“That’s where they’re moving the graves. The sea rose too high and started washing away the bones of our ancestors.” Joe Moeono-Kolio tells me this with one hand on the wheel as he guides us around the northeast coast of the Samoan island of Upolu.
He gestures again at a smaller island offshore. “That used to be a peninsula, my father’s elementary school was out there. It’s now underwater.” From the road, I can see a bright blue patch of water that indicates a shallow reef.
“That was the rugby field,” he tells me further down the road.
We were in Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of State Meeting (CHOGM). Moeono-Kolio is the Pacific advisor for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative and a member of the Pacific Climate Warriors. Like many Samoans, he has roots on the islands going back thousands of years. He wears a shirt that defiantly reads: “We are not drowning. We are fighting.”
The day before at CHOGM in Apia, he had watched grimly as senior officials from the governments of Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Fiji called out Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom for continuing to build new fossil fuel projects.
The leaders were commenting on a report commissioned by the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, which highlights the disparity between the “big three” commonwealth nations — Canada, Australia and the U.K. — and the other 53 nations that make up the Commonwealth Secretariat. The report, titled “Uncommon Wealth,” finds that the “big three” have accounted for 60 per cent of emissions generated from extraction since 1990, despite making up just six per cent of the Commonwealth’s population.
Prime Minister Feleti Teo of Tuvalu said current policies among the world’s wealthiest nations amount to nothing less than “a death sentence.”
Despite Canada’s claims to being a climate leader, the report points out that Canada is continuing to develop fossil fuel infrastructure, expanding projects in the Alberta oil sands and approving offshore drilling projects, such as Bay du Nord in the Atlantic.
Canada also continues to expand natural gas exports, despite a thorough debunking of the myth that it is a less-carbon-intensive “transition fuel” away from coal.
Prime Minister Teo called further fossil fuel expansion “inconsistent with the spirit of the Paris Agreement” and its goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees of warming. Not to mention Canada’s pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
Canada cannot claim to be a leader on climate change while it fails to even uphold its own inadequate climate commitments.
The Fossil Fuel Treaty Report found the Canadian government gave $21 billion in public financing to the fossil fuel industry between 2018 and 2021. That is money that can be spent on a just transition to a cleaner economy, ensuring industry workers are not left behind. It can be applied to adaptation funds for our communities, and loss and damage funds for countries — like those in the South Pacific— that our emissions are impacting.
Dr. Maina Vakafua Talia, minister of Home Affairs, Environment and Climate Change for Tuvalu said: “As a Commonwealth family, we must work together to keep our Paris commitments of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees alive and lead in financing a fair transition for countries like ours. We call on our wealthier partners to align themselves with this goal and not fan the flames of the climate crisis with fossil fuel expansion.”
Among those flames are the wildfires that rip across Canada every year and now smoulder through the winter. But if setting our own landscape on fire is not enough to get us to honour our climate pledges, and clearly it is not, then perhaps, we could reach for our common humanity and see that our emissions have the greatest impact upon those who are among the least responsible.
I fear our politics seem to be past the point of reaching for the better angels of our nature. But for those who are willing to see, we must look clear-eyed at the consequences of our actions.
Our prime minister claims climate leadership on the international stage. The recent draft legislation to cap pollution is emblematic of the administration's approach: historic climate policy watered down with promises to “put a limit on pollution not production”, language which allows expansion to continue under the guise of “net-zero”.
Meanwhile, carbon priceing is being walked back and the Conservative opposition has built a campaign around doubling down on fossil fuels and fearmongering around climate policy. Giving in to this rhetoric will result in increased wildfires, heat waves and storm damage here in Canada, but the damage at home will pale in comparison to the death toll in the global south.
The great chain of causes may be too long and too complex to point the finger legally — at least for now — but the basic physics of burning carbon and the greenhouse effect shows us we are complicit. The Liberals might point to the realpolitik “made necessary” by our political climate, but that’s an excuse that would not gain them much sympathy in Samoa.
The economic concerns of working people are legitimate, but they will not be solved by further investments in a dying industry, which will come at a terrible cost to everyone who faces the fires, floods and storms of our delay. For those of us who are complicit in the carbon-intense system we are stuck in, our government’s continued expansion of fossil fuels shames us. We are naval-gazing in the Global North, while the world watches in horror.
The differences in how the Global North and South — which is the global majority — experience the climate crisis is so stark that it has led Kumi Naidoo, South African anti-apartheid activist and president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, to call the situation “climate apartheid.”“A death sentence,” Prime Minister Teo called it.
The diplomat and poet Audrey Brown-Pereira, of the Cook Islands, opened the People’s Forum at CHOGM with a poem she had written.
“They’re taking pictures of us in the water,” she said, speaking like a songbird at first, her voice ethereal, almost musical. But as she repeated the line, her inflection shifted subtly lower. Her sing-song tone turned eerie.
“They’re taking pictures of us in the water. On the count of 1.5.”
Forrest Berman-Hatch is a freelance writer from Cortes Island, on the unceded territories of the Klahoose, Homolco and Tla’amin nations.
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