November 19th 2021

Feature story

So not ready

“The reality is that communities are prepared.” Incredibly, those words came from the mouth of Mike Farnworth, B.C.’s public safety minister this week.

That statement carried echoes of the Freudian slip by Premier John Horgan, just 140 days earlier as hundreds of citizens died in the lethal heat dome: “Fatalities are a part of life.”

In both cases, the political leaders were at their podiums defending the government’s emergency response to the onslaught of climate catastrophes hammering the province. The premier walked his comments back later in the day but, each time, what stood out was their demeanour: defensiveness, sometimes bewilderment and high levels of plain old irritation.

It’s the irritation that’s the real tell. “Our leaders seem incapable of anticipating these events, grasping their significance, or imagining how much worse things will get. They live in a dream world that no longer exists,” wrote Kai Nagata of the Dogwood Initiative.

Ahead of the deluge and the heat dome, there was in fact ample warning for those with ears to hear it. Extreme weather forecasters had been posting increasingly dire warnings as the weather systems approached.

B.C.’s provincial government deserves a lot of the heat it's getting for its slow response. But, honestly, would you have preferred Doug Ford or Jason Kenney at the helm? The truth is that even in the rich Global North, we haven’t grasped how utterly unprepared we are for the cascading, overlapping climate impacts we’ve already unleashed, even less for those more dire that are now inevitable. And we are still exacerbating the problem at industrial scale. “We can’t seem to fathom our genuine vulnerability,” as David Wallace-Wells put it.

What it means to declare a climate emergency is now coming into focus. We are going to have to deal with multiple aspects of the crisis all at once. Emergency response. Rebuilding for climate adaptation and resilience. Cutting carbon emissions, transitioning the energy system, redesigning agriculture, food systems and communities. All while addressing the international situation and the needs of developing countries.

B.C. is just the most recent microcosm. During the heat dome, 911 was utterly overwhelmed. The province waited five days after the latest atmospheric river hit to declare a state of emergency. As waters rose and land slid, the government repeatedly shirked responsibility, shifting it to local communities and claiming travel advisories posted to a website were adequate warning.

Apparently, the mudslides that wiped out every highway to Metro Vancouver, stranding hundreds for multiple nights in their cars, are the responsibility of municipalities like Kent, B.C., population 6,000. If only the modern world had developed some mechanism to punch warnings through to people’s cellphones — through all the heat waves, wildfires, and flooding, B.C. used its text alert system a grand total of zero times (the only province never to have activated it).

But it’s not as if the provincial government had ground to a halt. In court, lawyers were debating how best to remove the pesky land defenders trying to stop the clear-cutting of old-growth forests, which are both carbon storehouses and watershed regulators.

And the province sent in militarized police to remove Wetʼsuwetʼen elders blocking fossil fuel expansion.

On Thursday, 15 people were arrested, including two Wet'suwet'en elders, three legal observers and a journalist, according to Sleydo’, also known as Molly Wickham, a member of the Gidimt'en Clan.

B.C. also hasn’t gotten its priorities straight on climate adaptation. The flooding that inundated the province’s dairy and farmland was predictable and predicted. In fact, Canadians got a crash course in colonial history this week — it turns out the most productive farmland was once a lake with at least three Stó:lō villages around it and a seasonal stilt village on the water. The lake was pumped dry to sell to settler farmers and the Sumas Nation forced onto reserves.

Several climate adaptation studies had identified the area to be at risk of flooding, specifically from atmospheric rivers, but the studies have been gathering dust. It was only because of heroic overnight sandbagging efforts by local residents that the pump station wasn’t overwhelmed.

Still recovering from fire season, the city of Merrit was completely evacuated. The resiliency planning for that region is woeful. Flood mapping was last updated in 1989, based on hand-drawn maps from air photos and using river flows from 1969 to 1985.

There are a few examples of resiliency planning in the province. Vancouver city planners are grappling with sea-level rise. They will point to the new mega-hospital being designed five metres above current sea level. Although, even on that project, you have to wonder if we’re still at the “bargaining” stage of grief — the site itself is locally known as the “False Creek mudflats.”

And let’s stick with poor B.C. as our microcosm for emissions cuts as well. Famously the home of Greenpeace, the province has long been at the forefront of green awareness and climate policy. And yet more and more homes are being hooked to “natural gas,” transportation emissions continue to rise, and the province keeps on subsidizing and expanding fossil fuel projects.

If we force ourselves to step back from the emergency response failures, the lack of adaptation and the carbon emissions, what worries me most is the climate risk to the zeitgeist — a fortress mentality.

Deadly disasters are going to keep accelerating but we do have the ability to improve our response systems, get serious about building resiliency and drive down atmospheric pollution. These things become impossible without collective action and a commitment to the common good.

We saw an outpouring of help and common cause in B.C. this week. Sikh organizations chartered helicopters to fly food to those in need. Neighbours helped neighbours. First Nations and other locals opened homes and community centres to evacuees and stranded travellers. Emergency responders, ferry crews, people from all corners pitched in with whatever resources they had at hand.

The question is, can we sustain our best selves against climate shocks and through economic change in an era where so much of the culture demonizes taxes as bad and government as a parasite?

As crops fail, sea level rises and migration intensifies, will we welcome refugees? Will we contribute our share to offset “loss and damage” in the Global South even as we “spare no expense” (B.C.’s Transportation Minister Rob Fleming) rebuilding and fortifying infrastructure at home?

We need to hold governments responsible for accelerating climate action of all kinds, but we also need to push back against the insidious view that collective action is weakness and a fortress mentality is strength.

The Roundup

Inuit to have a say on shipping frenzy in Arctic

“As Arctic ice melts and shipping increases, it’s vital Inuit are involved in the high-level decisions to protect their marine environment and the ocean and sea ice, all central to their survival and culture,” says Lisa Koperqualuk, Canada vice-president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council.

Rochelle Baker reports “the Inuit Circumpolar Council recently obtained provisional consultative status at the International Maritime Organization — the UN agency responsible for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of marine and atmospheric pollution by vessels.”

Drilling by example

At COP26, Joe Biden pledged the U.S. would “lead by example.” His delegation was home less than four days before the U.S. launched the largest auction ever for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Cancel culture”

A coalition of gas-exporting countries described itself as a victim of “cancel culture” in its submission to the UN after COP26. The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) thanked the hosts for their hospitality but decried the “ongoing reductionism and cancel culture on hydrocarbons.”

“Please shed a tear for the world's leading gas exporters who are suffering from ‘cancel culture’ because their product is destroying the planet,” writes Earther. “One of the GECF members is Egypt, which is hosting next year’s climate talks. We’re already off to a great start.”

Quebec goes after fuel oil in heating

Office of the Minister of the Environment and the Fight against Climate Change, Quebec adopts law to eliminate the use of fuel oil for residential heating

The provincial government of Quebec says that nearly 200,000 households still use oil-fired heaters and the province is cracking down.

As of the end of this year, no new construction will be allowed to have oil heaters and units over 10 years old won’t get permits to be repaired. As of 2023, “the installation of an oil-fired heater and the replacement of an oil-fired heater by a heater powered by fossil fuel in existing buildings will be prohibited.”

Hockey and HFCs

The NHL announced it’s going to extend its partnership with Chemours to promote chilling products marketed as Opteon.

The news release on the extension trumpeted the fact that more than 200 facilities — including the Beijing arena for the Winter Olympics and the home rinks of the San Jose Sharks and Colorado Avalanche — have switched to Opteon.

Opteon products are made from HFCs and HFOs, refrigerants targeted for phase-down because they are potent drivers of global warming. The products marketed as Opteon heat the atmosphere 600 to 1,200 times more than carbon dioxide compared to ammonia, which has a global warming potential of zero.

“You’re pushing facilities away from ammonia. That’s a step in the wrong direction,” Alex Hillbrand, an expert on HFCs at the Natural Resources Defense Council told the New York Times.

Electric Zambonis

Several Ontario communities are switching over to electric ice resurfacers. It’s not a new idea — the first battery-electric model was unveiled at the 1960 Winter Olympics by a guy whose name you might know: Frank Zamboni.

London, Mississauga, Kingston and some other communities are finally making the switch. But all of the ice resurfacers in Toronto still run on propane, methane gas or gasoline.

And electric fire trucks

Vancouver has ordered a Rosenbauer RT pumper truck, aiming to be the first city in Canada to get one on the streets.

The Fire Department had already moved forward on its buildings — Fire Hall 17 was the first in Canada to get Zero Carbon Building (ZCB) design certification.

Berlin, Amsterdam and Dubai already have electric pumpers in operation and the Dutch have a couple on military air bases. The Berlin truck got its first taste of action defending active transportation — putting out a fire in a bike shop.

Brampton has also made an order and Toronto’s fire chief responded to the Vancouver announcement saying he will soon have final design specs to order an electric pumper.

The Rosenbauers aren’t pure electric — they come with a diesel range extender to ease any concern during this first generation of trucks. And they have a number of improvements over traditional vehicles, including the ability to turn all wheels and crab walk in and out of tight spots.

Madison, Wis., is the first North American city already running an electric fire truck. It’s from one of the other manufacturers electrifying emergency vehicles.

That’s all for this week. I know it’s been a terrifying week for many of you. I’m not going to minimize that, but I’ll leave you with some gallows humour. Here’s the trailer for the upcoming climate movie that’s not a climate movie starring an incredible cast of Hollywood’s A-listers (Ariana Grande, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence among many others): Don’t Look Up.

Thank you for reading Zero Carbon. You can email me with your thoughts or suggestions for future newsletters at [email protected].

Support for this issue of Zero Carbon came from The Trottier Foundation and I-SEA.