The country's carbon footprint is expected to up by 38% by the year 2030

Jan 15, 2014 10:46 GMT  ·  By

As if folks needed any more reasons to oppose tar sands projects, it turns out that such initiatives are highly likely to cause Canada's yearly carbon emissions to up to a considerable extent.

According to a new report recently presented by the Harper administration to the United Nations, the country's annual emissions of said greenhouse gas are bound to hit 815 million tonnes by the year 2030.

When a 1990 baseline is taken into consideration, this represents an increase of 38%, The Guardian tells us. Thus, that year, Canada reported carbon emissions of 590 million tonnes.

In its report, the Harper administration details that the chief driver behind said increase in the country's annual carbon emissions is tar sands projects.

Thus, specialists estimate that, between the years 2005 and 2030, emissions linked to Canada's tar sands industry will quadruple and reach an impressive 137 million tonnes per year.

By the looks of it, this figure is greater than that reported by Belgium and several other countries around the world.

Commenting on the Harper administration's latest report concerning Canada's carbon emissions and their predicted increase over the years to come, environmentalist Bill McKibben said, “Who'd have imagined that digging up the tar sands would somehow add carbon to the atmosphere?”

“That Canada watched the Arctic melt and then responded like this will be remembered by history,” the founder of green group 350.org went on to argue.

Back in 2011, the country announced that it was pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, i.e. an international agreement to reduce yearly emissions of greenhouse gases.

At that time, Canada announced that, instead of meeting the reduction targets set in place by the Kyoto Protocol, it was to focus on meeting a more lenient target of cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 17% when compared to the year 2005.

The deadline for this initiative is 2020 but, according to a report issued last year, not only will the country fail to reach this goal, but its 2020 emissions are very likely to be roughly 20% higher than they were in 2005.