Let’s save the planet using stats!
I recently came across a blog post by The Pembina Institute entitled The most important climate numbers you need to know. The post uses data from the National Inventory Report (NIR), which is the account of all GHG emissions from Canada that we submit to the UN annually. Using this data, Pembina highlights two provinces and three sectors: Alberta and Ontario are responsible for 60% of the countries emissions, and Oil and Gas, Transport, and Buildings are responsible for 70% of our emissions. If we want to reduce our emissions, those are the places we need to focus.
So I thought k great start. Let’s revive my blog that’s been dead for 2 years and dig deeper into the numbers to see what we can learn!
BTW this post is v v long so there’s I made a bullet list TLDR at the end. K cool moving on.
1. I Wanna Talk About Transportation
Ok so I know Oil and Gas is the biggest emitter and super important for Canada’s climate strategy, but I want to take that sector out of the conversation for now, and here’s why. We already know the best way to dramatically reduce emissions from producing oil and gas: stop producing oil and gas. That just will not happen as long as it makes money to keep going. Since the industry and emissions are mostly restricted to Alberta, and since almost all of Alberta’s oil is exported, there’s not much to talk about for the rest of Canada other than opposing pipelines.
Once we take Oil and Gas out of the picture it becomes clear that we have to look at Transportation. Here’s a Pareto chart of the remaining emissions by sector:
Transportation is by far the biggest emissions source, and it’s not even close. The next place sector doesn’t even produce half the emissions transportation does.
Transportation is also interesting to talk about because, unlike oil and gas, it directly impacts all of us. Each province and territory has people and things that need to move around. If we dig in we might find that some provinces do it better than others, and find areas where we can learn from each other.
2. Let’s Break It Down Further!
So what’s nice about the NIR is it breaks the numbers down into useful subcategories. Within Transportation, there’s Passenger (moving people), Freight (moving stuff), and Other. Here’s a pie chart of how that breaks down:
With each of passenger and freight transportation accounting for about half of all transportation emissions, clearly we have to tackle both. So let’s look at them one at a time.
3. Moving People Depends On How Many People Need To Move. Shocking.
Ok so you might assume that passenger emissions would be proportional to population; the more people moving around, the more emissions generated. And yeah good assumption. Here’s a graph showing passenger transport emissions from each province against population:
The dots are all pretty damn close to that linear trendline, meaning yeah emissions from passenger transportation in Canada correlate pretty dang strongly with population. While this is quite logical it’s a bit disappoint. To me, this means it’s likely that no province is really leading the pack for passenger vehicle emissions reduction, so there aren’t many lessons to be learned. We’ll probably have to look internationally for best practices we can copy.
What the graph also shows that I didn’t mention before is that you can separate the data into personal vehicles (cars, light trucks, motorcycles) and mass transportation (bus, rail, domestic aviation). When you do this, you see that personal vehicles account for nearly all (91%) of the emissions from passenger transportation. That’s a big deal. To me, that means that if we want to do better on passenger transportation, we have to figure out how to get people to drive less, or at least drive more efficient cars. Improving our mass transportation vehicles by doing things like replacing buses with electric ones is nice and all but unless that translates to people getting out of their cars and onto those buses the impact will be small.
4. BuT wE cAn Go DeEpEr!
I have one more graph for the passenger data that brings up some interesting questions, so stay with me.
Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, BC, and Saskatchewan (in that order) produce the most emissions from passenger vehicles. These five provinces account for 87% of Canada’s passenger vehicle emissions. Here’s a graph of the per-person emissions from passenger vehicles for these provinces since 1991:
So I know I said all provinces are doing about the same when you control for population, and they are but if you zoom in a few interesting things show up here that raise questions I definitely don’t have answers for.
BC and Ontario match really closely from 1991 to 1998, and then they split up with BC doing better than Ontario. What happened in 1998?
BC and Ontario are now close again because BC’s per-person emissions have been climbing since 2011. What happened in 2011?
Saskatchewan has been steadily increasing its per person passenger emissions with a big increase from 2005 to 2010. During this same time period, the four largest provinces all had per-person emissions decreases. What is going on in Saskatchewan, especially since 2005?
These would be fun research questions!
5. We Also Move Stuff And Things
Oh yeah Freight. So freight is currently responsible for 41% of Canada’s transportation emissions, but this wasn’t always the case. Take a look at this graph comparing emissions from passenger and freight vehicles since 1990:
While passenger vehicle emissions have been increasing with Canada’s population, emissions from freight vehicles have increased twice as quickly. Especially between 1995 and 2012. That’s super interesting! I would love to know why.
We can also graph freight emissions against population for each province the way we did for passenger emissions. Here is that:
Looks a bit different! The dots aren’t sitting nicely on the line anymore. Ontario and Quebec have lower per-person freight emissions while Alberta and Saskatchewan have higher emissions. Perhaps Ontario and Quebec have some best practices to share! Would love to look into that.
6. BuT wE cAn Go DeEpEr (again)!
Ok last graph. Remember how 5 provinces are responsible for 87% of passenger vehicle emissions? Those same 5 provinces produce 88% of freight emissions. So here’s the graph of freight emissions per person from those provinces since 1991:
We already knew that some provinces were doing better than others, but now we can really see some differences! Here are my highlights:
Quebec and Ontario match really closely, like too close to be a coincidence. I know they’re neighbours and ship a lot between each other but there’s gotta be more to it than that.
From 1991 to 1995, the big 4 provinces were pretty flat. Then Alberta yeeted itself up for almost two decades while the other three stayed pretty flat. What happened in Alberta from 1995 to 2014 that didn’t happen in the rest of the country? And how did Alberta start to turn it around in 2014?
Once again, Saskatchewan has been steadily increasing its per person freight emissions with a big increase starting around 2005. What is going on in Saskatchewan, especially since 2005, and is it the same thing that’s driving passenger vehicle emissions?
7. So What Did We Learn Kiddos? (The TLDR)
I had fun I hope you did too. After all these graphs here’s what we got!
Pembina pointed out that:
Alberta and Ontario produce 60% of Canada’s GHG emissions,
Oil and Gas, Transport, and Buildings are responsible for 70% of our emissions
I pointed out that:
Transportation produces almost as much GHG emissions as oil and gas, and more than twice as much as the next most polluting sector.
Emissions among Canadian provinces from passenger vehicles are highly correlated to population, so we probably have to look outside the country for new best practices that will have a major impact.
Personal vehicles produce 9 times as much emissions as buses, trains, and airplanes combined, so we should focus more on getting people out of their cars rather than things like electric buses (though we should do that too).
Emissions from freight vehicles have increased twice as much as those from passenger vehicles since 1990
Alberta and Saskatchewan have the highest per-person emissions from freight vehicles, while Ontario and Quebec have the lowest.
I asked the following questions:
Why did BC suddenly start doing better on per-person passenger vehicle emissions than Ontario in 1998 when they were very similar before then?
Why have BC’s per-person passenger vehicle emissions been climbing since 2011?
Why did Saskatchewan have a big increase in per-person passenger vehicle emissions from 2005 to 2010 while the four largest provinces all had per-person emissions decreases?
Why have Quebec’s and Ontario’s per-person freight emissions been almost identical to each other since 1990, and what are they doing that other provinces can learn from?
Why did Alberta have a sudden increase in per-person freight emissions starting in 1995 that lasted until 2014 while the other largest provinces stayed fairly flat? And how did Alberta start to turn it around in 2014?
Again, why did Saskatchewan have a big increase in per-person freight emissions starting around 2005? Is it the same thing that’s driving passenger vehicle emissions?
So in the end after all that I basically just took a starting point and made a whole bunch of starting points for further research but that’s showbiz (read: research) baby! Anyway if anybody has answers to any of my Qs, do let me know! I luv 2 learn. But seriously if anybody actually reads this whole thing and wants to talk about it I would love to talk about it.
