That legislation is Bill C-59, which would require companies to provide evidence to back up their environmental claims. It is currently awaiting royal assent.
As of Thursday, it was also what led the Pathways Alliance, a consortium of Canada’s largest oilsands companies, to remove all its content from its website, social media and other public communications.
I work in this space. My focus area is consequential GHG accounting specifically, which is the process of quantifying the impact a decision will have on GHG levels.
There is an internationally recognized methodology for GHG emissions account and for most other things you’d make environmental claims about.
Hard part is most of those methodologies were designed for voluntary compliance. They tend to allow lots of estimates and average when better data isn’t available, because for someone trying to do the right thing, estimating data is better than nothing.
But that leaves a giant gaps in legislation like this because someone with incentive to do so can make generously optimistic assumptions that ridiculously overstate their environmental stewardship while still technically following the methodology.
While I think it’s doubtful we’ll see any major improvements in reporting for a while. The bill is still a massive step in the right direction.
And there’s hope for the methodologies getting better too. The leading methodology for calculating GHG emissions is currently being revised with a new version expected to be published next year. Current proposals being considered include dropping several notoriously inaccurate approaches, that could be used to make false or exaggerated claims.