Alberta has highest greenhouse gas emissions in Canada

Last month, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their latest report on climate change.

I’m not going to discuss its findings here, as there are plenty of media outlets who have. But it did make me wonder about where Canada and Alberta sit in all this.

I decided to do some searching to see what I could find on greenhouse gas emissions—which the report claims is driving observed climate warming—in Canada, and I stumbled upon the National inventory report.

I chose to look at the data for each province and territory between the years 2009 and 2019. I figured that should give me a pretty decent sample to see any recent trends. (They didn’t have 2020 data available yet.)

First, let’s look at 2019 data:

Alberta	276.00
Ontario	163.00
Québec	84.00
Saskatchewan	75.00
British Columbia	66.00
Manitoba	23.00
Nova Scotia	16.00
New Brunswick	12.00
Newfoundland & Labrador	11.00
Prince Edward Island	1.80
Northwest Territories	1.40
Nunavut	0.73
Yukon	0.69

It’s pretty obvious that Alberta is at the top of the list, with 276 megatonnes in carbon dioxide equivalents throughout 2019. That’s 69.3% higher than Ontario, which was in second place at 163 megatonnes.

Those two provinces were the only ones above the 100 megatonne mark.

And while Alberta’s collective emissions seems a lot, keep in mind that the rest of Canada put together contributes twice as much as Alberta does on its own.

As you can see here, Alberta accounts for a bit more than a third of the country’s emissions, with Ontario making up about 22%.

That being said, Alberta contains only 11.6% of the country’s population, which means those who live here carry a larger burden of the nation’s emissions than those who live in other provinces or the territories.

But the fact that Alberta’s share of emissions is 3 times as high as its share of the population tells you that this pollution can’t be just the result of consumer behaviour.

Here’s how the 2019 numbers compare to a decade previously:

	2009	2019	Change	% change
Alberta	235.00	276.00	41.00	17.4%
Ontario	171.00	163.00	-8.00	-4.7%
Québec	87.60	84.00	-3.60	-4.1%
Saskatchewan	70.20	75.00	4.80	6.8%
British Columbia	60.70	66.00	5.30	8.7%
Manitoba	19.90	23.00	3.10	15.6%
Nova Scotia	21.00	16.00	-5.00	-23.8%
New Brunswick	18.70	12.00	-6.70	-35.8%
Newfoundland & Labrador	10.20	11.00	0.80	7.8%
Prince Edward Island	1.98	1.80	-0.18	-9.1%
Northwest Territories	1.24	1.40	0.16	12.9%
Nunavut	0.43	0.73	0.30	68.6%
Yukon	0.35	0.69	0.34	95.5%

If we check out the percentage change, the Yukon and Nunavut win by a landslide, with the Yukon nearly doubling their emission. That being said, both of those territories, even with the increases, still measure their emissions in kilotonnes—everyone else does it megatonnes.

Measure by percentage change, Alberta comes in third place. And while that doesn’t seem as bad as first place, it’s still higher than 10 other jurisdictions.

Not only that but Alberta increased its emissions by 41 megatonnes. Of the 8 provinces that increase emissions over this decade, Alberta was the only one to increase it in double-digit megatonnes. And Alberta’s increase is more than the total emissions in 2019 for 8 provinces and territories.

Here’s the share of the national emissions for each province:

A decade earlier, Alberta was responsible for 33.7% of Canada’s emissions. By 2019, it had jumped to 37.8%, as I pointed out earlier.

The four Western provinces were the only jurisdictions to increase their share of the nation’s emissions:

	2009	2019
Manitoba	2.8%	3.1%
Saskatchewan	10.1%	10.3%
Alberta	33.7%	37.8%
British Columbia	8.7%	9.0%

Not only that, but their share increased more than any of the others, with everyone else bumping up less than 1 percentage point, while Alberta went up 4 points.

Here are the other jurisdictions:

	2009	2019
New Brunswick	2.7%	1.6%
Québec	12.5%	11.5%
Ontario	24.5%	22.3%
Yukon	0.1%	0.1%
Northwest Territories	0.2%	0.2%
Nunavut	0.1%	0.1%

Of those who decreased their emissions share, Ontario’s was the largest drop, decreasing by more than 2 percentage points.

Now, let’s look at how the provinces performed each year since 2009.

And sure enough, we see Ontario’s significant decline in emissions and Alberta’s significant increase. Everyone else’s decrease or increase are so small compared to them that they appear to be unchanged.

It looks like Alberta’s emissions decreased during the 2015–2016 recession, but they’ve started to recover since then; although they are still under what they were in 2014.

If Canada wants to get to net zero in the next 29 years, they’ll have to do something about Alberta.