After six years of carbon pricing in Canada, the signature—and highly controversial—climate policy of the Justin Trudeau-led Liberals is on its last legs.

Provincial and federal Conservatives have opposed the measure since its inception, launching legal challenges against carbon pricing legislation in the Supreme Court and foregrounding an “Axe the Tax” message as a core plank of Pierre Poilievre’s campaign for the looming federal election. The NDP has also backtracked from its support of the policy, with federal leader Jagmeet Singh calling for “an approach to fighting the climate crisis where it doesn’t put the burden on the backs of working people, where big polluters have to pay their fair share.” Premiers in British Columbia and Manitoba have also committed to quitting the scheme.

Now, as the Liberal leadership race comes to an end, many of the original boosters of the policy are preparing to abandon it. Seeming to draw on the left-populist framing floated by the NDP, Chrystia Freeland is reportedly “ready to make difficult decisions to meet our emissions targets and make sure big polluters pay for their outsized emissions,” while Mark Carney said that “the vast majority of our emissions in Canada come from our industry.” He claims his focus will be on “getting those emissions down, more than changing in a very short period of time the way Canadians live.”

Even Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault expressed an openness to a reversal, stating that the carbon price is only one of “about 100 different measures we have deployed to fight climate change in Canada” and that focusing on industrial emitters is far more effective than on consumers.

Seemingly overnight, the Liberal-NDP consensus on carbon pricing has largely crumbled, leaving behind a hodge-podge of vague commitments about cracking down on large industrial polluters.

This development may seem like a welcome relief to the left, which has often criticized the carbon tax as a neoliberal measure that downloads moral and financial responsibility onto individuals and households who burn fossil fuels for transportation or heating. Unfortunately, it represents a new form of climate denialism that vastly understates the role of oil and gas across much of Canadian society and the tremendously difficult task of rapidly reducing emissions to limit catastrophic climate change.

Carbon pricing is far from an ideal policy, but the shift away from directly challenging any part of Canada’s emissions-intensive mode of living may be disastrous for achieving our already weak international climate commitments.

While large industrial emitters need to be targeted for significant emissions reductions—especially through cuts in total output, not merely per-unit emissions intensity—this will also require a radical overhaul in the way Canadians live. Exclusively focusing on the “big polluters” conveniently ignores this urgent task for crude political gain.

Canada burns 230 million litres of oil on transportation every day

There are many aspects of dominant Canadian society that require significant downsizing to achieve rapid emissions reductions, including the frequent consumption of meat and dairy products, or the highly inefficient heating of single-family homes using natural gas. But when it comes to the continued centrality of oil, we have to reckon with the near-total dominance of private transportation of people and goods. While the resulting emissions are spread among tens of millions of individual vehicles, the transportation sector must also be collectively understood as a “big polluter” or “large emitter.”

There’s no question that oil and gas production is at the heart of Canada’s emissions crisis. In 2022, the most recent year that reporting is available, Canada emitted a grand total of 708 megatonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). The oil and gas industry accounted for a huge 217 Mt of that—almost one-third of the total—including 87 Mt from the oilsands, 60 Mt from natural gas production and processing, and 39 Mt from conventional sources. Further, while “fugitive emissions” from methane leaks are supposedly included, it’s well-established that these are being vastly undercounted. This especially matters given that most of the natural gas consumed in Canada is used for oilsands operations.

In 2023, Canada produced five million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil, with two-thirds of that (about 3.2 million bpd) from the oilsands. About 80 percent of this product is exported, almost entirely to the United States, although some tankers are also making their way to Asia since the opening of the $34 billion Trans Mountain Expansion Project (and may increase if the Trump tariffs come into effect). At the same time, Canada also imports a decent chunk of crude oil, especially to New Brunswick and Québec, along with some refined petroleum products to Québec, Ontario, and BC. Reducing oil exports, especially from the oilsands, must remain at the top of the climate justice agenda given the massive emissions from the production and eventual consumption of oil.

However, it’s also essential to grapple with the reality that a tremendous quantity of oil is also used in Canada itself. This isn’t only a problem of exports. Nor can the problem of consumption be reduced to extremely high per-capita but ultimately marginal “luxury emissions” like private jets, which account for less than two percent of commercial aviation emissions. Even the repeated focus by the left on military emissions tends to overstate its prominence; even if Canada’s military emissions were 10 percent of the US’s, it would only count for five or six megatonnes, less than one percent of national emissions.

Every day, about 2.4 million barrels of refined petroleum products are consumed in Canada. About one-quarter of this is used for “non-energy” purposes, including as petrochemical feedstocks, asphalt, lubricants, and some industrial applications of petroleum coke. Another chunk of oil consumption as a fuel happens in agriculture, forestry, and industry.

But far and away the biggest consumer of oil is the transportation sector, accounting for 60 percent of all oil use in the country, or about 1.5 million bpd of oil products. This consumption happens largely in three main forms: gasoline for passenger cars, SUVs, vans, and light trucks (about 735,000 bpd); diesel for freight trucks (about 575,000 bpd); and jet fuel for airplanes (about 150,000 bpd).

This is 230 million litres used every single day: about 120 million litres of gasoline, 90 million litres of diesel, and 25 million litres of jet fuel. To compare to other and much larger countries, Canada consumes roughly the same amount of oil for transportation alone as the total combined oil consumption of Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Philippines, which collectively have more than 18 times the population as Canada.

The approach that carbon pricing took to this problem was inadequate and confusing, with the expansive rebate system seeming to undercut much of the premise of the carbon price itself. It also failed to significantly improve public transit operations in urban areas that would make driving less of a necessity for many. However, a tax on oil products at least recognized at some basic level that consumption also matters in the fight against climate change.

Transportation is a ‘big polluter’ too

This matters because, unsurprisingly, the transportation sector’s heavy usage of oil results in huge greenhouse gas emissions. In total, transportation contributed 156 Mt of CO2e in 2022, almost one-quarter of total national emissions. and the second-largest source of emissions after the oil and gas industry. This included a massive 80 Mt from passenger cars and light trucks, and 38 Mt from freight trucking. Another eight Mt came from domestic aviation and five Mt from domestic marine vessels. Although not included in the national emissions total, another 16 Mt were emitted from international passenger and freight transportation, or when a vehicle departs from one country and arrives in another, such as a flight to the US or Mexico.

These are enormous emissions contributions, comparable in size to the most notorious “big polluters” in the country. Passenger cars and light trucks (80 Mt) pump out equivalent emissions to all non-oil and gas heavy industry (78 Mt) in Canada, including production of chemicals and fertilizers, iron and steel, cement, pulp and paper, and mining operations. Meanwhile, domestic freight transport (52 Mt) slightly exceeds all electricity generation emissions (47 Mt), which have plummeted in recent years due to the accelerated coal-fired power phase-out. Moreover, it is impossible to ignore the enormous and growing emissions problem posed by passenger and freight transportation, to say nothing of associated air pollution, deaths and injuries, and urban congestion.

This urgency is compounded by the reality that oil consumption is invariably linked to its production. While capitalists will only produce commodities that are deemed sufficiently profitable for their own competitiveness and accumulation strategies, consumption is essential to realize its surplus-value to be realized and divided. As Marx argued in Grundrisse, production always predominates over other moments in the process, but “consumption produces production in a double way.” Firstly, because “a product becomes a real product only by being consumed,” and secondly, “because consumption creates the need for new production, that is it creates the ideal, internally impelling cause for production.” Even more succinctly, he wrote: “No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.”

This doesn’t mean that the working class is to blame for the production of oil, as industry boosters like to contend, and that could be easily implied by carbon pricing itself. As energy historian Simon Pirani has described, “fossil fuels are consumed primarily by and through technological, social and economic systems,” which individuals tend to have very little control over due to “urban development that sites homes, jobs and shops far from each other, work patterns that require them to make particular journeys, and so on.” This reality has been made especially clear with the ending of many remote work arrangements and corresponding emissions increases.

At the same time, it’s abundantly clear that the oil industry profits from the constant reproduction of wants, needs, and desires that require ever-more oil products to fuel: same-day delivery, cheap flights, bigger SUVs and trucks, suburban homes. Crass political stunts like gas tax cuts—most recently deployed by the Manitoba NDP—directly appeal to and incentivize this mode of living. Again, carbon pricing was not a progressive solution to addressing these problems, but it was at least something compared to what we’re now left with.

Significantly reducing oil industry emissions, including from the ultra-polluting oilsands, will necessarily require a drastic drop in transport-related consumption, while also ensuring that oil production actually declines rather than being redirected into exports and petrochemicals. In combination, this would essentially double potential emissions reductions, eliminating a sizable chunk of the production and consumption of oil. Along with related investments such as the building of dense and energy efficient social housing, such measures would actually put the country within grasp of meeting emissions reductions targets—and much more.

The need to curb oil exports and domestic consumption

By now, however, it’s apparent that the liberal technocratic approach to curbing oil consumption—which includes modest carbon pricing—is simply not working. Despite costly subsidies for purchasing personal electric vehicles, the annual and total share of the national vehicle fleet remains utterly marginal. In 2023, only 11 percent of all new vehicles registered were “zero-emissions vehicles” (ZEVs); three-quarters of those were fully battery-electric, while the rest were plug-in hybrids. In mid-2024, it had crept up to a mere 16.5 percent.

In total, ZEVs represent just one to two percent of the total stock of vehicles in Canada. More than 80 percent of new vehicles sold in Canada remain fully reliant on oil, and are now mostly fuel-inefficient SUVs and trucks that will be driven for at least a decade more. It’s estimated that it will take between one-and-a-half and three decades to replace most of the existing fleet of vehicles with ZEVs, with all new vehicles sold after 2035 having to be ZEVs (assuming it isn’t repealed by a Conservative government). But as the horrifying Los Angeles fires reminded us, we don’t have that kind of time.

The same goes for the high-polluting but often-ignored freight sector, which has seen major emissions increases due to the rapid rise of just-in-time, same-day, and door-to-door shipping. Trucking, by far the least-efficient freight transport mode, has seen negligible emissions reductions from plug-in hybrids, and electric truck purchases continue to be made seemingly as showpieces (food distributor giant Sysco Canada’s recent purchase of eight electric trucks represents less than two percent of its national fleet). Meanwhile, the silver bullet technofix of “sustainable aviation fuels” for air travel remains exceedingly costly, ecologically dicey, and likely unscalable, while using electric batteries is impossible for large planes and long-distance flights. Aviation is additionally of concern due to the release of short-lived but impactful non-CO2 pollutants like water vapour and aerosols.

The carbon pricing system was never designed to meaningfully address these issues with any level of urgency, instead relying on minor pricing incentives and rebates to nudge consumers towards emissions reductions, while protecting and expanding private profits. The political case for such a policy was only further undermined by the nationalization of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project and the Liberal government’s failure to ban thermal coal exports as promised. After all, if Canada simply sends fossil fuels elsewhere to be burned, what’s really the point of domestic reductions?

The way forward must simultaneously commit to opposing continued exports of global warming-causing fossil fuels and their rerouting into alternative uses such as petrochemicals, while also dramatically reducing their use domestically through the vast expansion of public services and infrastructures. In the case of oil’s massive use in transportation, this would include high-quality and ideally free public transit—including intercity and rural systems—while freight emissions would be slashed through a combination of implementing CUPW’s Delivering Community Power plan and pushing for public and electrified rail. Fighting to protect VIA Rail from privatization, and advocating for its expansion and improvement, is a first step to helping curb some air travel.

At the same time, it’s necessary to be honest about the reality that there are some forms of existing emissions-intensive activities that simply can’t be continued at their current scales if we’re serious about achieving a liveable future: large single-family homes; driving enormous SUVs and trucks; ubiquitous air travel; the rapid delivery of goods; fresh air-freighted produce; and much else. Of course, there are important exceptions to all of this, and any such shift requires collective solutions that implicate work, municipal planning, and profit-seeking itself. But in contrast to the reductive focus on “big polluters” that appears to be catching on, these are the difficult conversations we need to be having.

James Wilt is a Winnipeg-based PhD candidate and freelance writer. His latest book is Dogged and Destructive: Essays on the Winnipeg Police.