Canada and the climate crisis: a state of denial 3

Following the February IPCC report Canadian Dimension took a look at the climate crisis now facing us and its ties to global capitalism demand for ever more growth and natural resources with the resultant income inequality gap meaning only a small percentage benefit from this system.

Demonstration during the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly known as the Copenhagen Summit. Sadly all the demos have not changed our economic system enough. 

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in February, painted a stark portrait of worsening global warming and the concomitant risks to organized human life on this planet. To its credit, mainstream media communicated these dire warnings—warnings of extreme heat, flooding, and drought, famine, and even war—effectively. As The Guardian put it, it was the “‘bleakest warning yet’ on [the] impacts of climate breakdown.” In a front page headline, the New York Times asserted that “Time Is Running Out to Fix Climate.”...

In fact, more than half of all anthropogenic carbon emissions ever released have been emitted since the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992.

That dissonance—or, to put it bluntly, that utter failure of international climate negotiations to make even the smallest difference—is what’s inspiring climate scientists to become activists. It’s also what inspired a group of IPCC authors to publish a paper calling for a climate science strike.

Drs. Bruce Glavovic, Timothy Smith, and Iain White argue that science and society are inherently in a symbiosis—what they call an unwritten “science-society contract.” We invest in and pursue science predominantly because we believe it will benefit society; science, in turn, does its part to drive positive change. With climate science, they argue that this contract has been broken. We have 40 years of “settled” climate science establishing global warming as a clear, present, and well-understood danger on top of more than a century of corroborating research. ... Climate scientists keep producing more and better research, improving our understanding of the phenomenon and its impacts, but not fundamentally changing the course of action prescribed—ending the use of fossil fuels. As such, the contract has been broken. ...

These dynamics—undergirded by the capitalist drive for accumulation and the resultant extreme wealth inequality of the modern era—are what is blocking climate action. So the question becomes not “how do we fix the science-society contract?” but rather “how do we overcome the governing powers in order to begin to work towards mitigating climate change and ecological collapse?” Some people benefit from perpetuating the global economic and governance system that is causing climate change. Virtually everyone else—most immediately the billions of people in the Global South, but increasingly even those of us living in the wealthier countries of the Global North—is a victim. In other words, the bottom 90 percent (by wealth) on Earth are victims of a repressive regime of globalized capitalism. Our quality of life, our lifespans, and the very potential of our futures happening at all are rapidly diminishing while the ultrarich accumulate more and more wealth.

The regime of fossil capitalism has no interest in a change of course. The Canadian government just released its new emissions reduction plan that involves growing oil sands production by 25 percent through 2030. In British Columbia, the two dominant parties are in the legislature fighting over who supports LNG expansion more. Around the world, governments are not just passing the buck on climate action, but actively doubling down on fossil fuel expansion.

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/how-a-global-climate-non-coo...

Here's more on the April 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. UN Secretary General's comments on government lying about saying one thing and doing another with regard to climate change, ramping up fossil fuel production could well be aimed at Trudeau (the Trudeau government's new climate change plan proposes to increase Canadian fossil fuel production by 550,000 barrels per day while claiming carbon capture and storage will reduce emissions), among many other leaders.

The world can still hope to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown but only through a “now or never” dash to a low-carbon economy and society, scientists have said in what is in effect a final warning for governments on the climate.

Greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, and can be nearly halved this decade, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to give the world a chance of limiting future heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The final cost of doing so will be minimal, amounting to just a few percent of global GDP by mid-century, though it will require a massive effort by governments, businesses and individuals.

But the chances were narrow and the world was failing to make the changes needed, the body of the world’s leading climate scientists warned. Temperatures will soar to more than 3C, with catastrophic consequences, unless policies and actions are urgently strengthened.

Jim Skea, a professor at Imperial College London and co-chair of the working group behind the report, said: “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5C. Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.” ...

Though the report found it was now “almost inevitable” that temperatures would rise above 1.5C – the level above which many of the effects of climate breakdown will become irreversible – the IPCC said it could be possible to bring them back down below the critical level by the end of this century. But doing so could require technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which campaigners warned were unproven and could not be a substitute for deep emissions cuts now. ...

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said some governments and businesses were “lying” in claiming to be on track for 1.5C. In a strongly worded rebuke, he warned: “Some government and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic.”...

Soaring energy prices and the war in Ukraine have prompted governments to rethink their energy policies. Many countries – including the US, the UK and the EU – are considering ramping up fossil fuels as part of their response, but the IPCC report made clear that increasing fossil fuels would put the 1.5C target beyond reach.

The IPCC working group 3 report found:

• Coal must be effectively phased out if the world is to stay within 1.5C, and currently planned new fossil fuel infrastructure would cause the world to exceed 1.5C.

• Methane emissions must be reduced by a third.

• Growing forests and preserving soils will be necessary, but tree-planting cannot do enough to compensate for continued emissions for fossil fuels.

• Investment in the shift to a low-carbon world is about six times lower than it needs to be.

• All sectors of the global economy, from energy and transport to buildings and food, must change dramatically and rapidly, and new technologies including hydrogen fuel and carbon capture and storage will be needed.

Pete Smith, a professor of soils and global change at Aberdeen University, said: “The time of reckoning is now. We have one decade to get on track. We use fossil fuels in all these things that we need to change.”

Poor countries warned they were ill-equipped to make the changes needed and required financial assistance from richer nations to cut emissions and help them adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis. Madeleine Diouf Sarr, the chair of the least developed countries group at the UN climate talks, said: “There can be no new fossil fuel infrastructure."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/ipcc-report-now-or-n...

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/08/cartoonists-code-red-caricatu...

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/08/cartoonists-code-red-caricatu...

A new study in the Journal of Science Advances "found  that the double threat of extreme fires and rainfall could increase by 700% in the Pacific Northwest by the end of the century and happen up to twice as often in California." Since the US Pacific Northwest borders British Columbia the 700% increased risek of extreme wildfires and torrential rains also applies to BC. 

A pickup truck that was washed down a creek in Silverado Canyon in Silverado, Calif., sits wedged against a driveway with the creek flowing underneath following heavy rain early on Wednesday morning, March 10. 2021. The storm caused flash flooding and mud slides with cars and debris washed down the creeks as people that stayed behind try to dig out before more rain falls in the area.

Quote:

The dangerous combination of extreme wildfires followed by torrential rainfall that can lead to deadly flooding and landslides will likely become more common in western states as the world becomes warmer, according to a new study.

The study, released Friday in the journal Science Advances, found that the double threat of extreme fires and rainfall could increase by 700% in the Pacific Northwest by the end of the century and happen up to twice as often in California.

Researchers used climate models to analyze the risk of intense fires followed by extreme rainfall in the worst-case scenario of continued human-caused climate change. ...
Overall, the results predict that 90% of extreme wildfire events in California, the Pacific Northwest and Colorado will be followed by at least three extreme rainfall events within five years after a fire.

The research comes on the heels of some of the worst western wildfire seasons on record.

Wildfires leave barren paths known as burn scars, which are more susceptible to an especially dangerous and fast-moving type of landslide that scientists call "debris flows," triggered by heavy rain.

“One disaster is bad. Two disasters in rapid succession is even worse because you’re already reeling from the first one,” study co-author Samantha Stevenson, a climate scientist at the University of California Santa Barbara, told The Associated Press. “But in the particular case of wildfire plus extreme rain, the wildfire is setting you up for worse consequences because you’re losing your vegetation, you’re changing soil properties and making that landscape more conducive to destructive flooding.”...
Besides destroying vegetation that would normally hold soil and debris in place, wildfires change certain characteristics of the soil itself. It becomes less likely to absorb water, which creates conditions ripe for flash flooding and debris flows.

Known less formally as mudslides, debris flows can send a wall of water, soil, ash, vegetation, rocks and other debris careening downhill, sweeping away or burying everything in its path.

Ongoing drought in the West also contributes to the risk by making extreme fire weather more likely. The type of short, intense bursts of rainfall that trigger debris flows can happen regardless of drought conditions. ...
The scientists involved in the new study point out that previous research has already shown that wildfires will likely get worse due to climate change, and models predict more extreme rainfall in the future.

"This increase in fire-following extreme rainfall events is driven by widespread increases in both extreme fire weather conditions and high-end precip events -- so it's not just one side of the equation driving this large increase in compound events," UCLA climate scientist and study co-author Daniel Swain tweeted Friday.

You can throw the Trudeau Liberals climate change plan out the window as BS with the approval of the Bay du Nord oilfield out the window. Of course 30 years of reducing greenhouse gas emissions while increasing fossil fuel production should have told you otherwise. Environment Minister Guilbeault's statement that "the project would not cause 'significant adverse environmental effects' tells you how much BS the Liberals are pumping about Bay du Nord and therefore the entire climate change plan. The approval of Bay du Nord comes two after the latest IPCC report warning that keeping the temperature increase from global warming is all but out of reach as it requires a massive decrease in global emissions by 2025, which means not only greatly reducing existing emsission but ending all new fossil fuel projects. So, ignoring UN Secretary General Guitierres warning that starting new fossil fuel projects would be "moral and economic madness.", the Trudeau Liberals are doing just that. 

An illustration of the Bay du Nord proposal off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Photo courtesy of Equinor

Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault formally approved the Bay du Nord offshore oil megaproject Wednesday, making a decision that will infuriate environmentalists but boost the Newfoundland and Labrador economy.

In a statement Wednesday evening Guilbeault said he has determined that the project would not cause "significant adverse environmental effects" with the implementation of mitigation measures. ...

Environmental activists and climate scientists have long panned the proposed Bay du Nord development, saying it flies in the face of the federal government's climate goals.

The decision comes despite disagreement within Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal cabinet. In February, Radio-Canada reported that cabinet members from Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia were opposed to its approval.

The Newfoundland and Labrador government has fiercely championed the project, with Premier Andrew Furey lobbying fellow Liberals for months. 

At a St. John's news conference Wednesday evening, Furey called the approval a "giant step forward" for the project, and a key part of an economic recovery for the government, which is facing sky-high debt. ...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report last week warning that the Paris Climate agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels is all but out of reach. On Monday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure would be "moral and economic madness."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/bay-du-nord-approva...

Environmental Defence have brought more concerns about the Bay du Nord project: there is evidence that it is more than triple the 300 barrels of oil originally assessed, having grown to a billion barrels or more in estimated size. In addition there are the risks that come with deepwater drilling. 

Oil rig drilling for oil of the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador

Quote:

Getting serious about a climate-safe future means we cannot approve any new oil projects.

When the Bay du Nord project was first submitted, the oil reserve was estimated to contain 300 million barrels. Now, with new research, that has ballooned to a possible one billion barrels. Digging up and burning 1 billion barrels would result in well over 400 MT of carbon pollution over the project’s 30 year lifetime. That’s the equivalent of running 100 coal-fired power plants for a year. 

The climate can’t take the emissions from current levels of oil and gas production, let alone further expansion. The math is simple – we cannot develop these reserves of fossil fuels and meet global climate targets. 

And then there are the serious safety risks. Equinor wants to drill 1,200 metres down to dig for oil off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. To date, all existing offshore oil production projects in Canada are shallow-water operations, occurring at depths of 100 metres or less. Bay du Nord would be Canada’s only deepwater project. 

As we know from the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, deepwater drilling projects come with special and serious risks.

Because of Bay du Nord’s location, far offshore in an ecologically unique and rich environment near valuable fishing waters, the project also represents a threat to fisheries and ocean biodiversity – including whales, seabirds and deep-sea corals. According to Equinor’s own estimates, a blowout at the wellhead at Bay du Nord would take up to 36 days to cap – under ideal conditions.

https://environmentaldefence.ca/2022/02/25/minister-guilbeaults-climate-...

The Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) First Nation heat pump project in BC has helped remove one third of its homes off fossil fuels, far more than most other Canadian communities. In BC only 10% of homes have heat pumps and natural gas homes have increased 4% since 2017. Time to learn from the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) First Nation.

The Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation heat pump project is especially important for elders, says Leona Humchitt, climate action co-ordinator (right), with her mother Gásá, or Esther Brown. Photo by Mercedes Innes

A remote coastal First Nation has weaned a third of its homes off fossil fuels, making climate gains communities in the rest of B.C. can only aspire to.

To further its clean energy transition, Heiltsuk Nation has lined up another $5 million in funding to provide an additional 250 homes in Bella Bella with energy-efficient heat pumps over the next year. Once they are in, 90 per cent of the community’s households will have dramatically reduced their carbon footprint. ...

The heat pumps, which run on hydroelectricity and filter out pollutants, are already driving down energy consumption, emissions and bills while improving the air quality and health in the community’s homes, Humchitt said. 

The heat pump project aims to provide the Haíɫzaqv with healthy homes and hearths and tackle energy poverty as part of the community’s new clean energy plan. 

The nation developed its blueprint for action — titled Protecting our World, or H̓íkila qṇts n̓ála’áx̌v — and the heat pump project is a core initiative. ...

The first 154 households have already had diesel furnaces or other inadequate heating systems replaced with central air-source heat pumps as a result of a partnership with Ecotrust Canada, which got underway in 2018, Humchitt said. 

“Some of our community members didn't even have any heat, so being able to address that gap, especially for our elders, is huge," says Leona Humchitt climate action co-ordinator with the Heiltsuk First Nation heat pump project. ...

The Heiltsuk are ahead of the curve in a province where only 10 per cent of B.C. homes rely on heat pumps — which are much more environmentally friendly than natural gas, other fossil fuels, and other electric heating systems. 

Despite the fact heat pumps heat and cool a home while generating the least emissions, the number of households heating with natural gas has gone up four per cent since 2017, according to a BC Hydro report. 

More than half the homes in the province rely on natural gas, and in single-family dwellings, that number rises to two-thirds.

But in Bella Bella, many homes rely on dirty diesel to heat their homes, which is shipped to the remote community and poses an additional environmental hazard should a spill occur.

Switching just one home from an oil furnace to a heat pump eliminates five tonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions annually. So overall, the new heat pumps in the community mean 770 tonnes of GHG are abated each year. And typically, heat and electricity bills in Bella Bella homes — which often house multigenerational families — are high, averaging $3,600 annually. But by switching to heat pumps, average household energy spending dropped by $1,500 per year. ...

An early analysis of the community’s energy use showed Bella Bella homes are consuming double the provincial average, Humchitt said, largely because many residences built and neglected under colonial policy are energy inefficient, overcrowded and inadequate for the climate. An important step to compound gains from the heat pump project will be to continue to do energy audits of individual homes to determine what kind of retrofits, shallow or deep, they need, she said. ...

The Haíɫzaqv climate action team and tribal housing department will continue to work with Ecotrust — a charity that partners with rural, remote Indigenous communities to tackle energy poverty — on the community’s retrofit plans and train local energy advisers, she said. 

The success of the heat pump project in Bella Bella mirrors that of a Skidegate Band Council initiative in 2016 that saw nearly all the Haida Gwaii community’s 350 homes outfitted with the energy-efficient system, said Graham Anderson, director of Ecotrust’s Community Energy Initiative.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/04/08/news/heiltsuk-nations-clean-...

The following article examines the top ten factors increasing and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions in Canada since 1990, with five of them increasing and five decreasing them. Sadly the top four all increased emissions, leading to an enormous increase in emissions overall. 

Failure to cut our oversized emissions has left us far behind our peers in the Group of Seven (G7) nations. As of 2019, the most recent data available, Canada was the only one still emitting far above their 1990 level.

Equally worrisome, over the last decade — as the climate emergency started hitting with increasing fury, and we pledged to act faster under the Paris Agreement — Canada was the only one in the group whose emissions went up. That's shown by the solid lines on this chart.

So, with an eye to avoiding the same mistakes yet again, I dug into Canada's historical record to find the specific areas where our emissions changed the most since 1990 — either up or down.

What I found is that out of the dozens of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) subcategories, just 10 account for the lion's share of Canada's emissions increases and decreases. And several were surprises to me.

#1 — Dirtier barrels and lots more of them (up 74 MtCO2 since 1990). Fossil crude extraction has nearly tripled in Canada since 1990. Adding climate insult to injury, emissions per barrel also went up. As a result, the oil and gas industry now pipelines a billion barrels more every year into our atmosphere — while emitting an extra 10 per cent with each barrel.

#2 — Overharvesting Canada's forests (up 67 MtCO2). In another major climate loss, logging has remained high despite a steady decline in net growth from Canada's managed forests. This growing imbalance between harvesting and re-growth has tipped Canada's land use sector from a big CO2 sink into a CO2 source. (Note: This doesn't include the even larger rise in emissions from climate-fuelled wildfires, droughts, and insects. See endnotes.)

#3 — Freight trucks (up 38 MtCO2). Trucking emissions have nearly tripled in Canada since 1990. A major cause has been a shift to more CO2-intensive "just in time" supply chains, "next day" delivery, and the expanding use of trucks as rolling warehouses.

#4 — Dirtier passenger vehicles and lots more of them (up 33 MtCO2). Canada's relatively weak climate policies in the transportation sector have allowed the number of gas-guzzling pickup trucks, minivans, and SUVs — a.k.a. "light-duty trucks" — to quadruple since 1990. Canadians used to drive mostly the cleaner sedan-style cars. Now we mostly drive these big climate hammers. Environment Canada says our light-duty truck fleet emits 31 per cent more CO2 every kilometre than our sedan-style cars do.

#5 — Cleaner electricity and more of it (down 26 MtCO2). Rounding out our five biggest emissions changes is the only one heading in a climate-safe direction: electricity generation. This has been Canada's only big climate success so far. Strong climate policies pushed total electricity emissions down significantly, even as the amount of electricity generated rose by a third. Canada now has some of the world's climate-safest electricity. One of the major climate tasks facing Canadians and the rest of humanity is to "electrify everything" as fast as possible. Most Canadians can now power rapid and deep emissions cuts by shifting their fossil burning to locally made electricity.

The remainder of Canada's Top 10 are relatively smaller, but they add up. And as a welcome climate relief, most of these are emission reductions.

#6 — Cleaner off-road recreational vehicles and fewer of them (down 12 MtCO2). I was surprised that Canada's second-largest emissions reduction is from an area I knew nothing about: "Off-Road Other." I asked Environment Canada about it, and they said the big emissions cuts here are mostly from a reduction in the number of off-road recreational vehicles — along with a shift from 2-stroke engines to cleaner 4-strokes. This is an example of how cleaning up toxic air pollution reaped climate benefits along the way.

#7 — Ozone hole versus climate change (up 11 MtCO2). Ozone-destroying chemicals, called CFCs, were used in refrigerators, air conditioners and heat pumps. These have been replaced with ozone-safe alternatives known as HFCs. But the most common and least expensive HFCs are more powerful greenhouse gases. A global Kigali Agreement signed in 2019 aims to replace these with climate-safer alternatives.

#8 — Factory closed (down 10 MtCO2). Canada's third-biggest emissions reduction was caused by the closure of the nation's only adipic acid factory. Yeah, I had to look that up too. Adipic acid is a chemical used mostly to make nylon. Producing it emits N2O, which is a greenhouse gas.

#9 — Cleaner metal production and less of it (down 10 MtCO2). Emissions cuts here came from a combination of cleaner processes and reduced production in Canada.

#10 — Cleaner small cars (down 9 MtCO2). As mentioned above, the IPCC has two categories for passenger vehicles. SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks discussed above are listed under "light-duty trucks." The smaller sedan-style cars discussed here get listed under "light-duty vehicles." In Canada, the number of sedan-style cars has increased since 1990. And so has the number of kilometres they are driven. But their total climate pollution has fallen. That's because this class of passenger vehicle has been getting cleaner per kilometre faster than kilometres driven have gone up. Unfortunately, this small climate step forward with cars got wiped out three times over by the switch to much more CO2-intensive alternatives of SUVs and pickup trucks.  ...

For every tonne of emissions reduced in one area, three more tonnes were added to another area. Another troubling pattern seen in this Top 10 tour has been the shift by industries and individuals to more CO2-intensive alternatives. For example, the oil and gas sector has been allowed to shift to ever more CO2-intensive extraction methods — from conventional to bitumen mining and then to steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). Likewise, the freight sector has been allowed to shift to more CO2-intensive delivery models like "just in time" and "next day" delivery. And Canadians have been allowed to shift from the cleaner cars they used to drive to more CO2-intensive SUVs and pickup trucks.

With such huge climate policy loopholes, it's no wonder Canada's emissions keep going up.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/04/05/analysis/canadas-top-10-emis...

The developed nations are again asking the poorer nations to take on maintaining biodiversity, which is in part being reduced by climate change, to a much greater extent than they are without much in the way of economic assistance.

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For talks that are meant to be about halting the mass extinction of life on Earth, the slow pace of negotiations in Geneva ahead of Cop15, the major biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, later this year, was not a hopeful sign that meaningful action would follow. As discussions drew to a close this week, little progress was made on the targets and goals that are meant to herald nature’s “Paris moment”.

Rhetoric from rich developed nations about the need for ambition on halting biodiversity loss was not being followed through with resources, negotiators from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa complained.

Once again, much was being asked of the developing world without financial help to enact the change deemed necessary by nations that long ago cleared their forests, drained their wetlands and polluted their rivers to industrialise.

Governments have never met their own targets on halting the destruction of ecosystems despite bleak scientific warnings about species extinctions and the consequences for humans. But many world leaders suggested that this decade’s global biodiversity framework would be different, acknowledging scientists’ warning that humanity must solve the climate and nature crises together or solve neither. ...
But rich countries’ failure to provide at least $100bn a year of climate finance to the developing world at Cop26 in Glasgow has undermined trust and that is spilling over into the biodiversity process.

In the final plenary session in Geneva on Tuesday, Gabon – speaking on behalf of the Africa group, Brazil, India and other developing countries, also supported by China – called for developed countries to commit to providing $100bn (£76bn) a year of biodiversity finance from public and provide sources, which would rise to $700bn by 2030, closing the “nature funding gap”.

COP15 In Kunming
KUNMING, CHINA - OCTOBER 15: David Cooper (L), deputy executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Chinese Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu (C) and Elizabeth Maruma Mrema (R), executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, attend the High-Level Segment of the first part of 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) at Kunming Dianchi International Convention and Exhibition Center on October 15, 2021 in Kunming, Yunnan Province of China. (Photo by Cui Nan/China News Service via Getty Images)
COP15: is 2022 the year we save biodiversity?
Read more
Gabon’s representative said: “This must be new, additional and separate to the financing that has been committed under the UNFCCC and the Paris agreement. The current architecture for global biodiversity financing should be transformed.”

The 2010 Aichi targets, agreed in Japan in the wake of the global financial crisis, failed partly because of a lack of resources for the agreement, say experts. This time, Covid-19, rising inflation and the war in Ukraine are all significant impediments to more money for nature, even if more than half of global GDP relies on high-functioning biodiversity.

One African negotiator said: “To get out of this standoff between developing and developed countries, we need something transformative but it’s not going to be like the climate.
“Developing countries will just not compromise their sovereignty over their trees, soils, people and right to develop to the same extent that they would be willing to do for climate change,” they said.

In another case of catastrophic flooding, but much worse than last fall's climate change induced atmospheric river flooding BC, in part because it occurred in a developing country, the President of South Africa is linking the Durban floods that have already killed more than 300 people to climate change in the heaviest downpour in almost 60 years. 

Videos of the flooding can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXZoeaHyeIU

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Shipping containers carried away and left in a jumbled pile by floods in Isipingo, south of Durban, South Africa on Tuesday.

AP

South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa has said disastrous flooding in the Durban area is linked to the climate emergency, as the death toll climbs to more than 300 people. 

“This disaster is part of climate change,” he said, as he visited communities affected by the flooding on Wednesday, according to Associated Press. “It is telling us that climate change is serious, it is here.” 

“We no longer can postpone what we need to do, and the measures we need to take to deal with climate change,” he added.

Heavy rainfall in the coastal province of KwaZulu-Natal in recent days has killed at least 306 people, the provincial government said Thursday. 

Photos from the area show roads, bridges, and shipping containers at Durban’s port swept away by the deluge and low lying parts of the city underwater.Access to essential services such as water and sanitation had also been affected, a government official said.

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/south-africa-floods-du...

Quebec, just one week after the Trudeau Liberals approved the development of the Bay du Nord oil project off Newfoundland, approved the first law in the world banning oil and gas development because of pressure from the public. Hopefully, other provinces and countries will pass similar legislation soon due to similar public pressure.

Citizens protest in Gaspé, Que.. in 2021 during Utica Resources' court case against the Québec government for the right to drill. Photo courtesy of Pascal Bergeron

Quebec became the first jurisdiction in the world Tuesday to explicitly ban oil and gas development in its territory after decades of campaigning by environmental organizations and citizen groups.

“Citizens rallied, citizens regrouped and actually won this fight because it was in their backyards … it would have had major impacts on their way of living on the territory,” Émile Boisseau-Bouvier, Équiterre’s climate policy analyst, told Canada’s National Observer.

The newly adopted law will end petroleum exploration and production as well as the public financing of those activities in Quebec. It passed only one week after the federal government approved a new oil project off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador despite a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that found there is no place for new fossil fuel infrastructure in a climate-safe future.

For a jurisdiction within Canada — which is among the top five oil producers worldwide — to forgo the industry as part of its current and future economy immediately after the federal government indicated it will continue to pursue fossil fuel expansion “sends a really powerful signal,” said Caroline Brouillette, national policy manager for Climate Action Network Canada.

Last year, Quebec joined the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, a group of countries, provinces and states committed to ending new fossil fuel exploration. Membership also means jurisdictions must take action to phase out oil and gas by taking steps like ending fossil fuel subsidies. It is the first member of the alliance to pass legislation ending oil and gas exploration and production. 

For two decades, citizens have mobilized against different oil and gas projects in Quebec, including shale gas in the St. Lawrence Valley and oil projects in Gaspésie. Without citizens’ long-standing resistance to these projects and more, it would not have been possible to adopt this bill, said Boisseau-Bouvier. ...

Although Quebec’s economy is not held captive by the oil and gas industry like Alberta’s, for example, it still wasn’t easy to secure this victory, Pascal Bergeron, a citizen organizer and spokesperson for Environnement Vert Plus, said. ...

“There needed to be political pressure from an activist movement that made the government fear that they would lose something if they approved the next drilling,” he said. “We wanted to avoid this crash that always happens when an extractive industry ends … that's very important for people to understand that always going forward with this oil and gas exploitation, they're gonna hit the wall. At some point, it's going to be impossible to go further, so (we) might as well look that in the eye and act now.”

Bloc Québécois’ environment critic Monique Pauzé told Canada’s National Observershe applauds the province’s climate leadership.“The federal government should follow this path, which is central to reducing national GHG emissions,” Pauzé’s statement reads. “Recent choices made by the federal government are definitely not setting the pace for progress. ...

Carole Dupuis, another longtime citizen activist and spokesperson for Mouvement écocitoyen UNEplanète, told Canada’s National Observer receiving news the bill passed was “an amazing moment.” To her, the adoption of Bill 21 shows “we can change things if we work hard enough.” Dupuis’ activism began in 2014 when she moved to the countryside near the St. Lawrence River, looking forward to retiring in a tiny beautiful village called Saint-Antoine-de-Tilly. But upon arriving, Dupuis realized a pipeline was going to be built just across the river and people were largely unaware, so she and her sister created a citizens group in the village to highlight the issue. She has since worked at the provincial level and with multiple organizations. ...

The new legislation is a major win with one drawback, environmentalists say. The province is providing permit-holding oil and gas companies with a total of $100 million, one-third of which will largely cover the cost of closing and restoring wells and the rest of which aims to cover expenses the companies have incurred since 2015. Although this violates the polluter pays principle, the companies requested $500 million to cover these costs. Despite this downfall of the legislation, Boisseau-Bouvier says it is still a major win. ...

There is rhetoric that Quebec’s decision to ban oil and gas exploration and production is insignificant because the province isn’t an oil and gas powerhouse like Alberta or Newfoundland and Labrador, Brouillette said. But while provincial and territorial economies are very different, it isn’t fair to say the opportunity cost of Quebec’s decision is zero, she added. “It makes sense for first-movers to be jurisdictions where the opportunity cost of such a decision is the lowest,” said Brouillette. “Some people are under the impression Quebec has absolutely no oil and gas resources it is renouncing … that's not the case at all.” ...

In early February, Le Devoir reported the president of the Quebec Energy Association, Éric Tetrault, said shale gas from the St. Lawrence Valley could represent “lost profits” of $3 billion to $5 billion. Then, on April 12, Tetrault told Le Devoir the oil reserves in the Quebec subsoil were in a financial range of $45 billion to $200 billion. “In Quebec, the reason there's not a lot of fossil extraction activity is because of political decisions that were made because of citizen mobilization,” said Brouillette.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/04/14/news/citizens-officially-win...

Last year an explosion from a 100+ year old oil well destroyed a small Ontario community near Windsor called Wheatley's post office and grocery store, injured 20 people and closed dozens of businesses. "To this day 70 families are unable to return to their homes. (https://mailchi.mp/nationalobserver.com/tread-carefully?e=608d2c52ee)

A lot of people think of Alberta, Saskatchewan, BC, or Newfoundland when they talk about Canada's fossil fuel industry, but the first commercial oil well in North America was in Ontario in 1858 and Ontario's fossil fuel 27,000 wells of the past is still causing problems. And we are still letting our fossil fuel industry get away with not cleaning up their toxic mess. "A leaked internal document from the Alberta Energy Regulator estimated that the total clean up cost of the entire oil sands could reach $260 billion (with a b!), half of which would be to clean up tailings alone. To put it in context, $260 billion is 16 per cent of Canada’s entire GDP for 2020!" (https://environmentaldefence.ca/2022/01/28/a-cautionary-tale-on-tailings...) Even the hard-core Republican North Dakota government insists on fossil fuel companies pay in advance for the cleanup of their wells (https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/north-dakotas-last-orphan-h...) Meanwhile Trudeau is offering fossil fuel companies more billions to cleanup our oil and gas wells in the latest budget in a country that already led the G20 in fossil fuel subsidies per capita, while lagging in renewables (https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/oil-change-subsidies-1.6228679)

And were still paying for and suffering from Ontario oil and gas wells from well over one hundred years ago and will likely be doing the same for current oil wells far into the future. 

An explosion in downtown Wheatley brings a building down to rubble and severely damages surrounding structures. (Photo credit: Kathryn Parent, Photography by Phos³ via Twitter)

But decades before Western Canada first struck oil, the rush to cash in on black gold began in the east. North America’s first commercial oil well went into operation in 1858 — in Ontario. By the time Alberta caught up, the eastern province had moved on. Nowadays, its oil industry is all but forgotten.

More than a century later, Ontario’s oil legacy still exists, threatening to bubble up to the surface. Across the province, thousands of abandoned wells pose a serious danger to the communities they occupy — and unlike Alberta, where many oil producers are still in business, cleaning up Ontario’s long-forgotten wells is a tricky business no one’s really sure how to tackle.

There are roughly 27,000 oil wells scattered throughout Ontario. Most are inactive — relics of Ontario’s 19th-century oil boom — but more than 4,400 of those wells “pose a risk to landowners and public health and safety,” according to the Ontario Petroleum Institute. That number’s just shy of the 4,700 orphan wells that exist in Alberta.

After the oil rush wound down in the early 1900s, Ontario’s wells fell out of use. Some of them were sealed, some were left alone. But while they’ve largely been forgotten, ignoring these ticking time bombs has real consequences: an open or improperly sealed well can leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas that can explode when it interacts with oxygen or turn into hydrogen sulphide, a toxic gas that smells like rotten eggs and can be fatal in high doses, when it meets certain bacteria. 

While the province has maps to identify the location of these wells, “it's not clear which are deemed highest risk, and it's thought that there could be thousands more that no one knows about,” Jessica explains. A massive explosion last summer levelled Wheatley, a small town on the shores of Lake Erie an hour east of Windsor, Jessica adds, and the blast was “almost certainly from an old well” no one knew about, revealing “the knowledge gap when it comes to these boreholes.”

The explosion wiped out Wheatley’s local post office and grocery store, injured 20 people and shuttered dozens of businesses. To this day, nearly 70 families are unable to return to their homes.

Cleaning up these abandoned wells is a hairy, complicated and expensive problem no one really wants to take on. A report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer earlier this year — one that didn’t mention Ontario once — puts the cost of orphan well cleanup in Canada at more than $1 billion by 2025. 

In Ontario, there’s a lot of finger-pointing over who’s going to foot that bill: the province says these wells are the responsibility of the companies that dug them, an approach in line with the polluter pays principle — you make the mess, you clean it up. But most businesses cashing in on the 1800s oil boom are no longer around, meaning the responsibility has been passed on to landowners. Ontario can help out with some of the costs, but the annual budget for its Abandoned Works Program tops out at $3 million when the price tag for cleanup can range from $60,000 to more than $1 million for just a single well. In nearly two decades, Ontario has only managed to clean up 380 wells.

“The funding is a Band-Aid on a bullet hole when looking at the entire inventory of abandoned wells,” Jessica says. She points out that if you do the math on cleaning up just Ontario’s riskiest sites — at least $60,000 apiece for 4,400 abandoned wells — it works out to $264 million. ...

Ottawa has yet to respond, but in the meantime, Ontario landowners are wrestling with the need for cleanup on their properties. Some don’t even know about abandoned wells on their land, and there’s no guarantee landowners can afford to plug them even if they do.

https://mailchi.mp/nationalobserver.com/tread-carefully?e=608d2c52ee

In 1989, countries worked together to stop the ozone hole from growing larger by phasing out certain chemicals. Worried that they were next, the fossil fuel companies started their disinformation and lies campaign to prevent the same thing happening to them. The world is still paying for this with the enormous and exponential growth of damage done by global warming. Aiding and abetting the fossil fuel industry, has been the work of the vast majority of economists, often paid by the fossil fuel industry, who warn of the costs of switching away from fossil fuels without taking into account the much larger costs of climate change. Even in this month's IPCC report warning that we are three years away from being unable to prevent a 1.5 degree rise in global temperatures with all the disastrous effects that that entails, the report's analysis is still saying, on the other hand, what about the hypothetical economic costs in 2050. These economic models are based on assumptions that leave out or minimize the impacts of global warming even today. 

In the past, the price of failing to address climate change seemed theoretical, decades down the line. Today, we’ve already begun paying for it. Photo by Ken Cedeno-Pool / Getty Images

It was a pivotal moment: Seven months before, during an unusually hot summer, James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had warned Congress that the signs of global warming were already upon us, making the issue front-page news across the country. By the end of the year, politicians had introduced 32 climate bills in Congress, and the United Nations had established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists and policymakers intended to put global climate policy in motion.

In light of these developments, LeVine advised Exxon to temper the public’s growing concern for the planet with “rational responses” — not only arguing that the science wasn’t settled, but also emphasizing the “costs and political realities” of addressing rising emissions. In other words, the main problem wasn’t fossil fuel emissions, but that doing anything about them would cost too much. 

This sentiment was echoed by John Sununu, then-President George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, who worked to stop the creation of a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions soon after Hansen’s testimony. Sununu started a feud with the EPA administrator at the time, William K. Reilly, because he thought legislation to take on global warming would hinder economic growth. ...

Today, the country faces a similarly pivotal moment. When President Joe Biden took office a year ago, promising to “listen to the science” and “tackle the climate crisis,” the stars seemed aligned, with a political party in favor of climate action newly in charge of both houses of Congress. But Democrats’ narrow majority has made intra-party negotiations delicate, with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia the fickle, final, coal-friendly vote. ...

Manchin’s complaints have centered on the sticker price. In September 2021, when Congress began considering Build Back Better, Biden’s package of social and climate policy programs, Manchin wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Why I Won’t Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion.” ...

Manchin is hardly alone in framing things this way. Economics has become the de facto language politicians use to debate public policy and how they evaluate solutions to alleviate planetary problems. Its persuasive power and rhetoric have been harnessed by the fossil fuel industry and its allies, who have argued for decades that climate action is a killer of economic growth, even as it has become increasingly evident that inaction is a wicked killer itself. A narrow focus on short-term costs and benefits has led to a failure of imagination, experts say: Amid an abstract debate of how to make any action on climate change economically efficient, the bigger picture of what really matters — who suffers, who benefits, whether the planet burns to a crisp — often gets lost. ...

The general public has a “highly skewed” economic understanding of climate change, said Benjamin Franta, a historian who studies climate disinformation at Stanford. He said there’s “a tendency to focus on the cost of action and not the cost of inaction.” He blamed this, in part, on a coordinated industry effort to emphasize the price tag of climate policies, with no mention of who they help (thousands of lives saved) or even how they could save the government money in the long run. 

Not long after LeVine advised Exxon to highlight the economic costs of climate policies, the fossil fuel industry began paying economists to produce research that made legislation look prohibitively expensive. When people talk today about climate change costing too much, “the industry’s fingerprints are on that message,” Franta said....

The field of economics started dominating discussions around government spending decades before that infamous Exxon meeting in 1989, and it’s often taken for granted that money is a light to guide legislation. For many politicians, the first step is recognizing that there’s a problem; and the second step, unless it’s seen as an existential threat like a world war, is figuring out if it’s cost-effective to fix it. This way of thinking even shapes the words they use to talk about nature: Forests are “natural resources,” fish are “stocks.” 

“Economics is the mother tongue of public policy, the language of public life, and the mindset that shapes society,” wrote Kate Raworth, a self-described “renegade” economist at Oxford, in Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. ...

In 1965, inspired by how economists were managing the Pentagon’s budget with cost-focused analysis, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided to expand the approach to other agencies. By the late 1970s, economic thinking had pervaded government policy, guiding legislation around poverty, health care, and the environment. In 1975, the Congressional Budget Office was formed to provide nonpartisan budget analysis for lawmakers, “formalizing that this is the way we should think about legislation,” Berman said. ...

'The rising influence of money-driven decision-making had the effect of narrowing debates over public policies, dialing down ambitions to address environmental crises, compounded by a shift in focus among many mainstream economists to the risks of rising government debt and inflation. Consider the foundational pieces of environmental legislation in the United States, the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act of the early 1970s. They put in place strict standards for controlling pollution, regardless of economic consequences. But by 1990, environmental policy had moved away from this moral framework that stigmatized polluters, according to Berman.  ... By the time that Hansen testified before Congress in 1988, some people already viewed legislation to address the problem of the “greenhouse effect” as a threat to economic growth. Bush’s chief of staff, Sununu, worked to block climate initiatives at every turn. He saw efforts to restrict emissions as part of a larger, conspiratorial plot by environmentalists — some of whom worried that the combination of economic and population growth would lead to societal collapse. ...

The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s largest lobbying group, took a similar tack and began commissioning studies to put numbers behind the idea that climate policies would hurt the economy. In 1991, David Montgomery, an economist at the consulting firm Charles River Associates, calculated that a carbon tax — a fee imposed on fossil fuels — of $200 a ton would shrink the country’s economy by 1.7 percent by 2020, a finding that appeared in the Associated Press, CNN’s Moneyline, and the New York Times. ...

The 30-year-old strategy is still going strong. When former President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement in 2017, he repeatedly cited industry-funded estimates of its cost, dropping peculiarly specific numbers: “2.7 million lost jobs by 2025,” “$3 trillion in lost GDP,” “households would have $7,000 less income.” These statistics, Stanford’s Franta said, were from some of the same industry-funded economists that had been quoted in newspapers in the 1990s. ...

“We see a rinse-and-repeat pattern with climate legislation,” Franta said. “It’s often the same players, it’s often the same talking points. You know, ‘This is too expensive. It’s not going to work.’” Whenever the federal government was considering taking action — from when the Clinton administration proposed a carbon price in 1993 to when Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman introduced a bipartisan national cap-and-trade program in Congress in 2003 — the industry trotted out economists’ models that conveniently ignored the economic upsides of the policy.

One of the economists who used to analyze climate policies at Charles River Associates, Paul Bernstein, now advocates for passing a price on carbon emissions and volunteers with the Hawaii Chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. He regrets that his models only looked at the costs, not the benefits. ...

This kind of thinking lingers, even in international reports that warn about the dangers of inaction. A report out this week from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, calculated the costs of addressing rising temperatures separately from its benefits. In the report’s summary for policymakers, the panel noted that policies to cut global emissions in half by 2030 could hinder global economic growth “a few percent” by 2050 — if you ignore all the real-world costs that come with a hotter planet as well as the benefits of cutting emissions (less air pollution, healthier and more productive people). Why consider this hypothetical, unrealistic scenario at all? In a study from the journal Nature in November, researchers from Europe and Canada argued that these “overly pessimistic” calculations provide “a skewed image to policy-makers,” drawing their attention to the cost of taking action.

Such economic models render key aspects of this planetary problem invisible, from soaring temperatures and oppressive heat waves to the slow unraveling of Earth’s life-supporting ice, ocean, and land systems. As John Sterman, an expert on complex systems at MIT, once observed, “The most important assumptions of a model are not in the equations, but what’s not in them; not in the documentation, but unstated; not in the variables on the computer screen, but in the blank spaces around them.”

https://grist.org/economics/climate-legislation-costs-economics-oil-indu...

And both the Alberta tar sands and Sarnia Ontario have their own cancer alley associated with the fossil fuel industry with workers and indigenous people living nearby suffering high rates of cancer. The article below is nine years old but the disease conditions related to fossil fuels in Alberta and Ontario still remain today. Furthermore, there is very little evidence, as noted in the last post from a study this year, that carbon capture and storage works, despite Justin being willing to pour billions in taxpayers' dollar in subsidies into it as an excuse for not only maintaining but increasing fossil fuel production, as has continued throughout his term in office, just like Harper, Martin, Chretien, Mulroney and Pierre before him. 

Alberta’s Upgrader Alley has been known to some locals as ‘Cancer Alley’ for years. Photo credit: Isobel Simpson/University of California-Irvine.

Ten known or probable carcinogens now saturate the air downwind of Alberta’s Upgrader Alley, the nation’s largest bitumen and hydrocarbon processing centre, while male blood cancers and leukemia in the region are the highest in the province. 

That’s the conclusion of the Rowland-Blake Group, a University of California-Irvine laboratory that took a snapshot of air quality in Fort Saskatchewan just 30 kilometres northeast of Edmonton for two days in 2008, 2010 and 2012. 

Alberta’s Industrial Heartland, located in a farming community, is comprised of 40 different chemical, petrochemical and bitumen processing operations spread out over a 582 km area near Fort Saskatchewan.

In addition to upgrading bitumen, a heavy sour crude, heartland industries make fertilizer, separate condensate for pipeline shipments to dilute bitumen, and break-up hydrocarbons for the manufacture of plastics, foams and fibres.

Nearby residents and farmers have complained about bad air, hydrogen sulfide pollution, massive flaring and poor regulation in what they also call “Cancer Alley” for years. 

Air quality in the region was rated the worst or among the worst of 11 provincial monitoring stations in 2004, 2005 and 2006, according to the Pembina Institute. ...

The study added that “some of the largest VOC excesses were measured in samples designated as ‘no smell,’ showing that absence of odor is not necessarily an indicator of good air quality. The industrial plumes showed distinct chemical signatures that varied not only between facilities but also within individual facilities.” ...

Alberta’s Upgrader Alley isn’t the only chemical complex handling heavy sour crude from the oil sands and experiencing major issues with air quality and public health. 

Chemical Valley in Sarnia, which also processes bitumen and other hydrocarbons, releases more toxic air pollutants than the province of Manitoba or New Brunswick. 

Members of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, who live in the middle of a chemical soup made by the likes of Imperial Oil and Shell, routinely blockade roads in the area to protest ongoing pollution as well as plans to expand bitumen upgrading and refining facilities. In 2011, the World Health Organization rated Sarnia as having among the worst air quality in Canada. ...

Recent research on the oil sands in Fort McMurray tells, as scientists put it, “a consistent story of increased contaminants and ecological change” since bitumen production began in the late 1960s. In particular lake and river pollution is increasing; fish deformities are rising; mercury levels are increasing in birds; arsenic levels are increasing in groundwater; and the caribou population is nearing extinction.  Elevated rates of blood, bile duct and lymphatic cancers have also been found 300 km downstream of the oil sands in the Dene, Metis and Cree community of Fort Chipewyan. Almost everyone working in the bitumen mining boomtown of Fort McMurray knows someone who has had a brush with cancer.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2013/10/24/Alberta-Bad-Air/

It looks like we are heading into another early start and long summer of wildfires in the American and Canadian west as global warming continues its march higher and higher. In the southwest of the US, there is already an very early start to the wildfire season. "Wind-driven springtime wildfires are tearing through parched evergreens and brush across Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, burning scores of homes and forcing thousands of people to flee during a fire season that is growing longer and more destructive as climate change dries out the West." (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/us/wildfire-arizona-flagstaff-tunnel....)

The cost in the United States of these wildfires "totals as much as $347 billion US annually". (https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/extreme-wildfires-unep-nature-1.6361093)

Last night on the CBC National, Canadian experts predicted the same for the Canadian West.

Two new studies published this month predict "a dire future of climate-fueled disasters for the American West ... [with] more fires followed by floods [that] also are predicted to cause more devastating mudslides". (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/04/02/climate-change-american-w...)

However, this is part of a global pattern of increased wildfire disasters.

A wind-driven wildfire burns at the edge of U.S. 89 on the outskirts of Flagstaff, Ariz., on Tuesday, April 19, 2022. An Arizona wildfire doubled in size overnight into Wednesday, a day after heavy winds kicked up a towering wall of flames outside a northern Arizona tourist and college town, ripping through two dozen structures and sending residents of more than 700 homes scrambling to flee. (Jake Bacon/Arizona Daily Sun via AP) (https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/nation-world/story/2022-04-20/...)

A warming planet and changes to land use patterns mean more wildfires will scorch large parts of the globe in coming decades, causing spikes in unhealthy smoke pollution and other problems that governments are ill prepared to confront, according to a UN report being released Wednesday.

The western U.S., northern Siberia, central India, and eastern Australia already are seeing more blazes, and the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires globally could increase more than 50 per cent by the turn of the century, according to the report from the UN Environment Program.

Areas once considered safe from major fires won't be immune, including the Arctic, which the report said was "very likely to experience a significant increase in burning."

Tropical forests in Indonesia and the southern Amazon of South America also are likely to see increased wildfires, the report concluded.

"Uncontrollable and devastating wildfires are becoming an expected part of the seasonal calendars in many parts of the world," said Andrew Sullivan, with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, one of the report's authors. ...

At the same time, the slow disappearance of cool, damp nights that once helped to temper fires also means they are getting harder to extinguish, according to a second study published last week in the journal Nature.

With nighttime temperatures rising faster than daytime ones over the last four decades, researchers found a 36 per cent increase in the number of after-dark hours that were warm and dry enough to sustain fire.

"This is a mechanism for fires to get much bigger and more extreme," said Jennifer Balch, lead author of the Nature study and director of the University of Colorado Boulder's Earth Lab. "Exhausted firefighters don't get relief," she said, which means they can't regroup and revise strategies to tackle a blaze.

The consequences of extreme fires are wide-ranging, from loss and damage to costly firefighting response. In the United States alone, the UNEP report said the economic burden of wildfire totals as much as $347 billion US annually.

 

A warming planet and changes to land use patterns mean more wildfires will scorch large parts of the globe in coming decades, causing spikes in unhealthy smoke pollution and other problems that governments are ill prepared to confront, according to a UN report being released Wednesday.

The western U.S., northern Siberia, central India, and eastern Australia already are seeing more blazes, and the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires globally could increase more than 50 per cent by the turn of the century, according to the report from the UN Environment Program.

Areas once considered safe from major fires won't be immune, including the Arctic, which the report said was "very likely to experience a significant increase in burning."

Tropical forests in Indonesia and the southern Amazon of South America also are likely to see increased wildfires, the report concluded.

"Uncontrollable and devastating wildfires are becoming an expected part of the seasonal calendars in many parts of the world," said Andrew Sullivan, with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, one of the report's authors.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/extreme-wildfires-unep-nature-1.6361093

A new study of fracked wells in Alberta concluded "Living within 10 kilometres of a fracked gas well during pregnancy or just before you get pregnant could cause adverse birth outcomes like babies born preterm or underweight". A BC study reached similar conclusions in 2020. Yet none of the Alberta, BC or federal governments have shown the least interest in doing anything about it. 

While 36 studies have been done in the US on the health impacts of fracking, these are the only two done in Canada so far. Why? "Environmental racism and isolation have allowed for these health impacts to be “out of sight, out of mind” because they often impact Indigenous and rural communities".

Living close to one fracking site might not be good for you, but living within 10 kilometres of dozens of sites creates a clear impact on babies, who could be born underweight or preterm, says Amy Metcalfe, the study’s senior author.

The study, published recently in JAMA Pediatrics, followed 26,193 individuals in rural Alberta from Jan. 1, 2013 to Dec. 31, 2018. It tracked 34,873 pregnancies, looking at how close expectant parents lived to fracking wells and if there were any complications. 

The research suggests that the more fracking wells within 10 kilometres, the higher your risk of adverse birth outcomes, said Amy Metcalfe, the report’s senior author. Metcalfe is an associate professor with the department of obstetrics and gynecology, medicine and community health sciences at the University of Calgary. 

“The key takeaway is really about living near high-density fracking operations,” she said. Living near one well created “relatively small” risks, while living near 100 creates a “clear dose response” — in other words, a clear impact. ...

This is the second Canadian study ever done (the first was in B.C. in 2020) that looks at fracking and childbirth, and Metcalfe said it’s important for more research to be done to better understand what’s going on and to make sure parents don’t blame themselves for adverse birth outcomes, which have many causes. ...

While it’s only the second Canadian study in this area, it’s part of a growing body of research that suggests fracking impacts human health, either because of groundwater pollution or air pollution, said Dr. Margaret McGregor, a clinical associate professor at the department of family practice at the University of British Columbia. McGregor is also a member of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, an organization that advocates for environmental action to mitigate the health effects of climate change.

Fracking blasts large volumes of pressurized water, sand and chemicals deep into concrete-like shale formations one to two kilometres in the Earth. That force shatters rock underground with a network of fractures so that methane, oil or natural gas liquids can be released. There are thousands of fracked wells across northeastern B.C. ...

In a paper that McGregor recently submitted for publication, she reviewed 38 North American studies where the “majority found adverse associations with exposure to fracking.” One study even found being around oil and gas developments meant you were more likely to die.

She says people’s health could be impacted by the “slurry of chemicals” used in fracking to extract gas from underground. 

One U.S. study found that a quarter of the chemicals used in fracking can cause cancer and three-quarters of the chemicals used negatively affected the skin, eyes, other sensory organs and respiratory and gastrointestinal systems. 

Canadian companies do not have to disclose all of the chemicals they use in fracking because the exact cocktail is considered proprietary. 

One major difference between Canadian and American fracking sites is that in the U.S. you own any oil and gas deposits found underneath your property. In Canada these deposits usually belong to the Crown. That means a rural community doesn’t have the same say in what wells get built and where, and a community likely won’t get any richer if a new well is drilled because any royalty revenue goes to the government. 

So why haven’t more studies been done in Canada? McGregor says environmental racism and isolation have allowed for these health impacts to be “out of sight, out of mind” because they often impact Indigenous and rural communities. 

https://thetyee.ca/News/2022/04/20/Living-Near-Fracked-Wells-Increases-A...

Thousands marched today on Earth Day for an Earth that is not so happy. 

People mark Earth Day with a march, Friday, April 22, 2022 in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz (https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/hundreds-march-to-reduce-fossil-fuel-relianc...)

A demonstrator holds a banner as Climate activists protest in front of the German Embassy in Brussels" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/2022-04-22T114422Z_..." style="background-color:rgb(224, 224, 224); box-sizing:border-box; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); display:block; font-family:roboto,helvetica neue,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:16px; height:513.328125px; left:0px; object-fit:cover; position:absolute; scroll-margin-top:155px; top:0px; width:770px" />https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/22/on-earth-day-climate-activists-...

https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/2022/04/22/earth-day-around-the-wo...

If the new University of Waterloo study warning that 16 Canadian cities are at severe risk from extreme heat that is discussed in the last post, seems extreme in a country as cold as Canada, you need to remember that a 2021 study found that the extreme weather associated with climate change is already responsible for five million deaths a year globally. The Canadian study authors that warned that 16 Canadian cities are at great risk from extreme heat due to climate change concluded that extreme heat will be the greatest killer associated with climate change in Canada. 

Death from heat stroke is rising along with many other forms of death due to climate change.

The extraordinarily hot and cold temperatures that are becoming more common as climate change accelerates are responsible for 5 million deaths globally every year.

Extreme weather accounted for 9.4% of all deaths globally between 2000 and 2019, according to researchers who on Wednesday published the first study linking changes in temperatures to annual increases in mortality. While most deaths have been caused by exposure to the cold, the trend is likely to reverse as the planet warms, they said. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-07/climate-change-linked...

Nothing proves the power of global corporations on the world stage more than the Kafkaesque Steven Donziger case, where the power to destroy the world through producing more fossil fuels allows one to imprison someone who fought to bring them to justice for the destruction that they caused to the environment and health of Ecuadorians, and as a result of winning a $9.5 case is arbitrarily detained in the US for almost three years. The deafening silence of the US corporate media on this tells you all you need to know about their collusion with the fossil fuel sector for more than fifty years. The same can be said of the legal system. The judge assigned to the case had worked as a lawyer for the tobacco industry, whose cancer denial strategy was imitated successfully by the fossil fuel industry. Is it any wonder that democracy is on the brink of totally collapsing in the US?

Of course, much the same can be said for Canada's media and Trudeau's Liberal government in their fawning support of the fossil fuel industry.  

Steven Donziger with his clients in Ecuador. © Steven Donziger

In the United States today, it is easy to hear rhetoric about a handful of corporations controlling the nation — and for good reason, too. Corporatocracy is defined by Oxford Dictionaries as “a society or a system that is controlled by corporations.” In the US, ten corporations control almost all of the food brands, another 10  make up most of the clothing market, six control the media market, 10 control the pharmaceutical industry, and six control the petroleum industry. When so much power in our consumer economy becomes concentrated in the hands of so few, it leads to a situation where corporations can exert outsized power over our lives. 

Few examples of this are more stunning than the recent successful prosecution — or persecution, to some — of attorney Steven Donziger. Donziger, a human rights attorney from New York City, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991 and soon after took up a case that would consume the next thirty years of his life.

Back in the 1970s, Texaco and Petroecuador, two petroleum companies, drilled for oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. The two businesses destroyed the rainforest, leaving billions of gallons of oil waste in the Amazon, creating an area known as the “Amazon Chernobyl.” The indigenous peoples of this area have been, and continue to be, harmed by the effects of this waste. Tens of thousands of Ecuadorians were afflicted with cancer and other waste-induced diseases and deformities. 

In 1993, Donziger and other attorneys visited Ecuador. Shortly thereafter, they filed a class-action lawsuit against Texaco. They brought this lawsuit on behalf of more than 30,000 farmers and indigenous people from the affected area. By 2001, Chevron had bought Texaco and requested the case be moved from New York to Ecuador. This was part of a legal strategy by Chevron, who believed that Ecuadorian courts would deliver a more favorable ruling for the company. 

The case wound its way through the Ecuadorian court system, dragging out until 2011 when a provincial judge in Ecuador found Chevron guilty and awarded the plaintiffs a whopping $18 billion in damages. Ecuador’s highest court later affirmed this ruling, though they reduced the damages to $9.5 billion — still a great win.

Of course, Chevron wanted to play dirty. Namely, they moved all of their assets out of Ecuador to ensure that the judgment could not be enforced. Donziger and his fellow attorneys attempted to have the judgment enforced in nations where Chevron had assets, including Canada, Argentina, and Brazil. Despite the fact that the courts of these respective nations agreed with Donziger that Chevron had committed a grave injustice in the Amazon, it was not legally possible for these nations to enforce the judgment. 

Chevron then went on the offensive, and this is where they made their most significant mistake. Chevron filed a RICO lawsuit against Donziger, and only Donziger, in which they accused him of bribing an Ecuadorian judge and ghostwriting the judgment against Chevron. They demanded $60 billion in damages from Donziger. Curiously, though, just before the trial began, Chevron dropped its monetary demands, thereby allowing the judge in the case to dismiss the jury and make the ruling himself.

Chevron then benefited from the judge assigned to the case, Judge Lewis Kaplan of New York, a former lawyer who worked with Brown & Williamson Tobacco — the company known for Pall Mall, Lucky Strike, and Capri cigarettes. Kaplan’s past implicitly makes him a corporate-friendly judge, meaning Donziger clearly faced an uphill battle.

The case’s only witness was the judge that Donziger allegedly bribed. During the trial, Judge Alberto Guerra testified that he had received $250,000 from Donziger and that Donziger had ghost-written the judgment Guerra ultimately brought against Chevron. Crucially, Kaplan cited this testimony as the main evidence for Donziger’s guilt in the case.

This case should be a slam-dunk then, right? That has not been so, though, because of some crucial details. First, it’s rather suspicious that Chevron paid for immigration lawyers to help Guerra and his family emigrate from Ecuador and provided him with a monthly “salary” of $12,000 for “housing and living expenses.” Indeed, the most damning piece of evidence came out after the trial. Guerra admitted to having rehearsed his testimony with Chevron lawyers 53 times prior to the trial. Guerra testified to an international tribunal later that he had lied and changed his story multiple times during the trial. This means, contrary to Chevron’s claims, no bribe and no ghostwriting ever occurred.

Judge Kaplan refused to consider this new evidence that would clearly exonerate Donziger, and he ordered Donziger to pay Chevron $800,000 in damages. Donziger appealed, and as part of the process, Judge Kaplan ordered him to surrender his computer, phones, and electronics to Chevron to be searched for assets. Donziger refused, arguing that it would violate attorney-client privilege because of the sensitive information on his devices. Judge Kaplan then charged Donziger with criminal contempt for these actions. The Southern District Court of New York declined to prosecute, so Judge Kaplan took the “rare” step of appointing a private law firm — a firm which previously had represented Chevron — to prosecute Donziger. In doing so, this case became a private prosecution. 

Kaplan then hand-selected the judge who would preside over the contempt trial — a Chevron-linked judge named Loretta Preska. Donziger was deemed a flight risk, he was placed on house arrest for more than two years, and eventually he was found guilty of contempt and sentenced to the maximum sentence of six months in prison. 

Donziger is the subject of a corporate-sponsored persecution. Although he was released in December 2021 to serve the rest of his term in home confinement, he will remain deprived of his liberty until Monday, April 25, 2022. To add insult to injury, Chevron seized all of his assets and he finds himself in a financially precarious situation. The treatment Donziger continues to undergo is incredibly wrong; it is morally, legally, and ethically wrong. 

Unfortunately, not enough is being done to call out Chevron’s evils. Few mainstream outlets have reported on the case in its entirety, and the ones that have, have done a disservice to the case. For example, a New York Times article from November 2021 conveniently ignored the fact that Judge Guerra recanted his testimony.

Fortunately, Donziger has become something of a martyr among grassroots activists, a twist that Chevron likely did not anticipate. Now, the #FreeDonziger movement has a following with momentum. Amnesty International and the United Nations both urged the immediate release of Donziger. Mr. Donziger has nearly 200,000 followers on Twitter and he has publications like Jacobin and The Nation churning out articles about his case daily. All of this serves to keep the pressure on Chevron without allowing his case to fall out of the spotlight.

In the United States, it is abhorrent that such a blatantly corrupt series of events could unfold. Yet, it is an important reminder of how fragile our democracy is. As corporate power continues to strip away the last semblances of democracy and justice from our lives, the institutions that “guarantee” us our freedom, rights, and due process will no longer be reliable. If a corporation can successfully persecute Donziger, they can do it to anyone. The faint light of American democracy is waning as the power of the American corporatocracy burns brightly in its grotesque glory.

https://harvardpolitics.com/free-steven-donziger/

One area which has received relatively little time in the spotlight compared to the fossil fuel, but still has a major impact on greenhouse gas emissions is the impact of the meat industry on emissions. A new study concludes we need to reduce global meat consumption by 75% to save our ecosystems and reduce emissions. However, the socioeconomic consequences of such a shift need to be taken into account for social justice purposes. 

Factory farms contribute greatly to greenhouse gas emissions. 

If we want to save the world from climate change, we’re going to have to eat a lot less meat, experts say. In fact, according to a new report, while we don’t all need to become vegetarian, we do need to cut our global meat consumption by at least 75 per cent.

The demand for meat has been drastically increasing beyond the actual dietary needs of the human population for decades, researchers say, despite poor living conditions in factory farm settings and the meat industry’s huge impact on the environment. "If all humans consumed as much meat as Europeans or North Americans, we would certainly miss the international climate targets and many ecosystems would collapse," Prof. Dr. Matin Qaim of the University of Bonn, an author of the report, said in a press release. "We therefore need to significantly reduce our meat consumption, ideally to 20 kilograms or less annually. The war in Ukraine and the resulting shortages in international markets for cereal grains also underline that less grain should be fed to animals in order to support food security.”

This new study, published online in the journal Annual Review of Resource Economics on Monday, looks at the economics of the meat industry as well as the cost and benefits to our bodies, societies and changing climate, concluding that there should be a significant reduction in how much meat we consume as a planet.

Consumption levels of meat are highest per capita in rich countries in North America, Oceania and Europe, the study said, and income and demographic projections suggest that the demand for meat is going to continue to increase until 2050. Eating an excess of meat can be unhealthy and promote chronic diseases, the study pointed out, but despite this, consumption seems unlikely to slow down.

It’s already well established that the production of meat has a huge impact on climate change, with meat production connected to significantly higher emissions than the production of plant-based foods, and also linked to increased deforestation and loss of biodiversity, the study’s authors suggested.

Cows are the biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions of all livestock, producing more than ten times the amount of emissions per kg of product than the production of rice does, according to the study.

The study also pointed out that meat produced in “extensive grazing systems” have a much lower water footprint than meat produced in “intensive meat production systems,” or factory farming operations where large numbers of livestock are crowded into indoor facilities for the duration of their lives.

There are also many regions of the Earth where humans live that can’t grow plants with high-quality proteins and nutrients, or only grow them during a brief period of time that cannot totally sustain the population. These tend to be poorer regions.

"In such cases, animals are often a key element of a healthy diet," Parlasca said. “For many people, they are also an important source of income.”

Livestock is responsible for around 40 per cent of the total agricultural production value, the study stated, with around 1.3 billion people employed in these production chains.

Raising farm animals also can have a powerful role in society — in some regions, owning livestock is one of the ways that women or poor households can achieve their own economic independence or opportunities.

"If the revenue from milk, eggs and meat is lost, this can threaten their livelihoods," Parlasca said.

Efforts to reduce global meat consumption should take into account the socioeconomic benefits of raising livestock in low-income areas, researchers said, and instead target factory farming. The study points out that “industrial meat production systems have fewer positive effects on social equity in general,” clarifying that the big issue here is with large-scale meat production, not small farmers in poorer regions whose livestock are an integral part of their daily life, health and economic prospects.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/cut-meat-consumption-by-7...