One of the most challenging things about climate change is that it’s hard to describe what success looks like.
Of course we need to achieve net-zero by 2050: it’s a chemical necessity for the atmosphere. But this is hardly a goal that your average person can see and touch and wrap their arms around.
Compounding the difficulty is that 2050 is a quarter century away. What do the signposts of success look like between now and then? How do we make sure we’re on track? Where do we course-correct if we’re not?
One way that countries have tried to define progress is by measuring the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
The landmark Paris Agreement, signed a decade ago, aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Countries determine themselves what contributions they should make to achieve the aims of the agreement. These plans, called nationally determined contributions (NDCs), are required to be “ambitious efforts” toward “achieving the purpose of this Agreement” and to “represent a progression over time.” The contributions are to be set every five years and registered with the United Nations.
Similar to many other nations, Canada has enshrined its Paris Agreement commitments in a national law, the Canada Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, adopted by Parliament in 2021. Under this act, the federal government has rolled out its Emissions Reduction Plan that it regularly updates.
Unsurprisingly, given that the global community has consciously structured the climate change issue around these yearly measurements of emissions reduction, that’s the primary lens through which the public now views the discussion. A significant proportion of climate change media headlines relate to emissions targets being met, or not met.
Don’t get me wrong: I think this Paris Agreement approach has been useful. Like Canada, most countries in the world have methodically catalogued every scrap of carbon emissions and created policy architectures to start knocking them back. That’s led to a substantial reduction in projected future warming – close to one full degree Celsius by century’s end.
But a decade on from the Paris Agreement, I don’t think that communicating to the public the success or failure of climate progress in terms of megatonnes of carbon reduced – putting this in the metaphorical window every chance we get – is the best we can do.
For one thing, and as I’ve already observed above, it’s not really comprehensible or tangible for most people.
For another, there are better, more compelling stories of success or failure to tell. Let’s take electric vehicles as one example. When the Paris Agreement was signed, electric vehicles were less than 1% of new vehicle sales around the world. Today, they are more than 25% and rising fast. The boom in electric vehicles is actually resulting in less demand for oil and less greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency, for example, pegged the total number of barrels of oil displaced by EV adoption at more than 1.3 million barrels per day in 2024. The agency expects that number to rise to more than five million barrels per day by 2030.
Most compelling of all, EVs are just better machines than gasoline-powered cars. Anyone who drives one loves them and saves money in the long term (especially when the price of oil skyrockets because of the type of international conflicts we’re seeing at the moment).
Heat pumps are another example. In 2015, globally, heat pumps were generally a marginal technology. Now: heat pumps outsell gas furnaces in the United States and in many markets. And because they are more efficient than natural gas furnaces, and run by electricity, they are starting to measurably reduce carbon emissions.
A fork in the road for the Canadian climate change discussion
The rate of uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps is an extremely important measure of climate change progress. As opposed to emission reductions, they are visible, tangible things.
So as a way of refocusing the climate change discussion in a positive direction, the Canadian Climate Institute is going to start tracking these indicators of progress such as EV and heat pump sales data in the months ahead.
This is also a way of holding governments to account. The recent announcement by Prime Minister Mark Carney that the federal government is aiming for 75% of new cars sold by 2035 to be EVs is a clear commitment. And it’s an opportunity to ensure that the package of policies he has released will get us to that goal.
As I’ve said before in this space, the climate change discussion is a marathon, not a sprint. It has evolved over decades and will continue to do so. The way we talk about the issue in order to ensure that it gets the attention it needs in a volatile world requires constant reinvention to ensure that we’re connecting with our audiences.
Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute, the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health, and the executive producer of Plastic People, a 2024 documentary chronicling the damage done by microplastics in the human body.
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