Star found government failed to spend billions it had pledged

This article was written by Alex Ballingall and was published in the Toronto Star on June 16, 2023.

OTTAWA Opposition critics voiced disappointment and concern Thursday over the pace of federal climate action, after the Star revealed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals failed to spend billions of dollars they pledged on a host of climate-related initiatives in recent years.

Elizabeth May, the longtime Green MP and party co-leader, said she feels betrayed by the Trudeau Liberals, whom she believed would more aggressively confront the climate crisis after they took office in 2015. She argued the government has more eagerly financed the fossil fuel industry through projects like the $31-billion Trans Mountain oil pipeline, while underspending on programs designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the climate crisis.

“I’m one of those Canadians who believed Justin Trudeau and feels profoundly cheated. And we are running out of time. The whole country is on fire, facing floods, facing extreme weather events,” May said.

“The window is closing. What will future generations think of us?”

Speaking by phone from Toronto, New Democrat MP Charlie Angus noted how the government has

never — since it began making climate commitments through international negotiations in the 1990s — hit any target to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. He said Ottawa needs to move faster to ensure development projects for the emerging low-carbon economy support workers, after the NDP helped craft new “sustainable jobs” legislation under its parliamentary deal with the Liberals.

“They’ve got a bad record on making promises and not delivering,” Angus said. “There’s a great deal of concern and the sense that we have to make this happen.”

The criticism followed publication of an analysis in the Star that found almost $7.8 billion was either unspent or spent slower than what was pledged in various federal budgets on 10 major climate initiatives between the 2016-17 and 2021-22

fiscal years.

The government insists it can meaningfully contribute to the global effort to minimize the damage of climate change, while profiting from the economic shift away from fossil fuels causing it. The Liberals now boast of making $200 billion in long-term “commitments” since taking took power in 2015. It has also pledged to slash national emissions to at least 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, as leading scientists have warned unprecedented change is needed and time is running out to avoid the worst extremes of climate change.

On Thursday, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson admitted spending has been slow on some climate-related programs. He made the comments while hailing how the government was tabling a new bill that will provide a framework to publicly report on and craft policies to support good-paying jobs outside of the fossil fuel sector — legislation that was first promised almost four years ago.

Asked whether the government is acting with the urgency required to address the climate crisis and ensure clean economy jobs are created in Canada, Wilkinson said it is, and blamed various factors, including the previous Conservative government that left office almost eight years ago, for slow spending that occurred under the Liberal government.

“It has taken time to get programs ramped up. That is the nature of government. It’s also the nature of the fact that we had a government for 10 years previously that did nothing on climate change,” said Wilkinson, who also blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for slowing spending.

While stressing that the “pace of development just has to go faster,” Wilkinson also said upcoming spending through tax credits to spur construction of clean energy, hydrogen and electricity projects — part of a package the government expects to cost $80 billion by 2025 — will also flow quicker than some direct public financing of certain programs.

The government also came under fire after parliament’s budget watchdog reported the government’s arms-length export development agency has invested $15.4 billion in the oil and gas sector. The report prompted calls from opposition parties, echoing environmental organizations, for the federal government to broaden the scope of financial supports it is promising to scrap for the fossil fuel sector.

For Green MP Mike Morrice, the government’s underspending on climate initiatives marks a “sad contrast” with the continued public financing of the fossil fuel industry.

“The government isn’t spending what it’s committing to on good investments like the Low Carbon Economy Fund, and they’re overinvesting in the funds to subsidize the very industry most responsible for the crisis,” Morrice said. “It’s deeply disappointing.”

We are running out of time. The whole country is on fire, facing floods, facing extreme weather events. ELIZABETH MAY GREEN PARTY LEADER

This article was written by Linda McQuaig and was published in the Toronto Star on June 15, 2023.

LINDA MCQUAIG IS A TORONTOBASED FREELANCE CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST FOR THE STAR. FOLLOW HER ON TWITTER: @LINDAMCQUAIG

With outright climate denialism largely behind us, we keep moving on through more sophisticated stages of climate inaction.

Currently, even as large swaths of North America became engulfed in wildfire smoke last week, we seem lodged in a new stage of inaction based on the notion “we’re all to blame.”

Or, as Majid Al Suwaidi put it: “There’s no simple bad guy, good guy in this discussion.”

Framed this way — that it’s up to all of us to reduce emissions — climate action takes on the feel of a communal effort with us all rooting for the same team.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with communal effort. But this framing prevents us from seeing what’s really going on: yes, we all behave in ways that emit carbon (although some of us emit way more than others).

But — and this is the nub of it — we’re not all actively blocking climate action.

Rather, most of us are trying in small ways to reduce our carbon footprint. The problem is that there are immensely powerful forces out there using their clout to block the world from taking the urgent action needed to avert ever-worsening climate chaos.

So, sorry Mr. Al Suwaidi, but there is a bad guy in this discussion and that is Big Oil.

It’s not surprising that Al Suwaidi would avoid acknowledging this. After all, he’s an aide to Sultan Al Jaber, who heads up the national oil company of the United Arab Emirates, as well as heading up the UN climate negotiations to be held there next November. The fact that the sultan is heading up both is a perfect example of the sort of communal effort on climate change that feels good, but has gotten us nowhere.

To get somewhere, we have to start centre-staging the truly immoral role played by Big Oil. Otherwise, we end up duped into believing that what holds us back is the refusal of ordinary Canadians to give up their fossil-fuel-guzzling cars.

True, some Canadians would refuse and they would be goaded on by the oil lobby and the Freedom Convoy crowd. But the majority of Canadians are sufficiently freaked out by wildfires, heat domes and flooding to be ready to transition to clean energy (especially since it wouldn’t have to impact their lifestyles that much) — if only there was some serious government leadership.

But there isn’t. Justin Trudeau, knowing the public fears climate change, fashions himself a climate warrior.

But he largely succumbs to oil industry demands, revealing his warrior posture to be more fashion accessory than commitment.

It’s easy to see how this happens; Big Oil is relentless in its opposition to climate action.

A fascinating study by the corporate mapping project of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives documents that the oil industry lobbied government officials 11,452 times — with a heavy focus on lobbying senior officials responsible for climate policies — during a seven-year period spanning the governments of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.

Both governments appear to have responded to this constant pressure by giving Big Oil a say in our climate policies, leaving Canada with a terrible record on reducing emissions — far worse than many comparable nations.

As climate journalist Barry Saxifrage has documented, key nations — including Germany, France, the U.K., Sweden and Norway — have significantly reduced vehicle emissions, largely by raising taxes on gas-guzzlers and cutting taxes on battery-electric vehicles.

In case you’re tempted to excuse Canada’s dismal performance because we’re economically reliant on oil, Saxifrage notes that oil is also central to Norway’s economy, yet Norway has dramatically reduced emissions. (Last year, 78 per cent of new vehicles purchased in Norway were battery-electric, compared to just 6 per cent in Canada — and1per cent in Alberta.)

Canadians are just as reasonable as Norwegians. If only we had a government willing to stand up to the menace of Big Oil.

This editorial was written and published by the Toronto Star on June 14, 2023.

Canada is on fire.

The wildfires ravaging Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes, which recently transformed central and eastern Canada and the U.S. into hazy hellscapes, offered many of us, for the first time, an emotional appreciation of climate change. We could finally see it, feel it, even taste it.

That’s a marked departure from our previous understanding of climate change. Until now, global warming was, for us, an intellectual exercise — it was about science, about charts and graphs, about the voluminous evidence collected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Or it was about stories of waterlogged or water-deprived, farflung places. About Tuvalu, the tiny South Pacific Island nation trying to cope with rising sea waters. Or about desiccated, drought-stricken areas of Africa.

But the wildfires brought climate change home. Suddenly, it was our house that was on fire.

Of course we can’t attribute a single event, or even a single fire season, to climate change. Yet experts agree that climate change plays a role in increasing both the intensity of fires and the total area burned.

Wildfires, as University of Alberta wildland fire scientist Mike Flannigan explains, are influenced by three factors — weather/ climate, fuel, and ignition sources — and climate change affects all three.

As for climate, the federal government reports that Canada is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world, while the North is heating up at three times the rate. Among other things, this results in longer fire seasons, allowing more time for wildfires.

Indeed, according to the June 7 National Wildland Fire Situation Report, a total of 3.7 million hectares of land had burned, compared to a ten-year average of just 273,000 this early in the season. Factors other than climate change play a role, of course, but those stark statistics ought to give us pause.

Furthermore, Flannigan notes that climate change is creating slow, wavy jet stream patterns, which can create persistent warm and dry conditions. And those conditions are ideal for starting and spreading wildfires as they drain forests of moisture, thereby providing fuels for the fires.

Ignition sources are typically divided into two broad categories: lightning and human activity, and each is responsible for starting about half of fires. Yet this is something of a false distinction, since human activity can actually increase the risk of lightning-caused wildfires, with human-caused warmer weather incubating lightning-generating storms.

In fact, the frequency of lightning is predicted to increase and with it risk those strikes will spark forest fires.

And when it comes to lightning and wildfires, causation works both ways: Intense wildfires can produce their own weather systems, including the development of “pyrocumulonimbus” clouds, which further spread fires through lightning strikes.

A wildfire therefore has a strange way of taking on a life of its own, of keeping itself going — and growing — once someone provides the initial spark. Hence the best way to prevent fires from spiralling out if control is to avoid offering them a light in the first place.

If the science doesn’t convince us of that, then perhaps recent events will. Because an emotional appreciation of climate change could motivate us to act in a way that an intellectual understanding doesn’t.

After all, the South Pacific and Africa are no longer the only areas feeling the heat. We might not be drowned or desiccated like those far-flung places, but Canada is burning. And we’ll continue to suffer the deleterious effects of climate change until we feel strongly enough to stop it.

This opinion was written by Ross Belot and was published in Canada’s National Observer on June 12, 2023.

This opinion was written by Gillian Steward and was published in the Toronto Star on June 13, 2023.

GILLIAN STEWARD IS A CALGARYBASED WRITER AND FREELANCE CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST FOR THE STAR. FOLLOW HER ON TWITTER: @GILLIANSTEWARD

What will it take for conservative politicians and big oil bosses to actually acknowledge that the wildfires ravaging our forests are fanned by the carbon emissions that have torqued up the world’s climate?

Even as big cities choke on wildfire smoke — Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal, New York — it doesn’t seem to register. And neither do the raging fires themselves which this year have already burned off approximately 4.8 million hectares of Canadian forests. Some people have lost their homes, thousands have been evacuated. And fire season is far from over.

In his deeply researched and compelling book “Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast,” Vancouver based journalist and author John Vaillant makes it clear that these are no ordinary forest fires. They are hotter, faster and longer lasting. They start in the spring, even in normally cool northern parts of the country, because global warming has left forests tinder dry and ready to catch fire whether it be by lightning or a discarded cigarette.

Vaillant focuses on the monster fire that destroyed most of Fort McMurray — Alberta’s oil sands hub — in May 2016.

“Entire neighbourhoods burned to their foundations beneath a towering pyrocumulus cloud typically found over erupting volcanoes. So huge and energetic was this fire driven weather system that it generated hurricane force winds and lightning that ignited still more fires many miles away. Nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire,” Vaillant writes.

In Alberta this year, we’ve already lost almost 1.5 million hectares of forest, mostly in the central and northern parts of the province. That’s a record. As I write, Calgary is enveloped in the smell and haze of smoke.

And yet, just last week, as people in Eastern Canada and the U.S. were tasting and inhaling forest fire smoke from Quebec, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith put on her conspiracy hat and said most of the fires in Alberta were started by arsonists. She is bringing in investigators from outside the province to find the culprits.

She also dismissed the significance of the wildfires when she said, “Alberta has always had forest fires.” The phrases “climate change or “global warming” did not cross her lips as she underwent tough questioning on an Edmonton radio talk show.

It reminded me of the day former premier Jason Kenney was set to announce the repeal of Alberta’s carbon tax (approved by the former NDP government) at an Edmonton gas station. But the city was enveloped in so much forest fire smoke the event had to be called off.

Kenney didn’t mention global warming that day either. Maybe he couldn’t see the big picture because the smoke got in his eyes. More likely he refused to see the big picture.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of using the wildfires as a distraction from his other controversies. And yet, the Conservative party has yet to tell us how it would slow the carbon emissions that cause global warming.

The fossil fuel industry refuses to acknowledge the big picture as well. Even though Fort McMurray, the hub of Alberta’s mammoth oil sands operations, was consumed by a raging wildfire, it continues to downplay the effects of global warming caused by the burning of the oil it produces.

Our way of life is still too dependent on oil and natural gas for the petroleum industry to be ramped down overnight. But for these politicians and captains of the oil industry even the word “transition” has become toxic, never mind actually planning for it.

Already this year wild fires have destroyed more forests in Canada than ever before. But that doesn’t mean next year will be better. It likely won’t, nor the year after. If ever there was a time for all political parties and fossil fuel companies to work together to confront this threat to our forests and our overall well-being, this is it.

This editorial was written and published by the Globe & Mail on June 12, 2023.

There are lots of ways to clinically state the magnitude of wildfires: fire season starts earlier, lasts longer and the infernos are bigger; or that this isn’t an anomaly – the large, widespread wildfires this spring will happen more and more often; or that by the 2050s the amount of forests burned each year is predicted to double; or that ever-escalating climate heating is the propellent of all of this.

Or one can turn to three words from a veteran firefighter. Jamie Coutts is the retired fire chief in Slave Lake. His Northern Alberta community thought it was well prepared, but in 2011 Slave Lake was overrun by flames. Wildfires have morphed into a different sort of menace – burning, in Mr. Coutts’s words, “hotter, faster, crazier.”

Last week marked a broad realization across much of eastern North America of the whipsaws of climate heating. The orange pall of wildfire smoke smothered numerous cities – Ottawa, Toronto, New York among them. More than 100 million people were affected. Instead of enjoying pleasant spring days, we turn to the air quality health index, learn that seven means high risk, and are advised to mask up outdoors.

None of this is brand new. People in the West know it all too well. British Columbians brace themselves each summer. Toronto has at times seen summer days ruined by wildfire smoke. But the scale is something new. Canada is on track for its worst-ever fire year. As of last week, 3.8 million hectares had burned across the country. It’s a huge amount of land: five times larger than the sprawl of the Greater Toronto Area. And it’s way higher than the annual average of 2.9 million hectares burned in the 2010s, which was way higher than the 1.7 million hectares annually from 2000 to 2009. Escalation is obvious. The 1980s saw three years of two million-plus hectares burned; in the 1990s, three; in the 2000s, four; in the 2010s, seven; and twice so far in the 2020s.

It all circles back to the interconnected extremes of human-caused climate heating. Rare levels of heat this spring create conditions for wildfires to thrive. Decades of fire suppression and logging made forests more susceptible to fire. Pests that flourish in a warmer climate eat up trees and make them further susceptible to flames. Hurricane Fiona last September toppled trees in Nova Scotia that burned this spring.

How we got here is clear. A study of B.C.’s then-record 2017 fires drew a line between climate heating and the charred forests. A study last month connected fossil fuel and cement production with more than one-third of the forests torched in western North America over the past 35 years.

And it will get hotter and hotter. This summer, temperatures across almost all of Canada are expected to be above normal. Temperatures here are rising at double the rate of the global increase. The rise from preindustrial times had been around 1.2 degrees Celsius. An increase of 1.5 C – which the Paris Agreement set as the hoped-for limit – will probably be eclipsed for the first time by 2027, according to new work from the World Meteorological Organization.

What can be done starts foremost with cutting greenhouse-gas emissions as fast as possible. It means major investments in clean power to slash use of oil and natural gas across the economy. Every country must act. It may seem like domestic emissions are a small part of the world total, but consider that Canadian per-capita emissions are three-quarters greater than China’s and, historically, Canada has emitted close to as much as all of South America. The world has to get off its addiction to fossil fuels. As writer John Vaillant chronicles in his new book Fire Weather, combustion of fossil fuels has set the world ablaze.

On wildfires themselves, they cannot be stopped, but there is much to do – from strict planning on what is built where and how it is built, to more use of methods such as prescribed burns. Canada already spends $1-billion a year on wildfires. The bill will rise. Conservatives continue to argue against the carbon tax and decry the cost of a litre of gasoline. There are other, bigger costs. Wildfires – like flooding – are a fearsome example, both in destruction (recovery tallied in the billions of dollars) and mitigation (investments tallied in the billions of dollars) – and, less easy to quantify, how they can wreck spring and summer days: windows closed, outdoor plans cancelled, air that’s dangerous to breathe.

Last Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke of the country’s stretched resources, and said that governments must grapple with “how we can equip ourselves to deal with this new reality.” This space will have more later this week.

This article was written by Manuela Vega and was published in the Toronto Star on June 11, 2023.

Last week, clouds of red and orange coloured the air, blurred skylines and prompted a return to masking. As smoke spread from wildfires burning in Quebec and Ontario, residents were urged to stay inside to avoid poor air quality or, in some cases, evacuate for safety.

Earlier this year, the world’s leading climate scientists called for a rapid, co-ordinated response to climate change in the next seven years in order to prevent increased natural disasters and irreversible damage to the earth. There are steps individuals can take to help, but there also needs to be a societal shift, one climate expert and a climate activist told the Star.

Spread the word

“Do what you can, but make it visible and social,” said Matt Hoffman, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and codirector of the Environmental Governance Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

“We have to get societal and policy change,” he added. “The link between individual behaviour and individual choices and those societal changes are about making your choices part of the conversation and making your choices part of changing what’s natural in our society.”

Evelyn Austin, the executive director of Banking on a Better Future, also weighed in on campaigns to stop fossil fuel development and expansion projects.

Pressure politicians

In Hoffman’s view, the biggest thing many individuals can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to help make climate change a non-partisan priority, where it’s seen as “natural” to take aggressive action on climate change, regardless of political association.

“Vote for candidates at every level who take climate change action seriously and are committed to acting aggressively on it,” Hoffman said. “And not only voting, but telling people in your family, in your neighbourhood, and telling your politicians why you’re voting.”

Change your RRSP investments

People whose RRSPs or pensions are invested in the oil and gas industry are “contributing capital to the industry that’s creating the problem,” Hoffman said.

“More and more, there are mutual funds and investment options that are more sustainable and fossil fuel free,” he added, but you have to explicitly choose to make it a priority.

Alternative banking options

According to a 2022 report, Canada’s Big Five banks — RBC, Scotiabank, TD, CIBC and BMO — have invested $911 billion into the fossil fuel sector since the 2015 Paris Agreement, when governments around the world agreed to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Laurentian Bank is the only major bank in Canada that has agreed to phase out its investments in the industry, Austin said. There are also a number of credit unions that don’t invest in fossil fuels projects at all. In Ontario, those include Alterna Savings Credit Union, DUCA Financial and Kindred Credit Union. Through Banking on a Better Future, Austin advocates for people to make the switch, arguing credit unions across the board are more democratic than banks and therefore can be more receptive to depositors who vote for it to phase out investments into fossil fuel development.

Switch energy sources, watch your food

Some of the most important individual changes can be made at home and on the commute, Hoffman said.

“One of the big things you can do in your house is get a heat pump instead of a gas furnace,” he said. “Changing your light bulbs to LED light bulbs is good at reducing electricity use in your house, but that kind of impact is overwhelmed by how we are stuck in systems that are really reproducing climate change.”

Other steps one can take is turning off the lights, eating less meat, walking and biking as much as possible, switching from a gas-powered car to an electric vehicle, and taking fewer flights, Hoffmann said.

With the Empire State Building and the Lincoln Memorial blotted out, the US is experiencing the climate catastrophe first-hand

This article was written by Oliver Milman and was published in The Guardian on June 9, 2023.

Intense wildfires are blazing across Canada with thousands evacuated and smoke blown as far south as the US state of Georgia, creating hazardous air quality for millions.

This article was written by Georgina Rannard and was published by BBC News on June 8, 2023.

Every year countries pledge to cut their greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to curb the impacts of climate change.

This article was written by Jana Tauschinski and was published by BBC News on June 5, 2023.