Every year, the federal government requires any company that puts any kind of chemical into the air to report it to the Environment Canada. For its most recent accounting period — 2004 — Ottawa required companies to report the total amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases that were discharged. Environment Canada released this data in in June, 2005 and the activists at Pollution Watch have crunched the numbers on the country’s top greenhouse gas polluters. The top five are all in the electricity business and they all rely heavily on coal as the fuel to fire their electricity generating stations.
“We need a federal and provincial strategy for phasing out coal in the provinces that are hfeavily coal-dependent, provinces like Alberta, Ontario and Nova Scotia,” said Aaron Freeman of Environmental Defence, one of the partners behind Pollution Watch. Here’s the list of Canada’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters:
|
Rank |
Company Name (may have more than one facility reporting) |
Total all Gases (tonnes CO 2 equivalent) |
Prov |
Percentage |
|
1 |
24,887,358 |
8.97% |
||
|
2 |
22,672,480 |
8.17% |
||
|
3 |
13,669,500 |
4.93% |
||
|
4 |
11,957,574 |
4.31% |
||
|
5 |
10,570,678 |
3.81% |
||
|
6 |
10,367,463 |
3.74% |
||
|
7 |
8,599,254 |
3.10% |
||
|
8 |
6,898,565 |
2.49% |
||
|
9 |
5,731,121 |
2.07% |
||
|
10 |
4,863,485 |
1.75% |
||
|
|
Total Top 10 Companies |
120,217,478 |
|
43% |
|
|
Total all gases from all sources (from National Greenhouse Gas Inventory) |
758,000,000 |
|
|
Source: Pollution Watch
Of some note, Ontario Power Generation alone put out nearly twice as much greenhouse gases as every business and home in British Columbia.