenges,” the ministry of environment says in its prepared response to the recommendations.
It would be one thing if the government could boast of incredible success with its “adaptable and agile approach” so far, but it cannot. Ontario is almost certainly going to miss its 2030 target (barring a COVID-19-style shock to the economy nobody is hoping for) and, the auditor notes, the gap may exceed even the current projections. The major culprit is the government’s increasing reliance on natural gas to fill the gaps in our electricity sector, even as emissions from transportation and industry are expected to continue declining.
By 2030, projections show electricity-based GHG emissions in Ontario back up to 20 megatonnes, a level not seen since before the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession (and the mothballing of the province’s largest coal-fired power plants). The increased reliance on natural gas will almost certainly lead to a massive cost increase in Ontario’s power bills, as the continental gas supply is put in growing competition with global consumers thanks to American liquefied natural gas exports.
It's aggravating because it’s so unnecessary. The electricity sector is undergoing one of the most seismic changes in the last century with the proliferation of clean technologies while Ontario’s electricity system is getting dirtier. The Tories are skeptical of renewable power; fine, we don’t need to rehash that argument. But even accepting their single-minded devotion to nuclear power, technologies like batteries are still able to play a massive role in cleaning our grid, by displacing the role of natural gas wherever possible. That might not mean shutting gas plants down entirely, Nanticoke-style, but they can certainly be used less.
A presentation last month from Ember Energy laid out the transformation underway in the energy sector, calling it the Electrotech Revolution. While there are profound climate benefits from shifting our consumption from fossil fuel combustion to electricity, the shift in technologies isn’t primarily being driven by climate politics: cost and quality are driving the market.
“As a result, fossil fuel demand is peaking sector by sector, country by country. The ceiling of what is possible – cheap, abundant, universal electricity – is far higher than we once imagined,” the report argues.
This transformation is happening fastest and at the largest scale in China. It’s undeniably true that Chinese pollution from coal-burning is still an enormous source of GHG emissions, but the Chinese can boast something Ontario can’t: in 2025, their electricity-sector emissions are headed down, not up.
Ontario doesn’t need to ape Xi Jinping thought to achieve better than we’re on track to. Accelerating the construction of the proposed nuclear build-out, combined with a serious effort to build batteries into every niche of the power grid where they make sense, could massively reduce the projected increase in natural gas burning. Some of this might well be near-invisible to consumers: air conditioning giant Carrier wants to market home central AC units with integrated batteries that would charge when it’s cooler, taking strain off the power grid when it’s hottest.
But Ontario would need to stop listening to people who see energy as one front in the culture war, not to mention Enbridge’s well-compensated lobbyists, and actually press forward the electrotech revolution here in Ontario. Instead (to pick just one facet of this) we have a government that wants the jobs and investments that come from EV plants, but almost none of the policies that encourage consumers to actually buy those EVs here in Ontario — even as the Americans’ brief flirtation with robust climate policy evaporates under the second Trump administration, calling the entire enterprise into question.
The Tories don’t have to find religion on renewables to move forward with a serious, evidence-based climate policy. But they do have to face the facts of physics and economics if they want to change direction.
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