I have a confession to make … I’ve been feeding the climate trolls.

I’ve been getting into some tit-for-tat battles on Instagram. Even worse, that behaviour has escalated to posting comments on articles in the National Post and the Edmonton Journal.

I know, I know – you’re not supposed to feed the trolls. They say it’s a waste of time and there is no convincing certain people. But sometimes I just can’t bear to read a whole thread of self-reinforcing bile, un-interrupted by even a single note of reasoned counterpoint.

I get a lot of insults hurled at me but I can’t help but think – what if reasonable people are reading this stuff and drawing the wrong conclusions? There needs to be at least some representation from the side that cares about the climate.

In these forums, the most common argument people make is that Canada’s share of emissions, at around 2% of the global total, is so small that we don’t make a difference.¹ If we don’t make a difference, the reasoning goes, then why bother with the effort and expense of trying to cut emissions?

Here’s a typical example: In a recent column, Lorrie Goldstein, the Editor Emeritus of the Toronto Sun and a member of the Canadian News Hall of Fame, criticized federal policies to protect Canadians from the harmful effects of climate change as “… nonsense because Canada’s emissions, at 1.6% of the global total, are insufficient to materially impact climate change,…”.²

Is it fair to suggest that we don’t matter? Is that a responsible position to take?

Size is a matter of perspective

What that argument ignores, is that our share of emissions puts us 12th in the world. Canada’s emissions are greater than 94% of all other nations.

It’s a big number for a country with a modest population. On a per-person basis, our emissions rank 3rd among the G20 group of the world’s leading and developed economies. We’re just behind Australia and Saudi Arabia and about three times the global average.

Among the G7 group of the world’s most prosperous nations, we are the only member whose emissions have increased since 1990. France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States have all decreased their emission levels in that period.

Our reported emissions also underrepresent our impact because they only include domestic emissions – they do not include emissions that are exported. In Canada’s case, if we included emissions from the oil and gas that we ship to other countries, it would double our total emissions.

National reported emissions also don’t include the impact of wildfires. The thinking is that reported emissions should only include those caused by human activity. Wildfires are excluded because they are considered natural events. If we were to include all the CO2 released from the fires we experienced last summer for instance – it would triple Canada’s annual emissions for 2023.

Size in Numbers

But here’s the most important question to ask: what if every country with emissions levels similar to Canada’s took the position that they didn’t matter?

There are 190 countries that each have a share of emissions that is 2% or less of the global total. Taken together, this group represents 43% of the world’s emissions. How would you feel if countries like Japan, Mexico, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Vietnam, Turkey, and Australia all declared themselves insignificant and stopped efforts to fight climate change?

Surely countries with shares less than 4% would then also argue that they don’t matter either. That includes Russia, Brazil and Indonesia who would also all expect to get a pass on their responsibility to cut emissions. Then the “small emitters that don’t matter” group would represent 55% of global emissions.

Wouldn’t it then be reasonable for large emitters like China, the US and India to also conclude that their efforts were just as useless, because no else one is doing anything about the majority of the world’s emissions?

The point is, that we all matter. If all smaller emitters took the position that “we don’t matter” then no one would be doing anything about the majority of the world’s emissions.

Climate change is a collective problem, requiring the collaboration and cooperation of all the nations in the world. As individual countries, we may have our own needs and wants, but we also need to recognize that we are members of a global community. We are interdependent – our fates are tied together.

In this climate crisis, no one is too small to matter. We all need to be bigger people and work for the good of the whole.

1. Canada’s share of global emissions is consistently reported around 2% of the global total. The actual number quoted varies based on the year, the source and whether people are quoting a share of CO2 or a share of all greenhouse gases ↩︎
2. I soooo wanted to comment on that article – but it was 3 days old when I saw it and the comment section was closed. ↩︎