Greenhouse gas emission reporting always lags two to three years behind. I find this frustrating when we are in a Climate Change Emergency and yet do not publish our pollution until three years after the fact. How are we supposed to manage what we measure three years too late?
Yukon generates it own emissions estimate because it has access to its own data sets for a more accurate estimate (relative to the National Inventory Report where Yukon is a mere rounding error on the national scale). But the most recent Yukon estimate (https://yukon.ca/en/greenhouse-gas-emissins-yukon) only goes up to 2017. It is great Yukon does this more detailed, more accurate estimate, but again, it is still so much after the fact, it is hard to get feedback on how we are doing in our climate change fight.
So I plotted road fuel usage data, as reported by Yukon Bureau of Statics and greenhouse gas emissions to see if it gives some "indication" of how we've done since 2017. Since we know transportation is responsible for the majority of Yukon's emissions, it does give some insight: more fuel used = more emissions. Results are below, and the answer is things are not looking good for Yukon's emissions in 2018. Transportation fuel was up 16 million litres in 2018 vs 2017.
We are going in the wrong direction. It looks like we will need to double-down if we want to achieve our desired 30% reductions in the next 10 years.
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