Tausi Insider

Oil and gas producers Canada and Nigeria have become the latest countries to tackle the potent greenhouse gas methane with laws to rein in emissions in the fossil fuel energy sector. The announcements came as the United States on Friday said it would expand its own rules to require oil and gas drillers to find and fix leaks of methane at all of the country’s well sites. Methane has more than 80 times the planet-warming potency of CO2 in its first 20 years, but breaks down faster in the atmosphere, making it a high value target for near-term efforts to slow climate change. Canada said its new rules would target a 75% cut in methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 2030, including through a proposed monthly requirement for oil and gas companies to find and fix methane leaks in their infrastructure. “It’s kind of a big deal for us, we are the fourth biggest producer of oil and gas. So we have a big responsibility, but it’s also a big challenge,” Canadian Environment Minister Ste...

The processing facility at the Suncor oil sands operations near Fort McMurray, Alta., on Sept. 17, 2014. Todd Korol/Reuters Not that many years ago, the idea of showcasing the Canadian oil sands at an international summit on climate change would have been laughable. It is just three years since green energy think tank the Pembina Institute declared the oil sands as on a “collision course” with this country’s climate goals, and fewer than six years since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sparked fury in Alberta by commenting in a public forum that the province’s oil sands industry needs to be “phased out” as part of Canada’s transition off fossil fuels. So the fact that representatives of the Pathways Alliance – a consortium of Canada’s largest oil sands companies – not only attended the United Nations’ COP27 climate conference in Egypt this week but made a presentation Friday in the federal-government-hosted Canada Pavilion shows just how far the industry has come in terms of its willing...

Last Friday, Nov. 11, 2022, a watermelon made an appearance at the Ukrainian pavilion at COP27 in Egypt. Handout There is no Russian pavilion at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt. There is a Ukrainian one and it has been a hit, not just because of the environmental message it delivers but for its powerful anti-war message, too. Last Friday, an unusual guest made an appearance at the pavilion: a watermelon. It was brought in to celebrate the liberation of Kherson from Russian occupation and was placed on a chair draped with the Ukrainian flag. The fruit became a symbol of Ukraine’s victory last week when a video of a Ukrainian soldier entering the city while holding up a watermelon, as crowds cheered, went viral. “Ukraine is very good at procuring howitzers and HIMARS missiles – also watermelons in Egypt,” Oleksiy Ryabchin, Ukraine’s chief climate negotiator and former deputy minister of energy and environment, told Tausi Insider. Finding the watermelon was not easy, since they ar...

An ice-breaking tour boat pushes through drift ice on the Sea of Okhotsk on Feb. 24, in Abashiri, Japan. Carl Court/Getty Images Laurent Ramsey has been a managing partner of the Pictet Group since 2016. Humans are driving animal and plant species to extinction and destroying their habitats to feed an ever-increasing population. Biodiversity protection is now a priority that policy makers consider as urgent as halting global warming. At the UN COP15 biodiversity summit in Montreal in December, governments are expected to agree on groundbreaking targets to protect nature. But such discussion should not be confined to the policy arena. The financial industry, too, must play a more active role. As a steward of global capital, investors are uniquely positioned to help build an economy that works with, rather than against, nature. This is in line with investors’ interest, too. Of course, protecting our environment is important. But this is also an economic and financial issue. It’s called...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tours the damage caused by post-tropical storm Fiona in Port aux Basques, N.L. on Sept. 28. Frank Gunn/CP Eric Bosco is executive director and Annie Levasseur is scientific director of the newly launched Circular-Built Infrastructure Institute at École de Technologie Supérieure. The message coming out of the latest UN Climate Change Conference is loud and clear: Climate change is no longer tomorrow’s problem. It’s happening now, with serious impact to our infrastructure, and the situation is only going to get worse before it gets better. We simply can’t afford to continue building infrastructure the same way we always have. You don’t have to look further than Hurricane Fiona to measure the significant economic and social impact increased severe weather events are having on infrastructure. Tens of thousands of homes and businesses throughout Atlantic Canada were without power for more than a week and the federal government’s fall economic forecast has ea...

A security personnel stands guard next to a COP27 sign during the closing plenary at the climate summit, in Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Nov. 20. MOHAMED ABD EL GHANY/Reuters The first United Nations climate conference I covered was the 2009 COP15 dud in Copenhagen. Since then, I have worked the conference mob scenes in Paris, Madrid and, earlier this month, Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. They were duds, too, in the sense that none ended with formal agreements to reduce fossil-fuel use – the only metric that matters as average global temperatures rise to dangerous levels. The annual COPs have turned into chaotic, bloated carnivals where, in their final desperate hours (most of them go into overtime) the distraught host-country presidency produces a face-saving agreement that allows it to declare a victory of some sort – or at least deflect some of the criticism that the outcome was a total failure. Even a breakthrough that barely fits the definition is billed as a win, sinc...

Police officers patrol outside the Palais de Congres, during the opening of COP15 on Dec. 6, the two-week U.N. biodiversity summit in Montreal. CHRISTINNE MUSCHI/Reuters Delegates have reached the starting line for COP15 in Montreal, the 15th United Nations conference on biodiversity, where work on a new international agreement to protect nature is set to commence on Wednesday. But participants say the road ahead is already looking like a steep, uphill climb. For representatives from 196 countries who are party to the UN Convention on Biodiversity, the central purpose of the meeting is to hammer out a new framework under the convention, with agreed targets to be met by 2030. The previous framework expired in 2020 with none of its targets met. COP15 was initially intended to take place that year in China, but its completion has been delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic and the venue shifted to Montreal. The conference, taking place at Montreal’s Palais des congrès, is surrounded...

Delegates walk past a giant Jenga-style tower at the COP15 United Nations conference on biodiversity in Montreal, on Dec. 8. Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press A reporting system for business risks tied to land and water degradation, biodiversity loss and efforts to reverse them should start gaining traction globally in 2024 and achieve wide adoption relatively quickly, the co-chair of the task force developing it says. David Craig, co-chair of the new Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), said the urgency of protecting the world’s natural assets puts pressure on businesses to act to avoid financial and legal trouble. Companies face a host of risks as the natural systems degrade – shoreline loss, floods, deforestation, wildfires – all of which affect assets and markets. The TNFD aims to have its framework ready by next September, giving companies a new set of tools to assess and disclose their impact on nature and the risks they face in dealing with physical and pol...

The United Nations forecast Wednesday that global economic growth will fall significantly to 1.9% this year as a result of the food and energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine, the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, persistently high inflation and the climate emergency. Painting a gloomy and uncertain economic outlook, the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs said the current global economic slowdown “cuts across both developed and developing countries, with many facing risks of recession in 2023.” “A broad-based and severe slowdown of the global economy looms large amid high inflation, aggressive monetary tightening, and heightened uncertainties,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a foreword to the 178-page report. The report said this year’s 1.9% economic growth forecast – down from an estimated 3% in 2022 – is one of the lowest growth rates in recent decades. But it projects a moderate pick-up to 2.7% in 2024 if inflation gradually abates and econ...