Liberal government set to miss 2030 emissions targets, says environment commissioner audit
'We found that the measures most critical for reducing emissions had not been identified or prioritized'
The federal government is set to miss its 2030 target to cut carbon emissions by at least 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, according to the latest audit from the commissioner of the environment's office.
The world is off track in its efforts to curb global warming in 41 of 42 important measurements and is even heading in the wrong direction in six crucial ways, a new international report calculates.
“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.”
Nuclear proliferation experts are warning that 50 years of policy designed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons is unravelling as governments invest in certain small modular reactors that could be misused to build bombs.
The concerns are aimed at Moltex, a Saint John, N.B., nuclear startup building small modular reactors (SMRs) that will be powered with spent fuel from CANDU reactors. To make the fuel, Moltex plans to separate plutonium from uranium in CANDU waste and use the extracted plutonium to power new SMRs.
In January of this year the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported the reserves of the nine leading countries in the world which mine lithium, the new fuel to power electric batteries. Chile led, followed by Australia, Argentina, China, and the US which claims to have one million tonnes. Russia was left out of the USGS chart.
Global oil and gas demand will start to fall before 2030, marking the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era, the International Energy Agency (IEA) declared last week, in an op ed penned by Executive Director Fatih Birol.