March 11th 2022

Feature story

Voices from Ukraine

Would you call for more ammunition or take the ride? In our private moments, so many of us must be wondering if we would find the courage to step into the street, unarmed, and challenge a column of Russian tanks. Would I take up arms, make my own, run for safety? And, really, would I give a rat’s ass about climate change anymore? There are incredible Ukrainians who are, somehow, summoning the breadth of mind to challenge not just the oil-fuelled tyrant but the whole global juggernaut of fossil-fuelled disasters and conflicts.

Svitlana Krakovska, one of Ukraine’s leading climate scientists, managed to finalize the latest IPCC report from her home in Kyiv making Zoom calls while sheltering with her four children as Putin’s missiles destroyed nearby buildings.

“We will not surrender in Ukraine. And we hope the world will not surrender in building a climate-resilient future,” Krakovska declared. “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots, fossil fuels, and our dependence on them.”

Krakovska is a scientist working on the impacts of climate disruption. And there are few people more attuned to the urgency than scientists working on climate impacts. But she’s far from alone in her fortitude.

Another Svitlana — Svitlana Romanko — has launched the Stand With Ukraine campaign from her home in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine. Romanko and her colleagues released a “Putin 100” list exposing the world’s banks and other financial giants that kept ties with Russian oil, gas and coal. The list includes RBC, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Quebec’s CDPQ.

This week, Romanko wrote an article excoriating the financial sector in the Los Angeles Times, alongside Bill McKibben: “The invasion of Georgia didn’t slow them down, nor the annexation of Crimea. Likewise, they’ve happily profited off fossil fuels, even after science made the climate-disaster link crystal clear. The melt of the Arctic didn’t slow them down, nor the fires of California.

“Wall Street and the banks must go further and stop the ongoing funding of fossil fuels everywhere, because they are the bulwark of autocracy and the death of the natural world. The sooner we replace oil, gas and coal with cheap, safe renewable energy, the sooner we can all live in peace.”

Canada’s money managers are now promising to dump their holdings and the federal government finally slapped financial sanctions on Roman Abramovich on Friday. Abramovich has been target No. 1 on the sanctions list issued by opposition leader Alexei Navalny (now incarcerated in a Russian prison colony). Abramovich may be best-known as the owner of England’s Chelsea Football Club but his company Evraz also supplies most of the steel pipe for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

Ukraine’s extraordinary President Volodymyr Zelensky has been calling for allies to stop all trade in Russian oil and gas. Quite incredibly, even in the midst of the bombing and bloodshed, Zelensky’s team is holding a perspective on how the move against Russian energy would accelerate an even broader pivot off fossil fuels altogether.

Zelensky’s economic adviser Oleg Ustenko made the acute case for boycotting Russian oil and gas in an interview with the New Yorker: “You are paying all this money to a murderous leader who is still killing people in my country.”

Ustenko later articulates the longer-term benefits of ditching Russian fossil fuels: “In the middle term and the long term, it is going to be a positive development both for international security and for speeding up the move in the direction of technological change and renewable energy.”

It’s amazing how quickly that “longer-term” is materializing. Way back in January, most energy analysts thought Europe was hopelessly addicted to Russian oil and gas and couldn’t extricate itself for decades to come. That timeline has been collapsing by the day as European countries, international agencies and the European Union bring forward ever bolder plans.

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This week, the European Union issued its REPowerEU plan to eliminate two-thirds of Russian fossil gas within a year.

The European plan is a wartime mobilization based on two pillars. On one front, deploying heat pumps, lowering demand and powering up renewable energy while electrifying vehicles and industry. The other pillar aims to bridge the immediate gap by diversifying gas supplies with LNG imports alongside more biomethane and renewable hydrogen production and imports.

“Following the invasion of Ukraine, the case for a rapid clean energy transition has never been stronger and clearer,” says the EU.

In the short term, Russia’s invasion will almost certainly lead to an increase in coal burning across Europe. And Europe will be desperate for LNG imports. But it’s heartening to see that Europe is not capitulating to the old geopolitics of fossil fuels. In a recent U.K. poll, just 29 per cent of the public wanted to address Britain’s dependence on Russian gas by expanding drilling and fracking. Fifty-seven per cent want to reduce the use of gas altogether and expand renewables.

Back in Canada, the fossil fuel industry and its political boosters are continuing their full-throated campaign to increase extraction under the pretence of helping Europe. The latest salvo came over the deepwater drilling project proposed for Bay du Nord off Newfoundland. Premier Andrew Furey claims oil from his province would replace oil from a “tyrant who controls the energy markets.”

It’s always about more extraction. Without mentioning that any new oil production would be years and years away. And, like all the proposals for new extraction and new pipelines, it would arrive in a world even more battered by the impacts of climate change, even more gripped with the urgency of ditching fossil fuels.

Svitlana Romanko — hopefully still safe in her home in Ukraine — calls the fossil profiteering “peace-washing.”

“Nations worldwide must commit to the rapid and just transition away from all fossil fuels and to fossil fuels non-proliferation,” she says. “Fossil fuel companies cannot be allowed to make their 'peace-washing' to justify increased fossil fuel exploration.”

The Roundup

Environment minister highlights clean energy exports as main solution to European energy crisis

Steven Guilbeaut told Jessica McDiarmid that boosting extraction of fossil fuels in Canada is not the solution to the looming energy crisis, either at home or in Europe. “The solution is to move away from fossil fuels. That’s how we ultimately reduce our dependency.”

Both Guilbeault and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged this week that Canadian fossil fuels can’t play much of a role in relieving Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas.

“Canada doesn’t have the capacity to increase exports to the European market, and refineries on the other side of the Atlantic aren’t equipped to process the heavy crude that comes from Alberta’s tarsands. Increasing that capacity and retrofitting refineries would be expensive and long-term, Guilbeaut said. “The need is short-term.”

BMO steps ahead of the pack

No, the company hasn’t yet agreed to stop financing fossil fuel expansion projects but BMO did make some significant announcements this week.

The other big Canadian banks are still avoiding serious climate commitments by making policies based on “intensity” targets and excluding “Scope 3” emissions. Those innocuous-sounding bits of jargon allow the banks to keep increasing carbon emissions under the guise of “reducing intensity” and to ignore the majority of the emissions they finance.

“BMO moved to the head of the pack of big Canadian banks with their commitment to reduce financed emissions in the oil and gas sector in absolute and not just intensity terms, including Scope 3 emissions,” said Matt Price from the organization Investors for Paris Compliance.

Meanwhile, RBC is encouraging shareholders to reject a resolution that would stop the bank from financing fossil fuel companies under the guise of “sustainable” lending. RBC is the fifth-largest financier of fossil fuels in the world, John Woodside reports.

The Amazon

The Amazon may be approaching the dreaded tipping point where the rainforest flips to savanna. Research published this week found over 75 per cent of the rainforest has been losing resilience “consistent with the approach to a critical transition.”

Computer models had been indicating the ominous potential for a tipping point into mass die-off but this new research is based on observation using satellite data.

The analysis found the highest loss of resilience in regions that are drying out and those near farms and roads, so climate change and deforestation are the drivers. The authors say we are “risking dieback with profound implications for biodiversity, carbon storage and climate change at a global scale.”

The Amazon is one of the nine active tipping points or “sleeping giants” scientists have been warning about.

“Just a decade ago, Earth’s sleeping giants appeared largely still slumbering. Now, they are stirring. We are measuring very large changes, which should concern everyone,” explains Owen Gaffney from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

For the record, those nine “sleeping giants” are Arctic sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet, boreal forests, permafrost, Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, the Amazon rainforest, warm water corals, the West Antarctic ice sheet and parts of East Antarctica.

If you want to dive deeper into tipping points (and I’m not necessarily suggesting you do — consider this a serious mental health warning), just google “Johan Rockstrom tipping point” or you could watch Netflix’s Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet, which follows Rockström’s scientific career in planetary boundaries.

New emissions record

There’s not much sign of that “green recovery” from the pandemic that we all heard so much about. After a brief but dramatic decline in greenhouse gas emissions, the energy sector’s carbon pollution rebounded to a record high last year.

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The International Energy Agency described the rebound as “carbon-intensive growth reminiscent of 2010,” following the global financial crisis. Renewable power had its biggest growth year in history but couldn’t make up for the largest-ever increase in energy-related CO2 emissions.

The biggest spew came from power plants and heat production and a worrying rise in the burning of coal. Every region of the world showed an increase in energy CO2 emissions, but particularly in China — China’s per capita emissions (8.2 tonnes per person) are now higher than the average for “advanced” economies but still much lower than North America’s (14 tonnes).

Emissions from transportation stayed below pre-pandemic levels but the IEA also notes that: “The emissions reduction impact of record electric car sales in 2021 was cancelled out by the parallel increase in sales of SUVs.

“The world must now ensure that the global rebound in emissions in 2021 was a one-off — and that sustainable investments combined with the accelerated deployment of clean energy technologies will reduce CO2 emissions in 2022,” says the IEA.

Quebec gets in the battery game

Quebec’s efforts to position itself as a clean energy hub generated back-to-back announcements in the last few days. First, Germany’s BASF bought land in Bécancour where it’s going to build a factory to recycle EV batteries and produce CAM (cathode active material), a major component in EV batteries.

Three days later, General Motors announced it was beginning construction on a new $500-million factory in the same city. GM is partnering with a South Korean company and will also be making CAM for batteries.

Explaining its decision, GM pointed to Quebec’s supply of cheap, low-carbon electricity and success making electric buses and trucks.

Compared to Ontario, Quebec hasn’t been much of a player in auto manufacturing but the province has been taking a “thoughtful, strategic approach” to building a clean energy sector and the announcements are “not an accident,” Clean Energy Canada’s Joanna Kyriazis told the Globe and Mail.

Next step for a ‘Just Transition’

Two days before a Canadian “day of action” in support of just transition legislation, the federal government launched the next round of consultations on “a just transition through the creation of sustainable jobs.”

Iron & Earth, an organization of oilpatch workers advocating for skills training and support, welcomed the step: “The workers who built the energy system of the past definitely have the skills to build the energy system of the future,” Luisa Da Silva told Canada’s National Observer.

Sprawling cities

Some very cool data visualization in this project by Radio-Canada showing how Canada’s big cities have sprawled (or not) over the past 20 years. Naël Shiab and Isabelle Bouchard used an artificial intelligence algorithm to create maps from satellite images.

“Urban sprawl contributes enormously to greenhouse gas emissions,” explains the University of Calgary’s Sasha Tsenkova.

You can select one of Canada’s big cities and see exactly what’s been going on. Then scroll through to see how a region’s density impacts road congestion and how neighbourhoods fare on the proximity index measuring access to groceries, parks, schools etc..

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Electric buses in the cold

Saskatoon has been testing how battery-electric buses perform through all four seasons. They work and the city has decided to start buying them even though they’re more expensive up-front:

“Approximately $470,000 can be saved over the total life of the bus, a savings of 24 per cent. With that number applied to a fleet with 140 buses, it is close to $66 million over the life of the fleet, or approximately $3.6 million annually,"

No word yet on whether Premier Scott Moe will intervene and require the city stick with diesel.

Because you deserve a smile

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I’ll leave you with Rebecca Solnit’s latest piece: The world is unpredictable and strange. Still, there is hope in the madness. If the last few years have underscored anything, it’s that no one really has any idea what’s going to happen next. That’s always been our human predicament, of course, but Rebecca explores both disorientation and hope in her always delightful writing. This sentence is going to stick with me:

“Despair is a delusion of confidence that asserts it knows what’s coming.

“It would be unreasonable to predict that we can leave the age of fossil fuels behind and do what the climate requires of us, but it would be unwise to say that it’s impossible, and only our actions can make it possible. The livable world of 2072 is almost unimaginable. But the way that I imagine it is possible is by thinking how unimaginable the 2022 we’re all in now would have been in 1972 and how little it resembles either most science fiction or prediction. We see no farther than the little halo of our lanterns, but we can travel all night by that light.”

That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading Zero Carbon. Please feel free to forward it along and you can always write with feedback or suggestions to [email protected].

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