Canada plans more pipelines to export oil as emissions rise, climate crisis worsens
Prime Minister Mark Carney says pipeline decisions will increase Canada's carbon emissions in coming years. Experts warn the moves undermine climate goals.
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Canada is planning major new pipelines to export Alberta crude, with Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledging the decisions will increase the country's carbon emissions in coming years.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford joined Alberta counterpart Danielle Smith at the Calgary Stampede Monday to unveil a proposed pipeline carrying 500,000 barrels of Alberta crude to refineries in southwestern Ontario. Days earlier, Smith and Carney announced a planned route for another oil pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to transport more than a million barrels a day to British Columbia's South Coast.
Carney said the choices being made now to secure "Canada's energy future" will "certainly increase" the country's carbon emissions in the "next few years."
But climate experts warn that producing more oil to burn comes at greater cost to the climate and Canadians already facing increasingly severe weather. Rick Smith, president of the Canadian Climate Institute, said: "We see Canadian communities being threatened by increasingly severe climate change effects. These effects are also going to get worse year over year."
By the time either pipeline is built—likely several more years away—global surface temperatures are expected to have surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a threshold seen as a critical tipping point for weather extremes. Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, noted that 2026 is already on track to be one of the hottest years on record along with the past three years.
Brouillette flagged the irony: Carney's announcement was delayed by "biblical weather in Ottawa" as parts of Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada faced a heat wave—itself driven by fossil fuel emissions. "It is not a problem for later. It is a problem that is here and now, and we need to stop literally pouring more fuel on the fire," she said.
Scientists with World Weather Attribution say such heat would be "virtually impossible" without greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and that "a rapid phase out of fossil fuels is critical" to prevent even hotter temperatures. More than 40 deaths in the U.S. have been attributed to last week's heat wave, while at least 3,700 excess deaths have been recorded since last month's historic heatwave in Canada.
