We just can’t leave COP30 behind. At least not without an award. Yes, folks, Canada left with renewed ambition, renewed verbiage and… uh… the “Fossil of the Day award”, which goes to those governments “doing the most to achieve the least”. Aw shucks. But as the Climate Action Network emailed: “Canada’s inaction at this COP and significant climate backsliding at home has drawn the attention of our members, allies, and media.” So much for that triumph. We’re old enough to remember when anyone cared about either the empty ambition or the lame activism.

According to Canada’s National Observer, a far-left publication that thinks Mark Carney has betrayed the climate cause:

“Towards the end of every day on the periphery of the UN climate talks, civil society groups gather in a satirical ceremony to present an award to those ‘doing the most to achieve the least.’ The Fossil of the Day award is a raucous ritual, observed each day of climate negotiations since 1999. Canada was given the ignoble honour this week in Brazil, for the first time since the Harper years.”

Not that they aren’t boasting. They always do. In this case our windbag Environment Minister said in the wake of the COP30 debacle that:

“Over the past two weeks at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Canada’s delegation worked with counterparts from around the world, alongside international organizations, Indigenous peoples, civil society, and labour groups to advocate for measures to confront the urgent realities of a rapidly changing climate and the need to accelerate climate action globally. Throughout the negotiations, Canada worked with countries to strengthen multilateralism; foster dialogue; build consensus; and advance evidence-based, inclusive climate action…. Canadian communities are on the front lines of climate change, and the science is clear that we need to do more, faster and together, to keep 1.5 °C of warming within reach. That’s why one of Canada’s top priorities for COP30 was to push for more collective action to reduce emissions, recognizing that there is a lot of work ahead of us to meet the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals.”

A lot of work ahead of us. Yeah. It’s one way of putting it. And yes, it is tiring work stitching all those cliches together. Despite which “the world” doesn’t seem to notice us in Canada, or swoon over us if it does notice us, nearly as often as we think they should. In fact the World Population Review just put out an index of “Climate Change Performance” whose mathiness is hard to take seriously but which makes no effort to acknowledge Canada’s self-satisfaction, ranking us near the bottom and well below the dreaded United States.

Now the National Observer, in keeping with the leftist or in Thomas Sowell’s terminology “unconstrained” worldview, sees it as a plot and Carney as a turncoat:

“Many of the accusations will be familiar to anyone following Canadian politics: pulling back climate policies while pushing forward fossil subsidies and projects. But the committee seemed particularly stung by Mark Carney’s role in flushing ‘climate policies down the drain’ after so many years lauding him for raising the alarm about climate risk. At the outset of COP30, Canadians were frequently met with envy by people familiar with Carney’s background but unfamiliar with the last few months of domestic politics. The perception has soured as news about fossil fuel subsidies, an LNG project, a gas pipeline and even reports about a new bitumen pipeline all landed during the climate negotiations.”

And they certainly have a point that Carney gives the strong impression of being a “chancer”, praising greenery and hating on carbon in ways that made him rich and influential then talking of making Canada an “energy superpower” on conventional as well as alternative fuels in ways that made him prime minister. They seem to think it’s deliberate:

“The sense of betrayal led to some unusually sharp jabs by the award committee, and even a hurtful dig at our duds: ‘Canada has been wearing hypocrisy as confidently and comfortably as it wears its national denim-on-denim look, masking fossil expansion behind the language of climate leadership.’”

But they miss the key point, or rather, the two key points.

First, Carney was always among those, and they are many, who believe you can have it all, that governance is not about tradeoffs but about separating the policy sheep from the policy goats, disposing of things that are bad in every way and embracing those that are good in every way. Second, like most of the Canadian political class and partly in consequence, he’s terrible at governance.

In fact Canada is not engaged in “fossil expansion”, a term here meaning creating a positive environment for investments in hydrocarbon energy rather than, say, inflating a T Rex skeleton. Indeed, embarrassingly, one of the projects Carney approved for his Major Projects Office to do something unclear with just got shot down:

“The New Brunswick government confirmed that the Sisson Mine project has failed to meet a single one of the 40 conditions required for approval and would not be moving forward immediately.”

Oops. Going zero for forty doesn’t get you to the majors. And since Carney approving something, we know not how, to send to an Office that supposedly expedites approval of the preapproved we know not how, doesn’t actually bring approval, it’s all just soothing bloviation.

Funnily enough, Climate Action Network seems to have bought some of the other bloviation. Its email started:

“Over the weekend, our members and allies were quick to respond to the final outcome, celebrating the COP30 decision to develop a Just Transition Mechanism, while also highlighting the major gaps remaining on finance, adaptation and energy.”

Celebrating? A Just Transition Mechanism? That thing is so nebulous Mark Carney could have drafted it. Speaking of which, their Executive Director, Caroline Brouillette, was quoted that:

“For the first time at COP30, the world has committed to center justice for workers and communities in the UN climate talks. Our movements’ efforts have paid off: the Just Transition decision has the most ambitious language on rights and inclusion that we have ever seen at a COP, recognizing marginalized groups like women, youth and Afro-descendant people. It also calls for the respect and promotion of the individual and collective rights of Indigenous Peoples, including their self-determination and right to free, prior, and informed consent, affirmed in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. There’s a lot of work ahead to turn these principles into reality – but today, we celebrate this big step towards connecting climate action with people’s lives.”

A lot of work ahead. Yeah. You could say that. Again. Or not, because what really lies ahead is a lot of talk.

We don’t have the heart to tell her, amid raptures about “Afro-descendant people”, that the entire human race originated in Africa. It might spoil the mood. And we’re determined to accomplish that task in a more direct way, by saying that when you mistake windy intentions and hapless impracticality for a master plan, you’re very likely to keep holding conferences that talk and talk and all you end up with is an award you didn’t want.

On which point, the National Observer also quoted Ms. Brouillette sympathetically that:

“It’s sad to see Canada embarrassed on the international stage like this, but even more heartbreaking has been seeing the hard-won and substantial climate progress that we achieved over the past 10 years be torn away piece by piece.”

We beg to differ. It’s funny to see “Canada”, a term here meaning Canada’s government and its windbag politicians, embarrassed on the international stage like this, or strutting off as if not embarrassed, one skill they do possess. But also what “hard-won and substantial climate progress”? And we don’t just mean globally. We mean in Canada.

In fact the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and don’t ask why when we also have an Environment Commissioner and who knows what other bureaucracy, just put out a report “Estimating Canada’s 2023 Emissions Gap” that cruelly highlights the ongoing failure of our government, including for a decade under Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau, to get anywhere meaningful on its soaring ambitions:

“Under PBO’s updated projection that accounts for federal policy revisions earlier this year, we estimate Canada’s 2030 emissions gap could range from 49 megatonnes (Mt) to 102 Mt. That is, projected emissions in 2030 could be 49 Mt to 102 Mt above the legislated target of 40-45 per cent below 2005 levels. This would leave Canada’s emissions in 2030 at 33.5 per cent and 31.5 per cent, respectively, below 2005 levels.”

That’s a megatonne of failure, and of verbiage. But what you need to know is that total Canadian emissions in 2023 are thought to have been 650 of the things. And the figure for 2005 was allegedly 759 (we don’t trust these measurements) so the “legislated target” of 40 percent below that number (and to be blunt, you can legislate procedures but you cannot legislate outcomes; a tax bill for instance can set a specific tax rate but it cannot mandate that such-and-such a tax will bring in a specific amount) below that number by 2030 would be 455. Missing 455 by 100 isn’t a rounding error. It’s a you-had-no-clue error.

So missing our reduction target by a hundred or so is also a lot. Not because Justin Trudeau wasn’t serious, after his own silly fashion, about fighting climate change, reducing emissions and fixing the weather. Because he didn’t know how government worked and on the rare occasions when he tried to figure it out he got nowhere. And while Carney is smoother than Trudeau, he’s no better at making things happen by saying let it be so. Or at understanding that you cannot at one and the same time get rid of oil and gas and sell them in large amounts.

P.S. It gets worse. The insider Hill Times leads off its story, naturally involving the usual experts who say, with “‘Disappointing but not surprising’: PBO forecasts Canada to fall short of 2030 emissions target/ The Canadian Climate Institute is calling the budget watchdog’s analysis ‘optimistic,’ and projects Canada will miss the target by a greater margin.” So everybody knows, except the Canadian government, that it can’t do what it says it wants to do and can’t even predict its own failure ahead of time like everyone else. Which is not a plot. It’s precisely what it looks like, embarrassing incompetence wedded to blithe fanaticism.