The war in Ukraine threatens to distract us from the climate crisis

Russia's invasion of Ukraine does not change the fact of climate change – a reality brought home again by another stark report from the UN's climate change panel two weeks ago.

But the ramifications of this war are being used to raise new questions about Canadian climate and energy policy.

With gas prices surging a week after Vladimir Putin's forces invaded Ukraine, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown wrote to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to suggest that she delay the annual increase in the federal carbon tax, slated to take effect on April 1. "Now is the wrong time for any new burden," he said.

You could be forgiven for suspecting that Brown's new interest in federal climate policy has something to do with the fact that he's about to enter the Conservative Party's leadership race. Whatever his motives, the merits of Brown's proposed pause are dubious.

While the higher carbon fee will add 2.2 cents per litre to the price of gas, carbon pricing's critics tend to ignore the fact that nearly all of the revenue it collects is rebated back to households in provinces covered by the federal policy – and most households end up receiving more than they pay out.

Because of fuel consumption patterns, only Ontario households in the top two income quintiles were expected to pay more than they received when projections were published by the Parliamentary Budget Officer in 2020.

But Brown's call for a pause (which has been echoed by federal Conservatives and conservative provincial governments in Alberta, New Brunswick and Ontario) also assumes that climate policy is something less than necessary — that reducing emissions is a priority only when it's not inconvenient.

Between now and 2050 — the target date for bringing the world's greenhouse gas emissions down to net-zero — there will be many moments when leaders are tempted to deviate from the goal of reducing emissions and moving to a clean economy.

However much policymakers need to account for the practical impacts of climate action, suspending a planned increase in the carbon tax now could set a troublesome precedent.

Coupled with the attacks on the federal carbon tax are calls for a renewed push to export Canadian oil and gas.

Europe relies on Russia for a significant amount of its energy. Those Russian exports help fund Putin's regime and complicate European efforts to sanction Russia. If reducing that reliance is important, maybe Canadian oil and liquefied natural gas could help replace those Russian resources. Or so the thinking goes.

"Alberta can be a stable supplier of Liquefied Natural Gas to the countries threatened by Putin's dictatorship," Alberta Premier Jason Kenney tweeted this week.

A week earlier, the federal Conservatives put a motion before the House of Commons that called on the Liberal government to prioritize the construction of new pipelines to the East Coast to carry liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe.

In proposing the motion, Conservative MP Michael Chong argued that LNG can be environmentally beneficial if it's used to displace high-emissions coal. But building a pipeline is easier said than done — and even in an ideal scenario it doesn't seem like a short-term solution.