Latest news with #NationalObserver
National Observer
11 hours ago
- Politics
- National Observer
Opposition parties curtail some special powers in Carney's Bill C-5
A controversial bill that would give the federal government the ability to override laws and regulations and fast-track projects is one step closer to becoming law. The federal Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities passed 23 amendments to Bill C-5 and wrapped up after midnight following a marathon Wednesday session. The Carney government used a special order to limit debate and study to try to get the bill through Parliament before MPs leave for summer recess this Friday. Along with removing federal barriers to internal trade, Bill C-5 would allow the federal cabinet to conditionally approve projects it deems 'in the national interest' before regulatory processes take place and enable cabinet to exempt those projects from many laws and regulations. If passed in its original form, the bill would also empower cabinet to override any laws passed by Parliament, like the Criminal Code or Species at Risk Act, for example. Some of that power has been curtailed after opposition MPs carved out some exclusions and checks on the powers it would afford the federal government, but Bloc Québécois MP Xavier Barsalou-Duval is not satisfied. 'The bill is less problematic than it was, but it's still not a good bill for sure,' Barsalou-Duval said in an interview early Thursday morning with Canada's National Observer. 'It's not a good deal for the environment and Canada.' The Bloc and Conservatives amended the bill to curtail cabinet's power, naming 16 laws the federal government could not override, including the Criminal Code, Indian Act, Lobbying Act, Conflict of Interest Act, Trade Unions Act and Hazardous Products Act, and others. A controversial bill that would give the federal government the ability to override laws and regulations and fast-track projects is one step closer to becoming law. A federal committee passed 23 amendments in a marathon session. The NDP and Green Party also oppose Bill C-5, but only the Bloc Québécois gets a vote at committee meetings. That didn't stop Green Party Leader Elizabeth May from attending virtually to speak to her amendments. No NDP MP was present for the clause-by-clause debate and votes. Another amendment passed by the Bloc Québécois and Conservatives prevents the government from designating projects for fast-tracking when Parliament is prorogued or dissolved. Environmental lawyers, including West Coast Environmental Law's Anna Johnston, criticized the bill for lacking transparency. Opposition MPs made some gains on this with a series of amendments that will require more information about listed projects to be made public in a timely manner. Many of these amendments, particularly those that increase transparency, are a step in the right direction and could 'go a long way towards improving government accountability to voters,' Johnston told Canada's National Observer in an emailed statement. However, cabinet would still get sweeping powers to declare when and for whom laws apply, which is troubling, she said. Additionally, now, if a project has not been substantially started within five years of being listed, the document expires, according to a Bloc amendment. Prime Minister Mark Carney has said no project will be imposed on a province, but this is not spelled out in the bill and the Bloc Québécois are not willing to take Carney at his word. The party tried — and failed — many times to change the bill's language to explicitly require Quebec's consent for any project within its jurisdiction. 'The thing that was the most important for us is not in the bill,' Barsalou-Duval said after the meeting concluded. The Liberal committee members opposed these changes and the Conservatives abstained. Liberal MP Will Greaves told Canada's National Observer the amendment is unnecessary because provincial jurisdiction is in the Constitution. 'Any law that we pass is subject to the Constitution, and the provinces' jurisdictions are the starting point; they don't need to be written into the bill expressly.' The Bloc did manage to pass an amendment that would require the federal government to give 30 days' notice before a project is listed in the national interest, consult with the province where it will be carried out and 'obtain its written consent if the project falls within areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction.' The eight-hour committee meeting on Wednesday evening was marked by friendly exchanges, jokes and laughter between Liberal, Bloc Québécois and Conservative MPs, despite the BQ's vehement opposition to the proposed legislation. The rare instances of unanimity resulted in smatterings of applause and cheers, with Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs exclaiming: 'I'm so used to fighting and losing!' But there were tense exchanges as well, particularly between BQ MP Xavier Barsalou-Duval and Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who testified for two hours alongside Transport and Internal Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland and newly elected Liberal MP and minister of Crown–Indigenous relations, Rebecca Alty. Barsalou-Duval compared the sweeping powers in Bill C-5 to a 'disguised' version of the Emergencies Act, and suggested the federal government is taking advantage of the trade war with US President Donald Trump to grant itself extreme powers. LeBlanc balked at the comparison to the Emergencies Act, and said the current situation is urgent from an economic standpoint. Through much interruption and back-and-forth, Barsalou-Duval fired back: 'We don't know that you will act in our best interest.' The CPC and BQ voted in favour of an NDP amendment to add language about good-paying, unionized jobs to the preamble.
National Observer
a day ago
- National Observer
A city in war-torn Ukraine has a mass transit policy some Torontonians are begging for
The lions are everywhere, once you start to look. Riding the trams in Lviv, Ukraine, it becomes impossible not to see the city's namesake animal on shop signs, company cars and the sides of buses. But the scenery goes by fast. Even as national resources have been diverted towards the defence force in the country's eastern areas, Ukraine's fifth-largest city has managed to implement a transit signal priority (TSP) setup this year for streetcars in the city's centre, giving trams expedited green lights that help them go 10 to 15 per cent faster on formerly clogged stretches. In a fully implemented TSP system, a bus or streetcar that is approaching an intersection sends a signal to the traffic light at that intersection, receiving a green light. Such systems can be a quick boost for cities looking to increase the share of commuters using public transit, rather than single-occupancy automobiles, key drivers of the global climate emergency. Lviv has installed such a system, despite facing significant challenges related to Russia's invasion. That leaves some Torontonians asking why Canada's largest city can't seem to fully do in peacetime what Lviv has done in the middle of a war. "TTC [Toronto Transit Commission] has a very ingrained habit of finding external causes to blame for their problems and to avoid internal review, assuming there's nothing to fix," said Steve Munro, a local transit blogger who has won the Jane Jacobs Medal for urban design, in an email to Canada's National Observer. "I really don't think the city or TTC are really on top of what technology is available elsewhere for TSP and there is more focus on developing something new for Toronto as if it doesn't exist yet." A recent Australian study says that Toronto has the slowest streetcar service of all the large world systems for which structured data is easily available. And while the city's transit index from the group Walk Score has improved since a decade ago, that improvement has been negligible — 0.1 points on a 100-point scale, compared with 7.4 points of improvement for nearby New York during the same period. New York's current transit score is 88.6, while Toronto's is 78.2. If Toronto is to bounce back from its poor transit performance, Canada's largest city might look to a Ukrainian city for answers. The lack of strong transit options in a city — even in car-happy North America — can hinder its ability to attract employers and population, with some large North American employers now citing good transit as a must-have when making facility location decisions. Traffic lights, though they may seem distinct from transit, are actually a significant part of the city's failure to build a thriving transit system. Traffic signals in Toronto are run by the city's transportation services department who, Munro said, are "frankly more oriented to roads than transit traffic. Their attitude is that if traffic moves well, transit benefits too. The 'rising tide lifts all boats' theory." But not all boats are being lifted. The feeling of frustration among Toronto transit riders has been percolating since at least October, when a Toronto-based user posted a video on Reddit under the title " Why no transit signal priority on St. Clair?" The video shows single-occupant vehicles chugging slowly through protected left turn after protected left turn, blocking the intersection as the streetcars jammed with people go nowhere. Reactions to the video ranged from posts blaming former mayor Rob Ford to a lamentation that the thought of adding 10 seconds to a commute to allow trams full of passengers through, "literally kills drivers" — a rhetorical flourish that appeared to be meant figuratively, based on the context of the discussion. The user who posted the original video confirmed that, as of May, the left turn blockage they documented in October still exists. Extra relevance now The topic of transit signal priority is of greater importance to riders now than ever before, as the Eglinton Crosstown light rail extension is coming along. The project is an undertaking that extends Toronto's existing streetcar system with a line that is part subway, part streetcar. The provincial government broke ground on the final tunnelled segment of the project in April. While the tunnelled sections do not include traffic crossings, they will add additional riders to street-level segments of the line when complete. With more riders in the overall system, there will be more need to move people through, including the parts that could benefit from the green lights that a fully activated TSP provides. According to Amer Shalaby, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto who has researched how traffic signals and transit should interact, just because existing TTC streetcars have transit signal priority devices installed "doesn't mean that TSP is implemented at all intersections." In some cases, he said, a city may buy a TSP solution for their transit vehicles, then fail to use it adequately due to political pressure or miscommunication. One project by the city, at least, seems to lend weight to the idea that TTC streetcars aren't doomed to be slow. In November 2017, the city launched a pilot project on King Street to give priority to streetcars on a roughly three-kilometre stretch from Bathurst to Jarvis streets, with private vehicles deprioritized. "Over the course of the following year, the pilot demonstrated, relatively quickly and cost-effectively, its ability to move people more efficiently on transit without compromising the broader transportation road network," the city wrote in a press release. The city made the transit priority corridor permanent in 2019. Deputy Mayor Ausma Malik, a fan of the King Street project, told the CBC that enforcement of traffic laws, along with good street design, is vital if transit priority projects are to work correctly. "Better enforcement has been our first and very significant step, and as the data shows, the addition of traffic agents along King has resulted in quicker travel times for transit users and safer travelling for pedestrians and cyclists," she told the outlet in 2024. For a brief moment, it looked like Toronto might be heading toward faster rail routes at a time when new understandings of climate change were putting pressure on cities to improve their transit options. Slowest in the world For some transit watchers, though, the King Street project feels like too little, too late, with a recent Australian study saying Toronto has some of the slowest tram routes in the world. "Who wins and who loses these policy battles, [which] may play out every time a traffic light is reprogrammed, a street is reconfigured, or a redevelopment takes place?" the study's author, Jan Scheurer, wrote in an email to Canada's National Observer. "My guess is that transit interests only rarely win in Toronto, but why is that so?" he asked, wondering whether pro-transit voices and institutions are too weak, or whether, despite strength, those institutions and thought leaders have come to accept Toronto's status quo as sufficient. And Toronto-area leaders' alleged attitude problems potentially extend beyond complacency over slow trams: A June 10 investigation by Jack Hauen in the Trillium found that before GO expansion partner Deutsche Bahn (DB) and its client, Metrolinx, parted ways, DB staffers "pushed for ambitious, European-style changes, while some of the Crown agency's leadership resisted, insistent that things work differently in Canada." The Trillium piece paints a grim picture of a regressive leadership stuck in the 20th century on the topic of mobility. "While the agency's GO Expansion web page still describes a plan for 15-minute service or better on the main lines," Hauen wrote, "sources mourned the more ambitious version of the project, which they said would have made suburban cores feel fully connected to downtown Toronto, and made rail a top choice for riders looking to travel within the Greater Golden Horseshoe. "A lot of people within the agency didn't understand that," a former Metrolinx employee told Hauen. "Or they didn't want it." To be fair to the current mayor, Munro says, the city previously had pro-car mayors "for a long time, and this sets the tone for staff. Although Mayor Chow is pro-transit, she hasn't been in office long enough to force a cultural shift, something that takes years." Munro's "long time" period full of pro-car mayors stretches well before the start of the century, argues Jason Slaughter, a Canadian transplant to Amsterdam who writes and speaks professionally about transit. "For the first few decades of subway building, Toronto would build a subway line under a streetcar line, and then remove the streetcar," he states in a recent video essay, saying that, unlike some European cities, where the systems were viewed as complementary, "this was a stated goal of the subway system. It was built less as a way to improve public transit, and more as a way to make room for cars on the surface." Both Slaughter and Scheurer emphasize policy preferences change over time, and there are still chances for Toronto to bounce back from its poor transit performance. "[It's important to understand] urban streets as contested spaces, or constant policy battlegrounds between stakeholder interests," Scheurer wrote to Canada's National Observer. For its part, despite the success of its King Street pilot project, the mayor's office won't say whether it's looking at putting some traffic light systems directly under TTC control. Canada's National Observer left a half-dozen requests for comment via phone and email over the course of 16 days. No one responded. On June 16, Robert Fico, prime minister of Ukraine's neighbor, Slovakia, which has been a pro-Russian voice in recent years, acknowledged with approval what most European Union leadership circles have tacitly agreed on for years: Ukraine is likely to become part of the EU once the current war ends. If the experiences of Slovakia and the other Visigrad countries are any indication, this means that money is about to start flowing from the bloc to Ukraine's infrastructure needs, funding roads, bike paths and transit all over the country. Tram systems in cities like Lviv, in other words, will not be standing still. They're about to get even better.
National Observer
2 days ago
- Politics
- National Observer
A US climate conspiracy has spread to Canada — and local politicians haven't been warned
In a crowded room in Ottawa in April 2024, a woman stands in front of a screen displaying a bill from Tennessee. 'This is what we're aiming for,' she says, pointing at the text. 'We have their original resolution … and now we're making a Canadian version.' The Tennessee bill is uncompromising: it bans any city, municipality or school district from implementing climate policies traceable to the United Nations' Agenda 21, Agenda 2030 or net-zero goals if they in any way impact private property rights. A man in the crowd calls out that the UN is creating a 'one-world government' under its 'total control.' The woman onstage, Maggie Hope Braun, agrees and begins promoting the toolkits of Tom DeWeese, a US Tea Party influencer who claims that climate change is a hoax designed to usher in global socialism. Five months later, in September 2024, Maggie Hope Braun stood in front of the Peterborough County Council in Ontario and gave a far more polished speech. This time was different: she didn't mention Tennessee, provincial bans, a UN-takeover or a one-world government. Instead, she focused on fiscal responsibility, recommending that Peterborough County leave Canada's flagship local net-zero program. Mayor Carolyn Amyotte of North Kawartha was in the chamber that day. She said that Braun sounded 'reasonable, credible, legitimate and totally evidence-based. There's a lot of people I think that could be susceptible to it.' It wasn't until Amyotte came across Canada's National Observer's investigation into Braun's group KICLEI in May 2025 that she realized the full scope of what she had witnessed. Multiple councillors have told Canada's National Observer that they did not receive warnings from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities about KICLEI's misinformation campaign, even though it knew politicians were being exposed. Our investigation found that KICLEI – named to mimic the sustainability network ICLEI – is using an AI chatbot to turn climate misinformation into reasonable-sounding and convincing speeches, reports and letters to target 8,000-plus elected officials across Canada. The goal is to get municipalities to abandon net-zero policies. Three scientists at NASA, the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, and University of Melbourne told us Braun's group KICLEI misrepresented their research. On June 4, Amyotte introduced a motion to share Canada's National Observer's investigation with all elected officials in Peterborough County. But there are signs that her warnings are not reaching everyone. As this Tea Party-inspired misinformation campaign continues, the institutions responsible for the targeted net-zero program appear to be avoiding giving it oxygen. Multiple councillors told Canada's National Observer that they did not receive warnings from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities about KICLEI, even though our reporting has found it knew that politicians across the country were being exposed to its misinformation. They still are. Last Monday, Patrick Wilson, a councillor in the town of Cochrane, Alberta, introduced a motion to leave a national climate initiative, which will be voted upon on June 23. He quoted extensively from KICLEI's website, saying that it expresses concerns 'much better and more eloquently than I could.' 'Make it so they don't know which side it's coming from' KICLEI was created in 2023 by Braun, an erstwhile Freedom Convoy activist, with the aim of convincing municipalities across Canada, like Cochrane and Peterborough, to leave a voluntary net-zero framework called Partners for Climate Protection. The framework was developed by ICLEI Canada and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to help municipalities transition to net-zero (through a process covering emissions inventories, target-setting, action planning, implementation, and monitoring), based on international climate agreements, including the UN's Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals. But those UN ties got the conspiracy gears turning, just as they did 15 years ago in the US. Dozens of US cities left ICLEI around 2010 due to a Tea Party backlash against the UN's Agenda 21, which they saw as threatening property rights. Campaigns in small rural municipalities eventually snowballed into state-level legislation. KICLEI is explicitly trying to replicate the Tea Party's American blueprint in Canada. In a YouTube video recorded in Ottawa in April 2024, Braun displays Tennessee's bill banning UN-linked climate policies and announces plans to 'do what they've done here.' 'They're tapping into conspiracist sentiments, which have been long-held beliefs in far-right circles in the US,' said Wes Regan, a researcher at the University of British Columbia investigating how conspiracies impact municipal planning. But they face an uphill battle. In its 2010 heyday, the movement failed to spread to Canada, which Regan suspects is because Canadian audiences are more moderate and less receptive to US Tea Party terms like 'climate hoax,' 'UN takeover' or 'one-world-government.' The movement has adapted. At a bustling information session in Pembroke, Ontario, Braun advised supporters to 'remove every triggering word — make it so they don't know which side it's coming from.' This tactic is streamlined by KICLEI's AI chatbot, which uses language like 'local consultation' and 'environmental stewardship' over overt ideological signals. Regan is troubled by this shift toward outward moderation while the underlying ideology hasn't changed. 'They're taking the right-wing conspiracist, anti-globalist playbook and using language that's friendly, positive and empathetic,' he said. Braun disagrees. 'There's nothing deceptive about using language that connects,' she told Canada's National Observe r in her written response to questions. For her, avoiding terms like 'Agenda 21' is simply good communication. She denied importing US laws. Braun published a blog post with detailed answers but refused to give an interview with Canada's National Observer. 'I actually thought they were an environmental group' To find out whether elected officials are falling for KICLEI's campaign, we attended the annual conference of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) – a body that represents over 2,000 councils across Canada. FCM organizes many environmental programs, including the Green Municipal Fund and the PCP program, which has been targeted by KICLEI. Canada's National Observer sent its findings by email to FCM three weeks before the conference, which started May 29. That afternoon, FCM hosted a workshop on misinformation, attended by hundreds of elected officials. Multiple councillors told Canada's National Observer that AI was mentioned only in passing and KICLEI's misinformation was not addressed. Councillor Mara Nagy from Pickering, Ont. said that she expressed concerns about KICLEI during the workshop because her colleague had fallen for it. The panel did not directly answer that part of her question. 'I would've liked for KICLEI to be addressed head-on,' said Nagy. She explained that the confusion is causing frustration among elected officials. 'I've not heard from FCM since,' she added. This silence was 'out of respect' for ICLEI, according to Ewa Jackson, managing director of ICLEI Canada. Jackson explained that they try not to amplify KICLEI's misinformation, instead providing support to municipalities who reach out with concerns. ICLEI has known about the campaign for almost two years – they stated that they have warned members and that it was raised by elected officials during a recent Sustainable Communities Conference. Jackson accepts that the campaign has caused confusion. When she introduced herself to elected officials in the misinformation workshop, she was mistaken for a representative of KICLEI. Another attendee of the workshop was James Leduc, mayor of Bradford West Gwillimbury, Ont., who started receiving KICLEI's correspondence after the town adopted its climate plan in November. 'I actually thought they were an environmental group,' he said. According to Chris Russill, an expert in climate communication at Carleton University, this confusion provides 'opportunities' to shape the opinions of elected officials. Russill also warned that AI has caused an 'exacerbation' of long-standing democratic vulnerabilities, including the lack of resources for local governments to fact-check correspondence. Faced with this, elected officials like Leduc look towards institutions like FCM for guidance. 'We really need their support,' he said. In a written response to Canada's National Observer, FCM acknowledged that 'disinformation campaigns have caused frustration for some members' but said that they have only received a 'small number of inquiries' about KICLEI's campaign. FCM's annual conference now appears to be a missed opportunity to set the record straight. In attendance at the event were multiple elected officials from Cochrane, Alta. – the same town that will vote next Monday on whether to leave the PCP program. During a press conference at the event, FCM President Rebecca Bligh said that FCM is 'alive to the issue' and that fighting AI-generated misinformation is an opportunity to partner with the federal government, which launched a new ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation in May 2025. But for now, it appears that councillors like Amyotte and Nagy are left scrambling to warn their colleagues before more municipalities abandon their net-zero commitments to carefully crafted conspiracy theories.
National Observer
4 days ago
- Business
- National Observer
Could Canada's carbon capture ambitions catch a chill from Iceland's struggling Mammoth project?
Iceland and Canada lie over 4,500 kilometres apart on a world map, yet news that a pioneering carbon removal project near Reykjavik is falling well short of expectations a year after its launch has hit home with some North American sector skeptics closely watching the climate technology's progress. Switzerland's Climeworks, which has raised US $800 million, opened the world's largest operational direct air capture (DAC) plant, known as Mammoth, to global fanfare in May last year. But the facility, which uses what look like walls of giant fans to capture CO 2 directly from the air and then pumps it deep underground, has not measured up to expectations. The pilot project pulled just 105 tonnes of CO 2 from the air in its first 12 months of operation, a fraction of its projected annual capacity of 36,000 tonnes, according to a report by Iceland's Heimildin newspaper last month. 'That is less than the annual emissions of a dozen long-haul trucks,' said Michael Barnard, a prominent clean energy technology analyst and self-styled debunker of greenwashing technologies. Climeworks has not responded to the news report or to requests for comment from Canada's National Observer. But the slow start at Mammoth has sparked discussion in clean energy circles over the wisdom of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in similar CO 2 removal projects in Canada. 'We don't need a billion-dollar vacuum cleaner for the sky,' Barnard said in a LinkedIn post. 'We need heat pumps, EVs, and clean electricity. DAC might serve as niche cleanup after 2050 — maybe.' Canada was already betting on direct air capture before the Iceland setback. The Trudeau government supported DAC development through tax credits covering 60 per cent of construction costs, a $10 million commitment to carbon removal service purchases, and a draft federal offset protocol allowing DAC companies to generate tradeable carbon credits. These incentives and guaranteed demand aim to lure private investment in DAC and potentially boost the Liberals' faltering pledge to reach net-zero emissions in Canada by 2050. Following his April election, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada could be a leader in carbon capture and storage as part of a controversial effort to decarbonize oil and gas, including extending tax credits and setting carbon dioxide removal targets. Canada is taking the opposite approach to the United States, where Trump administration budget cuts could eliminate up to US $1 billion in Department of Energy (DOE) funding for two direct air capture demonstration projects in Texas and Louisiana. Nevertheless, DAC is gathering pace elsewhere, with roughly 150 companies working on projects around the world. Eight companies are located in Canada, including Montreal-based start-up Deep Sky's Alpha project — a first-of-its-kind solar-powered DAC technology hub in Alberta partly backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Catalyst fund. Deep Sky Alpha, on track to bring the first of as many as 14 different DAC plant concepts online this summer, is expected to cost over $110 million over the next decade. Whether any will make the leap to commercialization remains a question mark, said Phil De Luna, Deep Sky's chief carbon scientist and head of engineering. 'In the current geopolitical climate, with the US Trump administration cutting DOE funding for key DAC projects, there are understandably some concerns about development of the technology,' he told Canada's National Observer. 'But this only makes the industry more focused — and the scrutiny being shown [to projects like Mammoth] is overall a healthy thing and helps all of us in learning as we go in developing DAC technologies.' Trials of a 'first of a kind' technology Where industry observers like Barnard see an expensive technology failing to live up to its hype, De Luna remains optimistic. He said only a 'subsection' of the Mammoth plant was fully commissioned, and despite the low carbon capture rate, the results show the technology works, he said. 'I think the marketing [by Climeworks on its Iceland project] and the attention generated has been a little premature,' said De Luna, who toured the facility during a recent holiday in Iceland. 'This is first-of-a-kind technology, and it's tremendously positive that we know the technology is working,' he said. Jorden Dye, director of the Carbon Dioxide Removal Centre, a Calgary-based think-tank, said the poor results from Iceland were 'nothing more than a bump in the road' and direct air capture could be a viable technology for climate mitigation in the years to come. 'If we are not developing DAC now — working through the prototypes, getting it deployed at ever-larger scale, commercializing it — then we won't have it ready when we need it by mid-century,' he said. Barnard, a former IBM troubleshooter who now consults on energy transition technologies for industrial conglomerates, said DAC 'does work and will work better' as it is developed, but it would not be economically scalable by 2050, if ever. 'DAC is economically non-viable. It's a dead technology walking,' he said. The current uses for captured CO 2 — such as injecting carbon dioxide into aging oil and gas reservoirs to boost pressure and production, as well as into concrete, plastics or biofuels — account for a very small percentage of the 35-45 billion tonnes of CO 2 added to the atmosphere each year, he said. 'So the 'U' in CCUS [carbon capture, utilization and storage], for instance, will never become material," Barnard said. If captured CO 2 isn't being used, he said it only makes sense to build DAC plants where it's possible to store large volumes in geological structures like depleted fossil fuel reservoirs or rock formations deep underground. 'Carbon capture, if it can be made to pencil out at all, only does so in a very limited number of places,' Barnard said. To make sense from a climate and economic point of view, any new carbon removal technology would need to capture around 100 million tonnes annually, according to Barnard's calculations. Achieving this scale would require hundreds of kilometres of so-called 'extractor walls' made of porous materials to absorb CO 2. Nature-based alternatives — from reforesting denuded lands and planting tree farms, to restoring waterways and wetlands — are a better investment, Barnard said, as well as stepping up the electrification of industries and transportation. Canada "well positioned" Despite the economic and technological hurdles, proponents point to DAC's key role in Canada's carbon management strategy to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. 'Canada is incredibly well-positioned to lead in advancing this technology — which will take time to develop, but which we are definitely going to need due to climate change,' Dye said. "Carbon capture, if it can be made to pencil out at all, only does so in a very limited number of places. Canada has two advantages for DAC projects. First, 80 per cent of the country's electricity comes from renewable sources, primarily hydroelectric power that provides the clean, affordable energy that carbon removal plants need. Second, Canada's underground geology can store about 678 gigatonnes of CO 2 — nearly equal to the country's entire emissions in 2023 and more than twice Canada's objective of carbon removal by 2050, according to Carbon Removal Canada. The industry lobby group projects that a full-scale DAC industry could create 300,000 jobs and add $143 billion to Canada's GDP by 2050. 'DAC needs the intersection of renewable power and geologic storage and there are very few places on the planet that have these in the abundance we do here in Canada,' De Luna said. The global DAC market could exceed US $1 trillion by 2050, according to projections from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and McKinsey & Company. Still, the disappointing news from Mammoth could affect investor perceptions of direct air capture projects, said Na'im Merchant, Carbon Removal Canada's CEO. 'There are well over 100 companies around the world that are doing 'something new and difficult for the first time' to develop these technologies,' he told Canada's National Observer. 'Some might outperform expectations, some might underperform, but we haven't yet made the kind of investment needed to help commercialize these technologies to let up now," he said. "I do worry public perception of a project like Mammoth could affect investor perception [of the viability of DAC]." Multiple pilot projects could help to identify scalable technologies worthy of the major investment needed to build carbon removal plants that can benefit from economies of scale, he said. Barnard disagrees. While Wright's Law — which says the cost of manufactured items gets cheaper for every doubling of units produced — explains a 90 per cent plunge in solar panel prices in the past decade, DAC will not see such cost reductions, he said. 'Solar got cheap because [the industry] had billions of units, huge consumer markets, and steep learning curves and [photovoltaic panels] were relatively simple objects to make,' he said. DAC involves industrial-scale infrastructure moving huge volumes of air through kilometres of fan walls. 'Only thousands of units will be manufactured per type of DAC and most of the components are already bog-standard and cost-optimized,' he said. "Creating the right policy environment, so investors feel DAC is sufficiently derisked must ultimately be more important than early results from a first-of-its-kind carbon removal technology like Climeworks" The technology faces other challenges. 'It takes energy to separate dilute CO 2 from air and then separate the CO 2 from whatever captured it — lots of it. There's no magic breakthrough coming,' Barnard said. DAC's development is also a policy puzzle. "Creating the right policy environment, so investors feel DAC is sufficiently derisked must ultimately be more important than early results from a first-of-its-kind carbon removal technology like Climeworks," Merchant said. He sees the US policy retreat as Canada's opportunity to accelerate the development of demonstration-scale plants capturing hundreds of thousands of tonnes annually. Environment and Climate Change Canada spokesperson Samantha Bayard said in an emailed statement that Ottawa was 'still consulting' on the draft offset protocol for using direct air capture that qualifies for federal offset and pricing systems, as well as clean electricity regulations. The federal government supported DAC because it was 'recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency that there is no credible path to net-zero emissions without [these] carbon management technologies," she said. Canadian 'DAC Olympics' Deep Sky Alpha, being built in Innisfail, AB, will play a central role in growing small-scale pilots to mid-size demonstrators. Start-ups such as ReCarbn, Carbyon, Carbon Atlantis, and Skyrenu are already queuing up for construction and commissioning. 'We see Alpha as the DAC Olympics,' De Luna said, adding the project will help identify what technologies work best for Canada's climate and inform investor decisions on whether to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to scale up the technology. Other Canadian projects are moving ahead as well, including a maiden DAC plant in Fermont, northern Quebec, developed by Ottawa-based TerraFixing and partner Tugliq Énergie, a green energy supplier in Montreal. 'This project will take full advantage of Quebec's clean hydroelectricity and huge wind power resource, so it will point the way toward developing more renewables in the province as well as proving our technology on the way to commercialization,' TerraFixing CEO, Vida Gabriel, told Canada's National Observer. The Fermont project, expected to go online later this year, comprises a pair of TerraFixing DAC units powered by wind and backed up by hydro. Each unit aims to capture up to 1,000 tonnes of CO 2 per year. Industrial-scale demand needed The federal government's carbon removal strategy envisions deploying a range of technologies that will spur the development of a 'world class, multi-billion-dollar carbon management sector.' While it concedes that DAC is 'less mature' than CCUS, it believes direct air capture holds 'significant' potential for current climate action plans. Ottawa's carbon removal procurement plans are an important first step, Merchant said, but federal purchases need to increase tenfold now and another tenfold after 2030, given that industrial demand for carbon credits will drive DAC growth. 'We need to create the demand for DAC across government, the corporate sector, from heavy-emitting industry — we won't get to gigatonne-scale [carbon removal] plants without it,' he said. Corporate early adopters are already emerging. Shopify, an online marketplace platform, last year founded a group called Frontier alongside Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability, with plans to spend US $925 million on carbon removal. Separately, RBC and Microsoft have signed deals with Deep Sky to buy DAC carbon credits over the next 10 years. Climate change won't wait, however. DAC proponents argue technologies must be developed now to be ready to capture and store legacy emissions in the decades ahead, regardless of how quickly the world decarbonizes. 'We have to factor in 'pipeline warming,'' De Luna said, adding that even if all emissions ceased immediately, global warming would persist for decades and require removing at least a decade's worth of CO 2 already in the atmosphere. 'The criticism of DAC — it's too energy intensive, too costly, too hard to scale up — overlooks this," he said. "Clean energy, yes, it is absolutely what we should do, but there are still emissions to be dealt with and DAC will be a big part of the solution there.' Carbon cost disincentive One issue is that Canadian companies are reluctant to pay the price of carbon credits. The federal carbon levy, launched at $20 per tonne in 2019, rises $15 annually and is expected to reach $170 per tonne by 2030. But De Luna believes 'over time this willingness to pay will change' as carbon removal gets cheaper and companies face intensifying pressure to decarbonize. Today, the cost of pulling CO 2 from the atmosphere is around US $1,000/tonne — what Climeworks has paid to capture emissions at its Mammoth facility. The Swiss company has said its Generation 3 technology aimed to reduce costs to US $250-350/tonne of CO 2 captured, and achieve a total cost of US $400-600/tonne removed by 2030. Deep Sky sees a route over the next three to five years to reduce their costs to $400/tonne and then 'in the 2030s' closer to $200/tonne. 'We are never going to get the cost down to as low a level as we need if we don't start building now,' said De Luna. 'We are never going to get the cost down to as low a level as we need if we don't start building now." 'We are already seeing precipitous cost reductions between the technologies we are piloting at Alpha and the next-generation technologies that we are evaluating for our next projects there," he added. Barnard argues climate action investments by governments and industry should be directed solely at clean energy — solar power, battery technologies and electric vehicles. 'If we electrify as fast as we might, we will not have anywhere near the demand for technologies like DAC,' he said. 'DAC is not going to help us in Canada or on this planet with our 2050 emissions reduction targets. Renewables, led by solar and batteries, will.' 'Co-opted' by Big Oil? Without wider public support, Merchant warned, DAC risked becoming a 'fig leaf' that allows fossil fuel companies to continue business as usual. US oil giant Occidental is an example of this concern. Its Stratos facility in Texas will be the world's largest DAC plant, capturing 500,000 tonnes of CO2 yearly and, according to the company, help preserve its core oil and gas business. 'This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it's going to be very much needed,' Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub told a Houston oil and gas conference in 2023. Investor sentiment for DAC is also highly dynamic, with feverish interest in the technology in the early 2020s giving way to greater investor wariness. That could shift again. 'The carbon removal investor 'gold rush' we saw a few years ago is over. This is a time of stress for the sector,' Gabriel said. 'Canada can seize the opportunity to rapidly advance DAC and move past this phase.' DAC proponents want to reframe the conversation about climate change and the role that carbon removal technologies can play in reducing emissions along with other mitigation efforts. As the climate crisis deepens, 'we will realize we didn't do enough to develop carbon removal technologies so that we have the tools we need to help ourselves," Merchant said. De Luna said he hoped 'ingenuity and innovation' would get the energy transition back on track and DAC could be part of the climate action solution. "With climate change, things are going to get worse before they get better. But will we be able to make things better with DAC and other carbon removal technologies? Yes, absolutely.'
National Observer
13-06-2025
- Business
- National Observer
CNO lands major climate solutions reporting award
Canada's National Observer is proud to announce business correspondent Darius Snieckus has won Canadian Journalism Foundation's annual Award for Climate Solutions Reporting. The award-winning series, Big Green Build, told deeply reported stories on Canada's housing construction crisis and the generational opportunity to build greener and better to meet the country's climate targets. "It's an extraordinary privilege to have received this award," Snieckus said from the Toronto stage as he received the national honour. "The word 'climate' has been conspicuous in its absence of late in global geopolitical discourse and much mainstream media. ... And yet it is the most important story of our time. This recognition by the Canadian Journalism Foundation of my series on the sustainable construction sector, Big Green Build, is a recognition of Canada's National Observer 's mission to cover and uncover the many transformative narratives emerging in Canada's shift to a clean economy." One juror wrote that the series draws attention to 'green innovations that could be used not just in Canada but across the world. 'This series does an excellent job reminding us of the challenges new buildings pose to planet — but also the opportunities new technologies and design offer for mitigating the problem,' the juror continued. The series explored deep retrofits for high-rise buildings in Toronto, affordable upgrades to century-old residential and office spaces in Montreal, and a state-of-the-art EV residential project in London, Ont. It also analyzed innovations in materials, from low-carbon cement and concrete to engineered wood, which offers net-zero benefits but faces questions over the sustainability of mass timber. "Climate journalism can get stuck in a few modes, like wonkish big-picture policy stories or recounting environmental collapse," said Jimmy Thomson, editor-in-chief of Canada's National Observer."This series breaks that mold. It examines smart solutions and exciting developments that can improve our quality of life while delivering better climate outcomes." Linda Solomon, publisher of CNO, added, 'I'm incredibly proud of this recognition for Big Green Build. It reflects the kind of journalism we believe in at Canada's National Observer — deeply reported, solution-focused, and committed to tackling the most urgent issue of our time. This award is a testament to the power of public-interest reporting to inform, inspire, and drive change.'
