Given the threadbare state of Canada’s remaining climate policies and the windfall profits the fossil fuel industries are poised to pocket from the attacks on Iran, you might think they’d be satisfied. Instead, fossil fuel boosters are doubling down on the strategy of predatory delay.

It’s a useful term, first coined by Alex Steffen, to describe a shift in tactics. Instead of sowing doubt about the science of climate change and denying the need for a green transition, the industries and their promoters play for time. They might even acknowledge the need for change — but not too much and not too quickly. Nothing that might transform the existing system or upset the shareholders.

It allows politicians and industry to perform an insidious double act — sidestepping outright climate denial while opposing climate action. In the hands of a shrewd practitioner, you can even push the timeline out to infinity.

And so we got Pierre Poilievre, over in Europe to rebrand himself more statesmanlike, but calling net-zero a “fraud.” We should note that this was several days after US President Donald Trump began bombing Iran. And he was sitting for an interview in the UK, a country that has cut emissions by more than half amid an impressive deployment of wind power. A country whose leaders were frantically pledging to accelerate the rollout of clean energy to grapple with the latest round of fossil fuel shocks.

Poilievre may be trying to distance himself from Trump, but he sure sounded pretty Trumpy, describing net-zero as “just the latest of many pretexts used to justify taking away everybody’s money and giving it to a treasured, privileged, few green grifters…..it’s all BS.”

European leaders might have taken that personally. All the EU countries, alongside the UK, have net-zero targets. About 83 per cent of the global economy comes from countries that have formally committed to net-zero. And yet, as Bruce Anderson pointed out, “Poilievre says Canada, under his leadership, would join the other 17 per cent.”

But the broader implication of the attack on net-zero is that predatory delay is meant to last forever. After all, net-zero is simply the point at which climate pollution is brought back to balance with the planet. In the big picture, net-zero is not enough to pull us back from climate overshoot and it is often criticized by climate campaigners for providing green cover to dirty deals. But every scenario that foresees any end to worsening climate change has us hit net-zero at some point. The alternative is an unending grand experiment to see just how hot we can make the place. 

Once he returned to Canada, Poilievre went back to his standard target of carbon pricing. The broad carbon tax is dead, but we are closing in on the deadline for Ottawa and Alberta to agree on terms for industrial carbon pricing. The grand bargain sketched out in the famous MOU is supposed to be finalized by April 1. In the House of Commons, Poilievre rose to demand that Prime Minister Mark Carney ditch this “Liberal tax, so that Canadians can afford to eat.”

In response, Carney sounded like he was channeling everyone who’s had to live through Poilievre’s tenure as leader: “Mr. Speaker, it feels like Groundhog Day,” Carney replied. “I'm once again required to remind the member opposite that the impact of the industrial carbon tax on fuel prices is approximately zero.”

Carney is getting the squeeze from the fossil fuel industry as well. Canadian Natural Resources, the giant among oilsands and natural gas producers, has announced it will defer work on its Jackpine Mine because of the "economic burden” caused by uncertainty on federal climate policy. 

No pressure, though, says the company president: “We're just being very prudent from our perspective and ensuring that the outcomes …are reviewed internally here to ensure that we can tell our investors that growth in oilsands is going to be economically competitive.”

This, from a company that was announcing record levels of oil production to an audience of investors stoked by surging oil prices because of the war on Iran. How much might industrial carbon pricing cost oil sands producers? Less than 50 cents a barrel if the price really gets set at the level outlined in the MOU ($130 per tonne by 2030), according to the Canadian Climate Institute.

“Stronger industrial carbon pricing will cost oil sands companies just a Timbit a barrel by the end of the decade,” says the institute’s President, Rick Smith. “It’s unclear how any project could claim to be uneconomical as a result of such a negligible cost — especially considering it makes up less than one per cent of the cost of a barrel of oil.”

We could go on listing examples of predatory delay. A particularly egregious one is the advertising barrage by fossil gas giants like Enbridge and Fortis, who run regulated monopolies (and have seeming strangleholds over provincial governments) but who nonetheless use ratepayers' money to brand themselves as indispensable and convince the public to keep installing new gas lines.

But, given the looming April 1 deadline, one other example deserves particular attention: methane. The oil and gas industry’s front group is lobbying for a set of rules that sound arcane but would allow much more methane to be spewed into the atmosphere.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is insisting that methane regulations “rely solely on … provincial emissions data,” reports Marc Fawcett-Atkinson. The problem is that Alberta’s provincial system relies on self-reporting by industry. Those reports aren’t based on measurements but on mathematical models. When researchers actually fly over sites with sensors, they find much more methane is spewed than is being reported.

The federal system is more robust and incorporates the measurements from methane detectors. The gulf between the two systems is significant. If negotiators end up agreeing to use the provincial data, about six million more tonnes of methane will leak into the air. 

And methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — there’s less of it up there and it doesn’t last nearly as long, but it is often called a “superpollutant” because it’s 80 times more potent over the first 20 years it enters the atmosphere. So, it really matters what gets measured.

“If you break your arm, but don’t go for an X-ray, it doesn’t stop your arm from being broken,” writes Amanda Bryant about the industry lobby to rely on provincial data. “Worse still, without good information about how your arm is broken, your doctor may have a harder time fixing it.”

Predatory delay thrives on obscurity and complexity — wonky terminology, arcane rules, disputed data. You call the goal a "fraud," you hide the leaks, you claim a negligible cost is insurmountable. Each obstruction feels like a minor skirmish. But added together, they form a coordinated strategy.

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