Canadian emissions and unconventional oil production exceed the 2°C global warming scenario

Canada could highly impact the climate, as it possesses the world’s third largest resources of unconventional oil. This paper evaluates in three ways whether Canada is respecting a scenario of fossil fuel production and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions limiting warming to 2.0 °C by 2100. Firstly, McGlade and Ekins (2015) proposed a model providing production budgets for each fossil fuel producing country. Data show that Canada has extracted more unconventional oil than allocated for the entire century. Secondly, global GHG emissions from the Canadian fossil fuel industry were computed using a life-cycle analysis. Emissions increased by 32% from 2011 to 2019, although dropping 4.9% in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results also show that an increase of 1% in Canadian fossil fuel industry emissions cancels out at the global level a decrease of 2.1% in national emissions. Thirdly, three models providing a national carbon budget for Canada were compared to annual emissions. Emissions were higher than the targets set by these models. In conclusion, Canadian GHG emissions and unconventional oil production exceeded the amounts allowed by the 2°C scenario during the 2011-2020 period. Policies to reduce exports of fossil fuels and mitigate national emissions are discussed.


Introduction
Canada merits special attention concerning climate for several reasons. Canada has the third largest proven reserves of oil in the world with 169.7 billion barrels in 2019 (BP, 2020). It also has the third largest resources of unconventional oil after the US and Venezuela (IEA, 2008;Jaffe et al., 2011). Burning all Canadian fossil fuel resources would generate more greenhouse gases (GHG) than the Global Carbon Budget (GCB) that should not be exceeded in order to limit warming to 2.0 °C by 2100 (McGlade and Ekins, 2015). Finally, in 2018 Canada had the second highest level of GHG emissions per capita of the G7 after the USA. That year Canadians emitted on average 19.7 tonnes of GHG, while Americans emitted 20.4 tonnes (OECD, 2020;United Nations, 2019).
The aim of the present paper is to answer the following question: Is Canada on a path to respect a scenario of fossil fuel production and GHG emissions providing a 67% chance to limit warming to 2.0 °C by 2100? This question is addressed by dividing it into three sub-questions. The first sub-question is: Does the exploitation of fossil fuels respect the quotas proposed by McGlade and Ekins' (2015) model to limit warming to 2.0 °C? To answer it, one has to compare the cumulative Canadian production to the quotas provided by the global model proposed by these authors. Based both on economic and climate factors, they computed the proportion of coal, oil and gas that should not be burned to avoid emitting more than the upper limit of the GCB for the 2°C scenario. They provided these proportions for the major fossil fuel producing countries including Canada. These proportions can be interpreted as production quotas (or production budgets). Major environmental organizations have adopted this view, but not the Canadian government (350.org, 2016;Abel et al., 2018;Cimons and Nesbit, 2016;Green, 2019;Trudeau, 2017). No scientific publication has assessed whether or not these limits have been respected or exceeded and whether Canada respects the 2°C scenario. The present paper computes the percentage of these quotas already spent and finds that the limit for unconventional oil has been exceeded.
The second sub-question is: Are the global emissions of the Canadian fossil fuel industry decreasing? To address it, the GHG emissions of Canadian fossil fuel production is assessed by computing global emissions using a life-cycle analysis (LCA). As this evaluation is global, it includes GHG released by burning exported fossil fuels. Emissions excluding exported fossil fuels are examined in the following sub-question. It is important to assess LCA emissions because an increase in Canadian fossil fuel industry production could cancel out at a global level the national efforts to decrease emissions. In brief, results below show that such emissions have increased by 32% from 2011 to 2019.
The third sub-question is: Do Canadian national emissions respect the Carbon Budget (CB) proposed by different models simulating the 2.0 °C scenario? To answer it, Canadian emissions were compared with the proposed emission budget of three models. Many more models have been proposed to distribute the GCB amongst nations. However, only three models were identified that published explicit predictions about the CB of Canada (Alcaraz et al., 2018;Gignac and Matthews, 2015;Kanitkar et al., 2013). These are the models examined below and the results demonstrate that Canadian national emissions exceed the annual budget according to each of the three models presented. Several policies are discussed to limit exports of fossil fuels and to mitigate national emissions.

McGlade and Ekins' (2015) Model
The concepts of 'resources' and 'reserves' of fossil fuels are distinct. McGlade and Ekins (2015) define resources as the Remaining Ultimately Recoverable Resources (RURR) -the quantity of fossil fuels "that is recoverable over all time, with both current and future technology, irrespective of current economic conditions." Reserves are a subset of resources that are "recoverable under current economic conditions and have a specific probability of being produced". McGlade and Ekins (2015) computed the proportion of coal, oil and gas resources that should not be burned to avoid emitting more than the upper limit of GCB for the 2°C scenario.
They estimated that combustion of all world fossil fuel reserves would generate about 2,900 Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) and 11,000 GtCO2 for all fossil fuel resources. This evaluation was based on multiple sources (Attanasi and Freeman, 2011;Babies et al., 2012;Iancu et al., 2010;IEA, 2013IEA, , 2011IEA, , 2008Rogner et al., 2012). As this is much higher than the GCB, a significant proportion of these fossil fuels should stay in the ground. To determine production until 2050, they used their TIAM-UCL model (Anandaraja et al., 2011), a whole-system model maximizing social welfare under constraints, in conjunction with the climate model MAGICC (Meinshausen et al., 2011).
McGlade and Ekins found that globally 33% of oil, 49% of gas and 82% of coal should stay in the ground, and proposed quotas for each producing country. They concluded that Canada should leave in the ground 98% of hard coal, 97% of lignite, 72% of conventional oil, 99% of unconventional oil, 73% of conventional gas and 71% of unconventional gas (see Table 1). Note that the last three columns about GHG in Table 1 are original to the present paper and will be discussed in Section 3 below.

Methods
All raw data and detailed calculations for this section and the next ones can be downloaded from the Data Availability Section.

Coal production
Since 2014, Statistics Canada has ceased publishing complete production data for each coal type, but the US government still does (EIA, 2020;Statistics Canada, 2020a). Therefore, data on Canadian coal from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) was employed. Data for 2020 were missing. According to Statistics Canada, total production decreased by 21.8% in 2020, therefore production levels of 2019 for each coal type decreased by this proportion were adopted as an approximation for 2020.

Oil production
Oil production data comes from the Canadian Energy Regulator (CER) (Canadian Energy Regulator, 2021a). McGlade and Ekins (2015) classified oil into conventional and unconventional.
Conventional oil includes the CER categories of conventional light crude, conventional heavy crude and condensate while unconventional oil includes synthetic crude oil and non-upgraded Alberta bitumen.

Gas production
Data on marketable natural gas production was also obtained from CER (Canadian Energy Regulator, 2021b). These data lack annual proportions of conventional and unconventional gas.
Only the province of British Columbia (BC) publishes these proportions, therefore they were used to approximate Canadian production for 2011 to 2019 (BC Oil and Gas Commission, 2020). By fitting a curve through these points, the proportion of unconventional gas was estimated to be about 92% in 2020. Table 2 provides the amount of each fossil fuel produced between 2011 and 2020. It computes the percentage of the production budget (from Table 1) that has already been extracted. Fig. 1 shows this percentage for each fossil fuel. During this period, Canada spent 76.3% of its budget of hard coal, 7.4% of its lignite, 33.6% of its conventional oil, 115.8% of its unconventional oil, 23.9% of its conventional gas and 16.8% of its unconventional gas. For unconventional oil, Canada has therefore exceeded its budget for the entire 21 st century. Indeed, unconventional oil production increased by 84% from 2011 to 2019.

Introduction
Are the global emissions of the Canadian fossil fuel industry decreasing? To assess these global emissions, one has to use emission factors obtained with LCA for each type of fossil fuel extracted in Canada. This analysis includes emissions during extraction, transformation, transportation and combustion, whether or not the fuel is exported. One limit of this section is that calculations do not include fossil fuels imported into Canada to be transformed or burned, but only those extracted in Canada. However, calculations in the next section include emissions of imported fuel and exclude downstream emissions of exported fuels.

Introduction
The selection of the proper emission factors for each type of fossil fuel is described below. Efforts were made to use emission factors developed or adapted to Canadian fossil fuels conditions. All factors referenced in this paper were computed using Global Warming Potential (GWP) with a horizon of 100 years (GWP100) after emission of the GHG.

Coal emissions
There are only a few publications on GHG emissions of Canadian coal (Jaques, 1992;Martin et al., 2004;The Climate Registry, 2020). The Canadian National Inventory Report 2021 submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) written by the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) was adopted (ECCC, 2021). This document provides CO2, CH4 and N2O emissions from different coal production processes, but does not combine them to produce a single emission factor expressed in CO2-equivalent for each coal type. This is accomplished in the following paragraphs, starting with the chemical analysis of the carbon content of each coal type.  There are several issues with ECCC's factors. Firstly, they do not differentiate between metallurgical and thermal bituminous coal. Secondly, no measures were taken on coal from BC, which produces 48% of Canadian coal (Natural Resources Canada, 2017). To remediate these issues, US emission factors from EPA were adopted as an approximation. This substitution is acceptable because CO2 release depends on carbon content, whose range is standard for a given coal rank. Thus, the EPA emission factor of 2.720 tCO2/tonne for industrial coking was adopted for metallurgical coal and the factor of 2.332 tCO2/tonne for the industrial sector was adopted for thermal coal (EPA, 2013). Note that the production statistics for bituminous metallurgical coal include the coal used to make coke.
Thirdly, the emissions mentioned above are only for carbon dioxide (CO2), therefore the impact of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) has to be added using data from ECCC. Given that almost all Canadian coal mines are now surface mines, only the fugitive emissions from surface mining were considered. These emissions amount (in kgCH4/tonne) to 0.705 for gross bituminous coal (i.e., Run-Of-Mine or ROM), 0. There are also emissions related to the way coal is used. ECCC found that using coal for electric utilities emits 0.02 kgCH4/tonne and 0.03 kgN2O/tonne; industry, heat and steam plants emit 0.03 kgCH4/tonne and 0.02 kgN2O/tonne; finally, residential and public administration emit 4 kgCH4/tonne and 0.02 kgN2O/tonne. It is assumed that all bituminous coal is used for industry, heat and steam plans. It is also assumed that all sub-bituminous coal and lignite are used for electric utilities. These are conservative assumptions given that no residential use was attributed.
The emissions of methane and N2O are converted to CO2-equivalent using the following GWP100 coefficients: 32 and 282, respectively. These coefficients are from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) with climate-carbon feedback (Edenhofer et al., 2014). These values are taken in the middle of the ranges recommended by EPA, that is, 28-36 for methane and 265-298 for nitrous oxide (EPA, 2016). For example, the emission factor for lignite equals 1.4727 tCO2e/tonne of lignite = 1.460 tCO2e/tonne + ((0.112 kgCH4/tonne + 0.02 kgCH4/tonne) x 32 kgCO2e/kgCH4 x 0.001 tonne/kg) + (0.03 kgN2O/tonne x 282 kgCO2e/kgN2O x 0.001 tonne/kg). Emission factors for each coal type are presented in Table   3. Table 1 computes emissions for all Canadian fossil fuel resources. The emission factor for hard coal applied in Table 1 is a weighted sum of the factors for bituminous metallurgical coal, bituminous thermal and sub-bituminous coal. The number of tonnes produced for a coal type in 2019 is employed as a weight. That year is selected because it is the latest year with complete production data. The emission factor obtained for hard coal is 2.487 tCO2e/tonne.
Although emission factors used in Table 1 are optimal to evaluate emissions from a part of resources (e.g., column "CO2 to emit"), they might overestimate emissions from the entire resources (RURR). A much more conservative evaluation of emissions linked to the RURR consists in taking into account only downstream emissions. By summing the columns 'CO2' and 'use' of Table 3 and computing the weighted sum for hard coal, one obtains the downstream emission factors of 2.457 and 1.469 tCO2e/tonne for hard coal and lignite, respectively.

Oil emissions
Researchers during the last decade have revised emissions of Canadian oil extraction upward (Gordon et al., 2015;IEA, 2010;IHS CERA, 2010;Koomey and Koomey, 2015). LCA emission factors were obtained from the most recent and sophisticated model, that is, the Global Oil-Climate-Index (OCI) (Gordon et al., 2015;Koomey and Koomey, 2015). The most recent studies suggest that emission factors from OCI could still be too low because fugitive emissions have been underestimated (Atherton et al., 2017;Baray et al., 2018;Chan et al., 2020;Li et al., 2017;Liggio et al., 2019;MacKay et al., 2021;Zavala-Araiza et al., 2018;Zhang et al., 2020). However, OCI was adopted because it provides the most accurate coefficients available.
OCI integrates prior models such as OPGEE and PRELIM while adding another layer called OPEM which takes into account downstream emissions. OPEM computes GHG from transport to consumers, burning of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, residual fuel and liquefied petroleum gas. Emissions for other petroleum products are not included, such as petcoke, fuel oil, bunker fuel and asphalt.
Some assumptions were made to match existing coefficients of OCI with CER oil categories. Emissions of 487 kgCO2e/barrel for Hibernia oil was applied to all conventional light oil. To estimate emissions of synthetic crude oil, the average of five brands was adopted, that is, 754 kgCO2e/barrel. For non-upgraded bitumen, the average of three brands of dilbit was adopted: 634 kgCO2e/barrel. As this database did not provide an emission factor for conventional heavy Canadian crude oil, the coefficient of 520 kgCO2e/barrel for Canada Midale oil was adopted because its density is similar.
No coefficient for condensate (i.e., pentanes plus) was available. As it is extracted in a similar manner as conventional light crude oil, it was assumed that emissions differ only for the combustion phase. EPA published data showing that the combustion of one gallon of pentanes plus emits less CO2 (2.59 kg/gallon less), less CH4 (0.08 g/gallon less) and less N2O ( kgCO2e/barrel is the emission factor of conventional light crude oil.
To compute GHG from oil in Table 1

Gas emissions
Most literature reviews have shown no significant difference between the LCA emissions of conventional gas compared to shale gas, although this is still debated (Balcombe et al., 2017;Burnham et al., 2012;Weber and Clavin, 2012). Consequently, the same coefficient is used for both types of gas. Because production volumes are reported at 15 °C and emission factors apply to gas at 0 °C, volumes were converted with the ideal gas equation to 0 °C and 1 atmosphere.
The emission factor for natural gas is construed as the sum of two numbers: upstream and downstream. Downstream, burning Canadian natural gas emits 1.926 kgCO2e/m 3 . This number is obtained by averaging across various compositions from all producing provinces (Environment Canada, 2011). A study showed that the upstream emissions (pre-production, extraction, processing, transmission, storage & distribution) are equal to 0.357 kgCO2e/m 3 assuming 0.97% leaking of methane during this process (Balcombe et al., 2017). Recent studies in the U.S. have shown that 2.3% of leaking is more realistic during these steps (Alvarez et al., 2018). Other studies in Canada confirm that this evaluation is conservative and could even reach 3.7% for U.S. and Canada (Howarth, 2019;Zhang et al., 2020). The intermediate value of 2.3% leak rate was adopted, which leads to a correction of 0.305 kgCO2e/m3. It is obtained with the following calculation: 0.717 kgCH4/m 3 x (0.023 -0.0097) x 32 kgCO2e/kgCH4, where 0.717 kgCH4/m 3 is the density of methane at 0 °C and 1 atmosphere and 32 is the GWP100 of methane (EPA, 2016).
The total is 2.587 kgCO2e/m 3 .   Table   1). This means that 37% of the fossil fuel budget for the 21 st century has been spent in 10 years.

Fig. 2.
Global emissions of CO2-equivalent as a function of time for coal, (natural) gas, oil as well as total emissions.

Table 4
Fossil fuel production and CO2-equivalent emissions using LCA.   Three models that calculated a CB specifically for Canada under the 2°C scenario are analysed below (Alcaraz et al., 2018;Gignac and Matthews, 2015;Kanitkar et al., 2013). These analyses complement the LCA fossil fuel emissions presented in the previous section because these models focus on national emissions, which include imported fossil fuels and exclude the combustion of fossil fuels extracted in Canada but burned after exportation.

Methods
To evaluate a specific model, the same emissions database as the model was used. The  In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused an important drop of GHG emissions globally of 7% (Friedlingstein et al., 2020). Consistently, Table 4 shows that the global GHG emissions of the Canadian fossil fuel industry dropped by 4.9% in 2020. Therefore, a conservative drop of 7% was assumed for ECCC, CAIT and CDIAC in 2020. Historical and extrapolated data are shown in Table 5. Table 5 Historical and estimated GHG emissions for Canada according to three sources.

Results
The sum of the extrapolated data from CAIT excluding LULUCF, in Table 5, equals 7.029 GtCO2e over the 2011-2020 period. Therefore, according to the MCJ model, Canada has already spent more than its CB for the 21 st century. This is showed in Fig. 3.  Kanitkar et al. (2013) distributed the GCB among regions using their TISS-DSF model (Kanitkar et al., 2013). They used the upper limit of GCB from 2010-2050 following the 2°C scenario. Fair share of the GCB for a given region was defined as proportional to its population. Entitlement designates the portion of the fair share that a region is allowed in a specified time period. The TISS-DSF model computes future entitlement by subtracting each region's historical emissions from its fair share. A negative future entitlement, implies that a region must reduce its emissions.

TISS-DSF model 4.4.1 Introduction
The model allocates a quota of 7.92 GtCO2e to Canada from 2010 to 2050.

Results
The sum of the extrapolated data from CAIT including LULUCF in Table 5 over the 2010-2020 period equals 7.451 GtCO2e. Therefore, according to the TISS-DSF Model, Canada has spent 94.1% of its CB for the 2010-2050 period as showed in Fig. 3. This implies that Canada's CB will be exhausted by the end of 2021 because the 0.469 GtCO2e left is much lower than the annual national emissions of 0.679 GtCO2e in 2020.

G&M model 4.5.1 Introduction
The G&M model follows the RCP2.6 scenario consistent with a 67% chance of limiting temperature rise to 2°C by 2100 (Gignac and Matthews, 2015). Their model follows the  Canadian emissions compared to the annual targets of the G&M model.

Results
The sum of extrapolated CDIAC data excluding LULUCF (in Table 6) from 2014 to 2020 equals 3.74 GtCO2. This represents 47% of the budget from the 2014-2035 scenario (see Fig. 3) and 37% of the budget from the 2014-2050 scenario. According to this model, Canada has not exhausted its CB. However, have Canadian per capita emissions been decreasing yearly by 0.56 tonnes since 2014? As shown in Table 6, from 2014 to 2020 the extrapolated emissions are higher than targets for every year. The sum of the target emissions from 2014 to 2020, in Table 6, equals 3.21 GtCO2e and the sum of extrapolated emissions equals 3.74 GtCO2e. Therefore, cumulative emissions are 16.6% higher than the targets.

Conclusion and policy implications
As Canadian annual unconventional oil production increased by 80% from 2011 to 2019 -reaching 1.08 gigabarrels (Gb) -Canada's cumulative production over that period exceeded the 7. represents 'unburnable oil', that is, oil that is beyond the upper limit of the 2°C scenario. Yet, in 2018 the federal government bought the TransMountain pipeline for 4.5 billion Canadian dollars (CAD $) and is building a new one, making it possible to increase production by 0.215 Gb annually (Morgan, 2018;TransMountain, 2017). In 2020, the federal government also scaled back environmental assessment of offshore oil exploration, with the stated goal of shortening the average delay from 905 days to 90 days (Quinn, 2020). A 2018 report found that Canada provided more financial support to fossil fuel companies than any other G7 country (Whitley et al., 2018).
There are, however, factors that could force a decrease in future oil production, such as Canada has already extracted 76.3% of the hard coal budget proposed by McGlade and Ekins (2015). At the pace of 2019, this budget will be exhausted by the end of 2023. As a member of the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA), Canada is phasing out coal power generation on its territory (PPCA, 2021). However, the extraction of metallurgical coal is promoted for exports (Fletcher, 2021). It is supported by exploration tax credits for coal mines in BC ( BC Government, 2020). Indeed, investments in exploration for new coal mines totaled 70 million CAD $ in 2018 (Natural Resources Canada, 2018). Vancouver has a project to expand a coal terminal in its harbour to increase exports (Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, 2020). One possible factor motivating this expansion project is that Vancouver accepts American coal for export while the neighboring states of Washington and Oregon have blocked all proposed coal terminals during the last decade (Kerr, 2019).
Canada's gas production increased by 7.6% from 2011 to 2019. This production is likely to increase further because the federal government has issued long-term export licenses to 24 Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal projects ranging between 20-40 years (Natural Resources Canada, 2020a). Their projected peak production is 0.30 Tcm/year, which would triple production and lead to GHG emissions higher than 2020 emissions from oil. The first Canadian LNG export terminals are scheduled to be in operation at Goldboro in Nova-Scotia and Kitimat (BC) around 2024and 2025, respectively (Global Energy Monito Wikipeadia, 2021Jang, 2021). Domestic consumption of natural gas has increased by 36% from 2010 to 2019, partly because Ontario replaced its coal power generation plants with natural gas combined cycle plants (BP, 2020).
Alberta plans to do the same (Healing, 2020).
The conversion from coal to natural gas is underway even though it is ill advised. Instead of a reduction, it could be very well be an increase. Given that the methane leak rate is in the 2.3%-3.7% range, if one applies a horizon of 20 years to compute the impact of these leaks (instead of the usual 100 years), then converting from coal to natural gas increases emissions (Lattanzio, 2015;Zhang et al., 2020). The horizon plays a role because methane concentration progressively decreases after its emission, so its warming impact is 2.5 times stronger on a horizon of 20 years than the usual horizon of 100 years. In any case, adopting a combination of renewable energy plants would mitigate emissions more efficiently (NREL, 2014 (Dineen et al., 2018). There are also proposals to ban publicity for large vehicles, promote carpooling, invest more in public transportation and facilitate active modes of transportation (Boyle et al., 2020;Simpkins, 2017;Stanley et al., 2011). lighting and high-isolation in building envelopes (Subramanyam et al., 2017a). For the residential sector, another study shows that the most GHG mitigation can be obtained with efficient lighting, efficient furnaces and high efficiency appliances (Subramanyam et al., 2017b).
Strauch proposed that there can be a positive feedback loop between policy and market for wind energy, photovoltaic (PV) solar panels and lithium-ion battery electric vehicles (Strauch, 2020). The drop in prices for producing these products makes it easier to adopt new policies which then favour an increased scale production and cost reduction. In order to mitigate national emissions, Canada should contribute to this positive feedback by supporting these three technologies while decreasing subsidies for fossil fuels. Alberta has programs to help its workers affected by the coal phase out (Alberta Government, 2021). Similar programs to help all fossil fuel workers transition towards a low-carbon economy can be implemented at an affordable cost for workers' benefit but also to accelerate this transition (Evans and Phelan, 2016;Louie and Pearce, 2016).
As shown above, if Canadian RURR of fossil fuels were extracted and burned, it would release 682 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2e). A very conservative evaluation using only downstream emissions equals 533 GtCO2e. Both amounts represent more GHG than the upper limit of 420 GtCO2e, which is the Global Carbon Budget (GCB) providing a 67% chance to limit warming to 1.5 °C in 2100 according to IPCC (Rogelj et al., 2018). Both amounts are about half of the upper limit of 1,170 GtCO2e, which would provide a 67% chance to limit warming to 2.0 °C by 2100. These numbers confirm that most of the RURR should not be exploited. Agreement, that is, the fact that a country can respect the agreement by reducing its emissions but increase its exports of fossil fuels to countries breaching the agreement (Lee, 2017). This weakness is described in the following way by Moss: "the accounting rules of the United Nations, under the Paris Agreement, currently allow exporters to pass on responsibility for fossil fuel emissions. We must move from this territorial model of responsibility to one that considers the whole chain of responsibility for climate harms" (Moss, 2020). There is a growing gap between the total amount of fossil fuels that producing countries are planning to extract versus the total amount needed to reach the objectives of the Paris Agreement (UN Environment Programme, 2019). So far, the accord has failed to control emissions, as was predicted from the start because of the lack of accountability and of appropriate national carbon budgets (Kemp, 2018;Rogelj et al., 2016;Spash, 2016).
Canadian fossil fuel production is influenced by political, legal, technological, economic and environmental variables. The results presented here from multiple perspectives show that Canadian emissions linked to the exploitation of fossil fuels have continued to increase (except in that have observed fossil fuel production increasing and becoming a greater threat to our planetary health (Jackson et al., 2019;UN Environment Programme, 2019). Future production is difficult to anticipate, but the results presented here stress the importance of closely monitoring and of mitigating Canadian national emissions. To reach this goal it is imperative to implement international policies to limit exports of fossil fuels and to implement several national policies with an emphasis on decreasing the number of vehicles, especially larger ones, and supporting the windmill/ PV solar/ electric vehicle trio as well as supporting the transition of fossil fuel workers to the renewable sector.

Declaration of competing interest
The author declares that he has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data Availability
All data and computations are available in this spreadsheet partitioned into six tabs: Overall, Coal, Coal2, Oil, Gas and National.