Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions are down, but so is public support for its carbon pricing policy. Let’s explore why.
Perception gap plagues Canada’s carbon price
By Rick Knight, CCL Research Coordinator
Canada’s carbon pricing law, which went into effect in mid-2018, features an annually rising carbon price, with 90% of the revenue rebated to households. Public support has historically been strong. As of July 2023, 10 of Canada’s 13 provinces or territories have adopted the federal plan, and the Niskanen Center reports that 80% of households come out ahead when receiving the rebate.
Sounds good! Indeed, my last blog post on this topic was titled “Canada leads the way on carbon pricing.”
But over the last year, public support for the carbon tax has dropped considerably – from 56% in 2021 to 45% this year. What happened?
Politics happened. A national election is scheduled for 2025, and Prime Minister Trudeau’s chief opponent, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre (pwa-lee-EV) is now leading an anti-carbon-tax campaign, summarized in the slogan “Axe the Tax.”
What’s the basis for this opposition? Is it because the carbon price has failed to reduce emissions?
The emissions
Here is a chart of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions per person from 2010 to 2022. The orange bars are prior to the enactment of the carbon tax, and the green bars are with the tax in effect.
Canadian Greenhouse Gas Emissions per Capita (Chart by CCL, adapted from Our World in Data)
Emissions clearly went down, but no reports have yet revealed how much of the decline is due to carbon pricing. Answering this question is complicated by the economic impact of the pandemic and, as this CTV article notes, “it’s not the only climate policy in Canada.” But it’s still clear that emissions are lower than they were before the carbon tax went into effect. Canadian author Michael Barnard explains that the decline is not chiefly due to individual day-to-day behavior, but longer-term decisions by businesses and consumers, such as replacing an old gas furnace with a heat pump or an old gasoline vehicle with an electric car.
So is opposition growing because the carbon tax imposes a net financial burden on average households?
Household costs
That doesn’t seem to be the case, according to this article that delves into the distributional impacts. The charts below are drawn from Statistics Canada’s Social Policy Simulation Database and Model and were reported by Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO). The left-hand chart shows how rebates (blue) stack up versus energy costs (red) for the lowest-income households, and the right-hand chart shows the same data for the highest-income segment of the population.
Costs vs rebates for lowest and highest income level(adapted from Robson Fletcher/CBC)
Among low-income households, 94% get more in rebates than their carbon tax costs, with more than half netting at least C$30 per month. Even for the high-income households, rebates still exceed costs for a healthy 55%. These results are strikingly similar to those estimated in CCL’s Household Impact Study of the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act.
And yet, Poilievre and his allies claim that “the carbon tax will cost most households more than they ever get back.” That claim is drawn from the same PBO report cited above, which on the one hand shows that wealthy households will bear a much higher portion of the cost for reducing emissions, but on the other hand says that all households will see reduced income growth due to suppressed economic activity.
So what’s going on here?
The economy
According to CBC analyst Peter Zimonjic, the PBO report does not consider “the cost to the economy of doing nothing about climate change, the economic growth that could result from a shift to a green economy, and how carbon pricing compares to other climate policies such as regulations or tax credits.”
There may be an even more fundamental problem with the PBO analysis. As Zimonjic notes, a 2020 NBER research paper showed that the type of modeling used by the PBO does not comport with real-world data from three decades of carbon pricing in 31 European countries. That study showed no suppression of economic activity due to carbon taxes. And to further underscore this, a 2021 CBO paper states that “sending each household an equal share [of carbon tax revenue] in the form of a rebate could more than offset the economic incidence … of the carbon tax.”
Here is Canadian GDP growth before and after the carbon tax was enacted.
Canadian GDP per capita(Chart by CCL based on data from World Bank)
From 2018 to 2022, Canada’s per-capita GDP grew from C$46.5K to C$55.0K, overcoming the pandemic recession and even blowing past its previous peak in 2013. Thus, real-world data throws some shade on Poilievre’s argument to “axe the tax.”
Unfortunately, though, voters don’t consult studies and charts before they go to the polls; they vote according to what they believe to be true. And that’s where public messaging is crucial.
The politics
There is a conventional wisdom in politics that taxes are always toxic. Canada defied that axiom when a coalition passed the carbon tax and maintained its popularity through the subsequent election cycle. But with another election approaching in 2025, the oppositional deluge has arrived. It seems to be working, despite the factual inaccuracy of anti-carbon price arguments. According to a government report for 2021, the average household rebate in the provinces where the federal tax applied exceeded the average carbon cost by C$249. But in a recent poll, only 14% of those polled believed their rebates exceeded their carbon tax costs, while 54% felt they came up short.
“What we’re learning in Canada is that our job as climate advocates is not over after a policy is enacted,” said Citizens’ Climate International Program Director Cathy Orlando, who’s been lobbying the Canadian Parliament since 2010. “Despite the fact that Climate Action Rebates are working for Canadian families and communities, the perception gap is putting this effective tool at risk. The effort to dismantle Canada’s carbon pricing policy is an effort to transfer wealth from ordinary Canadians to polluters. Our volunteers at Citizens Climate Lobby Canada will be working diligently this year and next to make sure the public knows the truth.”
This gulf between reality and perception shows that it’s not enough to simply tell the truth, nor is it enough to sell a policy product like a carbon tax once. The sale has to be made again and again until it becomes part of the sociopolitical landscape.
But black swan events like a pandemic can scramble public opinion in unpredictable ways, particularly when it affects the economy chaotically. Under COVID-19, supply chains ground to a halt, unemployment spiked, and then subsequent pent-up demand – exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – fueled inflation. Naturally, the opposition party grabbed the opportunity to assign blame to government policy – and to the carbon tax in particular.
This is a stark lesson in how seriously to take the political challenges around carbon pricing. Ironically, most people – Canadians and Americans alike – want their government to address climate change, but they can be easily turned against a policy that will actually work.
Can this conundrum be solved? A Financial Times article about the ups and downs of carbon pricing provides some guarded optimism, with one European economist noting that “Carbon pricing should go hand in hand with carbon dividends . . . Without carbon dividends, it is socially and politically unsustainable.”
Those of us who agree have the truth on our side. All we have to do is get people to understand it.
The post Perception gap plagues Canada’s carbon price appeared first on Citizens' Climate Lobby.
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according to Euronews.
- FLAGSHIP FUND: The African Development Bank’s “flagship clean energy fund” plans to more than double its financing to $2.5bn for African renewables over the next two years, reported the Associated Press.
- NO WITHDRAWAL: Vanuatu has defied US efforts to force the Pacific-island nation to drop a UN draft resolution calling on the world to implement a landmark International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on climate, according to the Guardian.
98
The number of nations that submitted their national reports on tackling nature loss to the UN on time – just half of the 196 countries that are part of the UN biodiversity treaty – according to analysis by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Sea levels are already “much higher than assumed” in most assessments of the threat posed by sea-level rise, due to “inadequate” modelling assumptions | Nature
- Accelerating human-caused global warming could see the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit crossed before 2030 | Geophysical Research Letters covered by Carbon Brief
- Future “super El Niño events” could “significantly lower” solar power generation due to a reduction in solar irradiance in key regions, such as California and east China | Communications Earth & Environment
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 fell to 54% below 1990 levels, the baseline year for its legally binding climate goals, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Over the same period, data from the World Bank shows that the UK’s economy has expanded by 95%, meaning that emissions have been decoupling from growth.
Spotlight
Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ community wind turbine
Following the recent launch of the UK government’s local power plan, Carbon Brief visits one of the country’s community-energy success stories.
The Lawrence Weston housing estate is set apart from the main city of Bristol, wedged between the tree-lined grounds of a stately home and a sprawl of warehouses and waste incinerators. It is one of the most deprived areas in the city.
Yet, just across the M5 motorway stands a structure that has brought the spoils of the energy transition directly to this historically forgotten estate – a 4.2 megawatt (MW) wind turbine.
The turbine is owned by local charity Ambition Lawrence Weston and all the profits from its electricity sales – around £100,000 a year – go to the community. In the UK’s local power plan, it was singled out by energy secretary Ed Miliband as a “pioneering” project.
‘Sustainable income’
On a recent visit to the estate by Carbon Brief, Ambition Lawrence Weston’s development manager, Mark Pepper, rattled off the story behind the wind turbine.
In 2012, Pepper and his team were approached by the Bristol Energy Cooperative with a chance to get a slice of the income from a new solar farm. They jumped at the opportunity.
“Austerity measures were kicking in at the time,” Pepper told Carbon Brief. “We needed to generate an income. Our own, su