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Seeing through the smoke
In a grim game of FOMO, cities and headline writers vied for the title of most dangerous air in the world this week. Montreal and Toronto battled for the crown but sharp elbows were flying from south of the border where Chicago staked a claim, disputed by outlets in Detroit and Washington, D.C. Almost none saw fit to mention the cause.
The news pointed to “wildfires,” of course. That’s a term that probably deserves retiring. The fires are definitely “wild” — in the sense of a party that got out of control. But not in the usual sense of wildlife or wild animals — something natural and beyond the boundaries of human meddling.
Very, very few outlets are piercing the smoke and connecting the fires to climate change. A few news searches will show you that a pitiful 13 per cent of wildfire coverage mentions climate change even in passing (or followed by a question mark).
Fewer still are making the cause visible. Well less than one per cent mention fossil fuels or any other source of climate pollution.
And the dots get even more obscured the closer we get to the source. The names of the big fossil fuel companies are entirely shrouded.
This form of climate silence is very weird when you think about it. If your local river is closed off, the media wouldn’t stop the story after abstract mention of contaminants upstream. You would know about the factory that spewed the sludge. You would know the names of the companies at fault.
Granted, that’s a more manageable story to tell. But we didn’t have this kind of silence around the ozone hole or acid rain. And we know that almost 40 per cent of charred western North America is caused by the products of the 88 “carbon majors.” About half the increase in fire conditions.
Those calculations carry us up to 2021. This year’s fires are so wild, they’ve already burned through the records for at least the last 60 years — a mind-boggling 80,000 square kilometres — and we’re just now into “real” fire season.
How big an area is that? It’s bigger than Ireland. Almost half the countries in the world are smaller.
The scale is hard to get your head around. But here’s another important milestone — fires across Canada have already churned out 600 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, according to Europe’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. And if that number sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it’s very close to surpassing the total for Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions from all official sources. (We don’t count most emissions from fire on our national ledger — our climate accountants figure they’re “natural.”)
Federal politicians aren’t doing the public any favours clarifying the causes. While headline writers vied for the smoky crown, Pierre Poilievre launched a campaign against the one broad public policy that explicitly targets carbon emissions. At gas stations across Atlantic Canada, Poilievre is railing against the carbon tax and taking shots at the clean fuel standard, vowing to scrap both if elected.
It often feels like Canadian politics is stuck in a time warp since at least 2008 — the year Stephen Harper declared Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift would “screw everybody” and the BC NDP fought a disgraceful provincial campaign promising to “Axe the Tax,” the very same slogan Poilievre is pumping at gas stations in the Maritimes.
On the other hand, we got some refreshingly blunt talk from Steven Guilbeault this week. “We all recognize Canada is not ready to face the impacts of climate change,” the environment minister said as he revealed the country’s first national climate adaptation strategy. Guilbeault focused on heat, fires and floods and held the announcement in Vancouver to underscore the impacts of the deadly 2021 heat dome. Most of the hundreds of victims lived in low-income neighbourhoods and baked to death in their own homes.
But one day before, Guilbeault’s cabinet colleagues were getting cosy with the carbon majors.
Pleased to host with my colleague @JonathanWNV @Shell’s first global Board of Directors meeting in Canada.
— François-Philippe Champagne (FPC) 🇨🇦 (@FP_Champagne) June 27, 2023
With a strong and historic presence in our country, Shell is our reliable partner. Together, we can and will pave the way for tomorrow's green economy. pic.twitter.com/kQXPDFdJeW
The same board that recently fired the CEO who made a series of climate commitments. They replaced him with a CEO who announced an increase in fossil fuel production, scaling back the plans for energy transition just two weeks ago. On Friday, Shell’s head of renewable generation quit.
And while the board discussed “tomorrow’s green economy” with our cabinet ministers, we now know that one of the company’s pipelines was pouring oil into the Niger Delta. “Our reliable partner” allowed the oil spill to continue for a week from a pipeline pumping 180,000 barrels-per-day.
The Indigenous Ogoni people and other locals have suffered decades of executions, other killings, human rights abuses and toxic spills under the boot of Big Oil. They aren’t likely to be impressed with Shell’s promise to investigate the latest contamination.
Climate impacts have become so blazingly obvious, the public is catching on despite all the contradictions and smoke-blowing. Seven in 10 Canadians have made the connection between fires and climate change, according to a new poll by Abacus Data for Clean Energy Canada.
Eighty-six per cent of Canadians say climate action will impact their vote. Six in 10 say it’s essential or very important come election day. Based on those kinds of numbers, Clean Energy Canada’s Trevor Melanson argues climate concerns wounded Conservatives in the recent byelections.
It’s worth highlighting some campaigns piercing the smoke for the public. This week, doctors headlined #CanadaIsBurning rallies in 30 communities across Canada.
In Toronto, organizers had to decide whether to call off the event because of fire smoke — a bitterly ironic climate conundrum. The protest went ahead in front of Chrystia Freeland’s constituency office, calling on the feds to stop funding fossils.
#CanadaisBurning action in front of MP Freelands office. Samantha, a physician, speaks to the fact that we NEED to phase out fossil fuels. pic.twitter.com/PnDglj7UVG
— Allie Rougeot (@AlienorR2) June 28, 2023
In Vancouver, Dr. Melissa Lem described the climate impacts she’s witnessed on physical and mental health.
It felt good to stand with Indigenous, faith, youth, industry and environmental leaders calling with one voice for a #healthyfuture today—and it will feel even better when BC has an effective, fully funded #ClimateEmergency plan. Let's get this done. /4.https://t.co/9UyFwPRsxY pic.twitter.com/zrezw2BAeH
— Dr. Melissa Lem (@Melissa_Lem) June 29, 2023
Days of action take time to arrange, so the organizers couldn’t have predicted how incredibly timely the day of action would be. It gave reporters the link between smoky headlines and the fossils fuelling the fires.
Also this week, the David Suzuki Foundation launched an ad campaign against misinformation by the fossil gas industry. The industry plans for a major scale-up of fracking in places like northeastern B.C.
The ads open with the kind of beautiful nature image and upbeat soundtrack favoured by the oil and gas industry, quickly burned away by the kind of flames the industry is fuelling.
The fossil fuel industry spends millions on spreading misinformation and lobbying. Our new ad campaign exposes their #greenwashing and tells the true story of how so-called “natural” gas and LNG is fueling #climate chaos.
— David Suzuki FDN (@DavidSuzukiFDN) June 28, 2023
✍️ https://t.co/m0uw1QUj0e#NaturalGaslighting #bcpoli pic.twitter.com/leXy3cKzJH
Off the charts
I didn’t give an update on the signals flashing red in this week’s Zero Carbon but if you have the stomach for it, Jeff Berardelli has the latest on the spiking temperatures and collapsing ice:
“In my three-decade-long career being a weather forecaster, and now chief meteorologist and climate specialist, I have never observed so many of Earth’s vital signs blinking red. Meteorologists and climate scientists all around the world are in awe by the simultaneous literal off-the-charts records being broken.”
The costs of climate change
Five days, $1.28 billion. In Ontario alone. That’s the price we’re paying in health costs from forest fires, according to the Canadian Climate Institute. The institute’s “eye-popping” numbers come from an analysis looking only at June 4 to 8. The number crunchers might have to update their 2021 report that projected heat-related deaths would cost Canada up to $3.9 billion a year by mid-century.
The University of Waterloo and Stand.earth took a look at U.S. pension funds and found they would be $21 billion richer today if they’d divested from fossil fuels 10 years ago. Bill McKibben summarized the findings in the Los Angeles Times:
“CalPERS managed to lose $4.7 billion over the last decade, or $3,163 per pensioner, by staying invested in fossil fuel, and that the smaller CalSTRS managed to lose $4.9 billion, or an astounding $5,114 per beneficiary.”
‘Hardly anything there’
Foothills County joined the list of Alberta municipalities declaring an agricultural disaster.
“The way it’s looking, there’s going to be hardly anything there,” Caleb Scott, the county’s manager of agricultural services, told the Calgary Herald.
“There’s a lot of fields that the plants didn’t tiller at all. There’s just one stem and one head with only seven or eight kernels on it, where you should have five, six tillers all with a nice head of 20 or so kernels.
World Council of Churches
“The World Council of Churches, representing 580 million Christians across 120 countries, formally endorsed calls for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty at a meeting in Geneva this week,” reports John Woodside.
Elsewhere in Canada’s National Observer, you’ll get the deets on the new climate adaptation plan to protect citizens from extreme heat, flooding and fires. And the parts of the plan drawing on Indigenous knowledge.
Abdul Matin Sarfraz reports on Fedex’s progress towards an all-electric fleet. “The delivery company added 50 all-electric BrightDrop Zevo 600 vehicles to its fleet, including 40 in Toronto… BrightDrop, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors (GM), is manufacturing the Zevo 600s at GM’s CAMI Assembly plant in Ontario.”
More on those cabinet ministers and their “extraordinarily naive” meeting with “one of the most awful oil companies.”
Silicon mobsters’ chokehold on Canada in which Sandy Garossino details “how thuggishly Meta (Facebook) and Google are conducting themselves in Canada. As well as Max Fawcett’s take on the looming merger between Postmedia and the Toronto Star’s ownership group: Canada’s journalism industry is bleeding out.
Nicole Rycroft’s campaign with the Vancouver-based organization Canopy to cut deforestation and carbon emissions from logging.
“Between today and about 10 years from now, we'll have 60 million tonnes of next-generation products on the market globally,” says Rycroft. “That will displace one-third of the trees that are currently cut down to make pulp and paper packaging and disposable clothing. It will enable us to ensure that absolutely no ancient and endangered forest fibre is being cut to disappear into a pulp machine.”
And Trevor Melanson unpacks the latest polling, making the argument that climate concerns wounded Conservatives in recent byelections.
Warning about warming … in the 1950s
Here’s a name that ought to be better known: as early as 1953, Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass was already warning the world about carbon pollution driving global heating. By 1961, he was blaming fossil fuels for most of the warming. “His words were prophetic,” reports The Guardian. “CO2 levels in the atmosphere were about 310 parts per million and now they are over 420 ppm and rising each year, along with global temperatures.”
Zelenskyy and Thunberg join forces
It never ceases to amaze me that Ukrainians are somehow finding the mental bandwidth to fight Putin’s military and target ecological breakdown at the same time. This week, Volodymyr Zelenskyy struck a task force to address environmental damage from the invasion and design reconstruction based on clean energy.
The group includes Greta Thunberg, former Irish president Mary Robinson, former Swedish deputy prime minister Margot Wallström and European Parliament Vice-President Heidi Hautala.
Image from Ukrainian presidential press office
The City of Light
Paris continues its extraordinary reinvention, showing what can be done in just a few years. Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s “Paris Breathes” campaign has reclaimed the Seine riverbank for humans along with the Champs-Élysées and now the Avenue de la Grande Armée on the other side of the Arc de Triomphe.
Smart as bricks
Industrial heat may not get much public attention but it’s a major decarbonization problem — at least 10 per cent of global carbon emissions. It’s often termed “hard to abate” in technical circles. Not so, according to several developments this week:
The ancient Sumerians wouldn’t be surprised to hear that one big solution is … bricks. Rondo Energy “will operate the world’s largest battery factory in Thailand, two and a half times the size of Tesla’s Gigafactory,” reports PV Magazine.
.@RondoEnergy is scaling up! Rondo, who Im proud to advise, is partnering w/Siam Cement to manufacture 90 GWh/yr of ceramic bricks for their heat battery, which allows cheap, clean, intermittent electricity to supply industrial heat 24/7 at up to 1500°C 🔥 https://t.co/b27iPmhTWw pic.twitter.com/zvyghb4ykf
— Jesse D. Jenkins (@JesseJenkins) June 27, 2023
Almost half of industrial heat takes place at much lower temperatures — under 200 C. AtmosZero has an air-sourced heat pump that delivers 165 C steam for industrial processes. The anchor customer is beer — New Belgium Brewing. You might know its Fat Tire Ale but the company also brews Torched Earth Ale (“made only with ingredients that would be available in a climate-ravaged future”).
Elsewhere in the world of clever monkeys, Canada’s Li-Cycle is pioneering the recycling of EV batteries. When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Canada this year, Justin Trudeau took her to Kingston for a tour of Li-Cycle. It’s the Canadian company at the forefront of EV battery recycling and Adam Rawanski reports on the company’s progress expanding into the United States, Germany and Norway.
Cloning a country
I’ll leave you with this extraordinary dispatch from the front lines of climate change. Kalolaine Fainu reports from Tuvalu, which is “expected to be one of the first countries in the world to be completely lost to climate change.”
Facing extinction, Tuvalu considers the digital clone of a country is Fainu’s report for The Guardian describing the monumental injustice and horrendous decisions facing the country.
“If we have a displaced government or population dispersed across the globe, we would have a framework in place to ensure that we continue to co-ordinate ourselves, continue to deliver our services, manage our natural resources in our waters and all our sovereign assets,” says Simon Kofe, Tuvalu’s minister for justice, communications and foreign affairs.