Floods signal need for action
‘This is what climate change looks like,’ renewable energy expert says
When a so-called “atmospheric river” unleashed torrents of rain over British Columbia this week, Merran Smith was in a meeting with the council of experts advising the provincial government on how to confront the crisis of climate change.
They had just seen news about mudslides in the mountains and how people were stranded. Then council members who came from places like the Fraser Valley started receiving texts from their hometowns.
“They’re getting texted, you know, hourly images of their communities going underwater, while we’re in a meeting talking about climate change,” said Smith, who is co-chair of the council and executive director of Clean Energy Canada, a pro-renewables policy institute at Simon Fraser University.
“If there ever was an indicator, a sign that we need to take action, we have got them,” Smith added.
“This is what climate change looks like ... It is a clear, clear call to action — right now.”
For experts like Smith, the latest weather disaster to strike B.C. this year is yet another reason the federal government should take swift action on key elements of the climate plan the Liberals ran on in last summer’s election campaign. Those include promises to tackle Canada’s two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions — the production of fossil fuels and the transportation that burns them — through capping planet-warming pollution from the oil and gas sector, and implementing regulations to force car dealerships to sell an increasing number of zero-emission passenger vehicles and ensure the country’s electricity grids run on emissions-free power by 2035.
“We’ve got a lot of plans and now it really is time for the action,” said Dan Woynillowicz, a principal at the advisory firm, Polaris Strategy, who specializes in climate policy.
“Climate is a top issue, and I think that expectation for action is high.”
Canada’s newly appointed minister of environment and climate change is well aware of that.
In a phone interview on Wednesday, Steven Guilbeault said public consultations on the oil-and-gas emissions cap, zero-emissions vehicle mandate and electricity regulations will start in early 2022.
Although he was not ready to provide an exact timeline, Guilbeault said the consultations won’t take “months and months” and that the government will strive to implement these new measures with relative speed.
“We’re a minority government. We may not have a lot of time ahead of us,” said Guilbeault. “I do feel a great sense of urgency.”
That stated urgency echoes the reports of leading climate scientists. In 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change panel reported the world needed to enact “unprecedented change in all aspects of society” to prevent the catastrophic extremes of global warming. Earlier this year, the same body concluded extreme weather events — like dramatic floods, severe wildfires and more — will become more frequent and intense as the planet gets warmer, and especially so if countries fail to limit average temperature increases to 1.5 C.
The panel has said global emissions need to be almost halved by 2030 and hit net zero by 2050 — when remaining pollution is offset by nature or technology — to ensure that limit isn’t breached.
In Canada, despite billions of dollars and policies like the national minimum carbon price, emissions haven’t dropped. In fact they increased almost one per cent from 2015 to 2019, the most recent year for which the government has published data. And annual emissions that year were just 1.1 per cent lower than in 2005, the year Canada is using to measure its progress toward its 2030 climate goal to slash emissions at least 40 per cent.
For Sabaa Khan, climate director at the David Suzuki Foundation, there is an apparent need for “strong, rapid cuts” in emissions, especially from oil and gas and transportation — economic sectors responsible for 26 per cent and 25 per cent respectively of Canada’s total emissions in 2019.
“The suffering that’s happening right now (in B.C.), it shows that we really need to tackle the source of the problem,” said Khan.
That means a cap on oil and gas emissions that doesn’t allow companies to break the imposed limit by purchasing “offset” credits, she said. It also means expanding Canada’s pledge — made during the recent United Nations climate summit in Glasgow — to stop devoting public funds to the fossil fuel sectors in other countries by the end of next year to include Canada’s domestic oil and gas industry.
As it stands, the government is pledging to scrap direct subsidies that promote oil and gas production by the end of 2023, but has only said it will develop a plan to end public financing through Crown corporations like Export Development Canada, which provided more than $7 billion in support to Canada’s oil and gas sector last year.
For Smith, whose basement also flooded in Monday’s massive rain storm, the crisis in B.C. shows the Liberal administration can’t implement the next phase of its climate plan at the traditional pace of government.
“There is no way we can meet our 2030 targets if we’re not able to get the policies and regulations in place over the next couple of years,” she said.
“There’s simply not enough time for us to be on the slow track.”