The following is a re-print of the November 2025 edition of Shift Storm, the CCPA’s monthly newsletter which focuses on the intersection of work and climate change. Click here to subscribe to Shift Storm and get the latest updates straight to your inbox as soon as they come out.
One of the most stubborn questions faced by Canadian climate advocates is why Canada should bother taking action on climate change when the rest of the world is not. After all, as Conrad Black puts it, why tackle emissions at home when other countries “consider all of these climate change warnings to be unmitigated rubbish and make virtually no concessions to them whatever”?
It’s a position many Canadians seem to believe. While two thirds agree that Canada should do more on climate, most think that Canada is making more progress than other countries.
They’re wrong. The idea that the world lags Canada on climate action is not true, has never been true and is becoming less true over time. And it’s not because the rest of the world is doing particularly well, as we’ll explore below. Canada is simply losing the race.
Since 2005, we have managed to reduce emissions by about 10 per cent. In the same period, the average European country has cut emissions by a third. Even the U.S. is down about 20 per cent. Overall, Canada has achieved half as much as the typical high-income country.
It’s true that emissions are up in many lower-income countries, but that has more to do with growth and development than a lack of climate action. China is the most striking case. Despite being held up as a climate bogeyman, China now accounts for 44 per cent of total global investment in renewable energy and leads the world in clean tech manufacturing. Half the vehicles sold in the country are now electric, compared to a tenth in Canada. Fossil fuel demand has plateaued in China, and its emissions are starting to fall.
China is hardly alone in racing past Canada. Countries such as Chile and Morocco are decarbonizing their power grids by phasing out fossil fuels and scaling up renewables at a stunning rate. Ethiopia recently became the first country to ban the import of internal combustion engine vehicles. Denmark and Colombia are actively winding down fossil fuel production.
Indeed, as Oil Change International points out in a new backgrounder, global oil and gas production would have fallen since the Paris Agreement if not for the singular efforts of the U.S., Canada, Australia and Norway. These four countries alone increased their production of fossil fuels by 40 per cent over the past decade—a brutal indictment of the Global North in the context of a world on fire.
On the latest Climate Change Performance Index, compiled by the NGO GermanWatch, Canada scores 61st out of 67 countries. The latest global update by Climate Action Tracker rates Canada’s climate plans as “highly insufficient,” a level that, if every other country followed suit, would put us on a path to a catastrophic four degrees of global warming.
Canada’s poor performance in international assessments is not complicated and should not be surprising. Unequivocally, the most important thing we need to do from a climate perspective is to stop the production of fossil fuels. Yet, for all Canada’s talk of climate leadership—and for all the debate concerning carbon taxes and electric vehicle mandates and clean tech subsidies—winding down the production of oil and gas is one intervention we refuse to entertain.
At last week’s COP, when more than 80 countries proposed a global roadmap away from fossil fuels, Canada refused to sign on. Days later, the federal government announced its support for a new liquefied natural gas facility. Today, the government is paving the way for a new oil sands pipeline.
The stubborn myth that Canada is a climate leader—or, at least, that we are no worse than the rest of the world—is not only wrong, it is a dangerous lie used to justify moves in the opposite direction. There is no room for new fossil fuel production in a net-zero future, whatever our governments may claim or whatever grand bargains they may strike.
It is also a self-defeating lie. The global economy is slowly moving away from fossil fuels, even if we can’t see it from our bubble as a U.S.-aligned petrostate. The business case for new fossil fuel infrastructure is weaker than ever, as we shall see below, and our existing fossil fuel industry is an increasingly large liability.
It’s time to put this myth to bed. Canada is no climate leader, but we have everything to gain by becoming one. Let’s get to work.
Storm surge: this month’s key reads
COP puts climate back in the sun, for now
The 30th Conference of the Parties (COP)—the world’s largest and most consequential climate conference—concluded in Belém, Brazil, last week, and my colleague Bruce Campbell breaks it down over on the CCPA blog. Ultimately, while Saudi Arabia and other climate laggards, including Canada, managed to keep fossil fuels out of the final decision text, the COP did still mark some forward progress in entrenching principles of climate justice and Indigenous rights. I’m looking forward to seeing how the new Just Transition Mechanism will take shape.
One of the biggest side benefits of the COP process is that it puts climate back on the public agenda for at least a brief moment every year. Many organizations seize on that moment to release their annual updates about the state of climate change and climate action around the world.
The annual “State of the climate” report, published in the journal BioScience, flashes warning lights across the board, identifying dozens of metrics by which climate change has reached unprecedented levels, including ocean warming and tree cover loss due to wildfires.
The Lancet’s 2025 “Countdown on health and climate change” offers a devastatingly detailed breakdown of the global costs of climate change in the past year alone, which have both human (e.g., 546,000 heat-related deaths, 124 million more people experiencing food insecurity) and economic (e.g., US$304 billion in weather-related damages, 640 billion potential work hours lost) dimensions. An essential citation.
The UNFCCC’s pre-COP synthesis report finds that if all countries deliver on their promises, it could cut global emissions by as much as 24 per cent in the next decade. That would represent monumental progress, but, unfortunately, very few countries are on track to follow through.
Greenpeace’s 2035 Climate Ambition Gap report reaches a similar conclusion, as does the UN Environment Programme’s 2025 emissions gap report, Off target. Current policies put the world on track for 2.8 degrees of warming by the end of the century—a big improvement from even a decade ago. But even if every country follows through on their climate promises, which they are not doing, that figure only drops to 2.3 degrees. We are, collectively, both underpromising and underdelivering.
UNEP’s 2025 adaptation gap report, Running on empty, finds that the world needs to be spending at least US$365 billion per year on climate adaptation to avoid even larger costs down the road, but only US$30 billion per year is currently on the table. Failing to invest in adaptation is massively short-sighted, because the costs of unmitigated climate impacts are ten times larger than the costs of prevention.
Finally, as mentioned above, Climate Action Tracker released its 2025 Warming Projections Global Update and GermanWatch published its 2026 Climate Change Performance Index. No country received top scores in either assessment, but some countries came close, including Costa Rica, Denmark, Kenya and Morocco.
At a high level, the story here is no different than in years past—the world is collectively taking action to tackle climate change but the collective effort is falling short. That obscures some significant trends, however. Most countries are ramping up their efforts to reduce emissions, while a subset of fossil fuel-producing countries, including Canada, are holding the world back.
Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate
Federal budget a portrait of a government abandoning climate leadership… Canada’s new federal government delivered—and narrowly passed—its first budget. I had so much to say about this I couldn’t fit it in the newsletter, but my op-ed in the National Observer hits the biggest points. The bottom line is that this is the most harmful federal budget from a climate perspective since the Harper era, and by turning away from the clean economy it sets Canada up to be less competitive in the long term.
…even though deference to private sector climate leadership is not working. The Office of the Auditor General released a new report on the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, which pokes several holes in the federal government’s claim to be supporting sustainable finance. Most noteworthy for this newsletter is the finding that uptake of the clean economy investment tax credits has been extremely low. I have been banging this drum for years. Offering incentives to the private sector to deliver public goods is simply bad policy. When the private sector fails to step up, as it inevitably does, action stalls and the public sector is left holding the bag.
IEA reiterates that fossil fuels are on the way out—but implies the opposite. The latest World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency got a lot of attention because its “current policies” scenario shows oil and gas demand increasing through at least 2050. This particular scenario, included at the behest of the Trump administration, makes a number of particularly pessimistic and unrealistic assumptions about climate action. In contrast, the “stated policies” scenario, which has historically been seen as the IEA’s baseline, shows oil demand peaking in 2030 and gas demand peaking in 2035. If the world actually gets on a path to net-zero emissions, those peaks hit even faster and harder.
Canada has little to gain and much to lose from new oil and gas investment. Building on that net-zero scenario, the NGO Carbon Tracker has released a pair of reports, Fading Fortunes and Petro-Provinces at Risk, that paint a bleak picture for the future of the Canadian fossil fuel industry in a world moving away from oil and gas. Perhaps more important, the reports find that even in a business-as-usual scenario, the potential upside of new oil and gas investment is very small for Canada. It’s a lopsided gamble, where the benefits flow to shareholders and the risks fall on workers, communities and governments. Matt Hulse and I reached much the same conclusion in last year’s Heads in the Sands.
A new west coast pipeline is as high-risk, low-benefit as it gets… Speaking of terrible investments, the federal government is now entertaining Alberta’s fancy of a new oil pipeline to the northern BC coast. West Coast Environmental Law has published an excellent report explaining just how bad an idea that is from a legal, financial and environmental perspective. In a new brief published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, energy economist Andrew Leach similarly concludes that the potential upsides from the project are speculative at best and counterproductive at worst—potentially making Canadian producers less competitive in global markets.
…but LNG is making a play for the crown. While liquefied natural gas will likely outlive the oil sands, LNG remains a highly-emitting fossil fuel that ultimately has no place in a decarbonized global economy. In a new backgrounder, Environmental Defence lays out the non-existent business case for new LNG infrastructure in Canada, focusing on the structural disadvantages of Canadian suppliers in the context of a global oversupply of gas. And an important new analysis from the Canadian Climate Institute concludes that, when it comes to climate policy, LNG is “definitively not an alternative to reducing Canadian emissions.” It shouldn’t need to be said (LNG is just cold methane!), but the Canadian government continues, against all evidence, to hold up LNG production as part of its climate plan.
The future of Canadian prosperity lies in the clean economy. So if LNG isn’t the future, what is? Clean Energy Canada released Our North Star Action Plan, which offers 30 recommendations for accelerating growth of the clean economy in Canada. It’s a helpful exercise that underscores the importance of seizing on global clean tech momentum, both to reduce emissions and to diversify away from the U.S., although I would’ve liked to see more specifics. Vague suggestions to “increase funding” are unhelpful without at least identifying the necessary order of magnitude.
New tool maps out country-by-country green industrial policy potential. The U.S.-based Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab has released a cool new web tool, the Clean Industrial Capabilities Explorer, that maps out the comparative advantages of different countries in emerging green industries. According to the tool, Canada’s biggest advantages—at least in terms of export potential—are nuclear power, electricity transmission and green hydrogen. We have a lot of work to do to catch up in other areas, including batteries, heat pumps and geothermal power.
What the private sector ought to do. In Winning the Future, the consultancy Climate and Nature Solutions makes six calls to action for the private sector to help accelerate climate action. They are generally good recommendations, but colour me skeptical that moral suasion alone will motivate corporate leaders to fight disinformation, scale up international climate finance and support climate policy. That kind of hands-off approach is how we got into this mess.
Worsening climate change makes climate action even harder. The Strategic Climate Risk Initiative, a coalition of UK-based NGOs and universities, released Derailment Risk, which explores the vicious cycle that can occur when future-oriented climate action is sidelined to deal with current climate impacts. It’s a potentially massive problem as the costs of climate change rise ever further. The report is unfortunately short on recommendations, but it underscores the need for adaptation planning and just transition mechanisms that keep society as stable as possible in the face of escalating disruption.
Just transition advocacy is missing a feminist lens. The Philippines-based NGO IBON International released Towards a Feminist, People-Powered Just Transition, which shines a welcome light on the “hidden subsidies that women, migrants, and marginalised groups provide to the global economy.” A truly just clean economy cannot only be zero-carbon. It must also redress these historical patterns of marginalization and exploitation.
Africa can leapfrog into renewables, bypassing many fossil fuels entirely. In Green Industrialization in Africa, the Ghana-based African Center for Economic Transformation makes a compelling case for “leapfrogging” into renewable energy. For the 600 million people on the continent that currently lack electricity, going straight to decentralized renewables offers major benefits over the conventional model of a centralized, fossil fuel–powered grid. There are important parallels here to the way Indigenous communities in Canada are regaining control of their own economies by building out locally-owned renewable energy.
Two academic books tackle climate capitalism. In last month’s newsletter I mentioned Amy Janzwood’s new book, Mega Pipelines, Mega Resistance, which I’m pleased to report has been made available as a free download. I also want to mention the book Refusing Ecocide by the venerable Bill Carroll. It’s from last year but still worth checking out. Both tackle the political economy of energy in Canada.
Dark clouds: artificial intelligence on the horizon
Labour wants AI to serve the public good. A really interesting analysis from UC Berkeley researchers, A First Look at Labor’s AI Values, effectively summarizes how U.S. labour unions are confronting AI disruption. Of the various themes identified in the piece, I think labour’s commitment to ensuring AI serves the public good is most noteworthy and laudable. Once again, labour organizing is one of the best avenues we have for making sure all workers—unionized or not—benefit from new technologies.
What would super-intelligent AI mean for us? The U.S.-based National Bureau of Economic Research has released The Economics of Transformative AI, a draft collection of essays unpacking the potential impacts of a future, super-intelligent AI. It’s inherently speculative, but it’s also a good stress test for policy thinking given the deep uncertainty surrounding AI development.
