In a grim game of FOMO, cities and headline writers vied for the title of most dangerous air in the world this week. Montreal and Toronto battled for the crown but sharp elbows were flying from south of the border where Chicago staked a claim, disputed by outlets in Detroit and Washington, D.C. Almost none saw fit to mention the cause.
The news pointed to “wildfires,” of course. That’s a term that probably deserves retiring. The fires are definitely “wild” — in the sense of a party that got out of control. But not in the usual sense of wildlife or wild animals — something natural and beyond the boundaries of human meddling.
Very, very few outlets are piercing the smoke and connecting the fires to climate change. A few news searches will show you that a pitiful 13 per cent of wildfire coverage mentions climate change even in passing (or followed by a question mark).
Fewer still are making the cause visible. Well less than one per cent mention fossil fuels or any other source of climate pollution.
And the dots get even more obscured the closer we get to the source. The names of the big fossil fuel companies are entirely shrouded.
This form of climate silence is very weird when you think about it. If your local river is closed off, the media wouldn’t stop the story after abstract mention of contaminants upstream. You would know about the factory that spewed the sludge. You would know the names of the companies at fault.
Granted, that’s a more manageable story to tell. But we didn’t have this kind of silence around the ozone hole or acid rain. And we know that almost 40 per cent of charred western North America is caused by the products of the 88 “carbon majors.” About half the increase in fire conditions.
Those calculations carry us up to 2021. This year’s fires are so wild, they’ve already burned through the records for at least the last 60 years — a mind-boggling 80,000 square kilometres — and we’re just now into “real” fire season.
How big an area is that? It’s bigger than Ireland. Almost half the countries in the world are smaller.
The scale is hard to get your head around. But here’s another important milestone — fires across Canada have already churned out 600 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, according to Europe’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. And if that number sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it’s very close to surpassing the total for Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions from all official sources. (We don’t count most emissions from fire on our national ledger — our climate accountants figure they’re “natural.”)
Federal politicians aren’t doing the public any favours clarifying the causes. While headline writers vied for the smoky crown, Pierre Poilievre launched a campaign against the one broad public policy that explicitly targets carbon emissions. At gas stations across Atlantic Canada, Poilievre is railing against the carbon tax and taking shots at the clean fuel standard, vowing to scrap both if elected.
It often feels like Canadian politics is stuck in a time warp since at least 2008 — the year Stephen Harper declared Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift would “screw everybody” and the BC NDP fought a disgraceful provincial campaign promising to “Axe the Tax,” the very same slogan Poilievre is pumping at gas stations in the Maritimes.
On the other hand, we got some refreshingly blunt talk from Steven Guilbeault this week. “We all recognize Canada is not ready to face the impacts of climate change,” the environment minister said as he revealed the country’s first national climate adaptation strategy. Guilbeault focused on heat, fires and floods and held the announcement in Vancouver to underscore the impacts of the deadly 2021 heat dome. Most of the hundreds of victims lived in low-income neighbourhoods and baked to death in their own homes.
But one day before, Guilbeault’s cabinet colleagues were getting cosy with the carbon majors.
The same board that recently fired the CEO who made a series of climate commitments. They replaced him with a CEO who announced an increase in fossil fuel production, scaling back the plans for energy transition just two weeks ago. On Friday, Shell’s head of renewable generation quit.
And while the board discussed “tomorrow’s green economy” with our cabinet ministers, we now know that one of the company’s pipelines was pouring oil into the Niger Delta. “Our reliable partner” allowed the oil spill to continue for a week from a pipeline pumping 180,000 barrels-per-day.
The Indigenous Ogoni people and other locals have suffered decades of executions, other killings, human rights abuses and toxic spills under the boot of Big Oil. They aren’t likely to be impressed with Shell’s promise to investigate the latest contamination.
Climate impacts have become so blazingly obvious, the public is catching on despite all the contradictions and smoke-blowing. Seven in 10 Canadians have made the connection between fires and climate change, according to a new poll by Abacus Data for Clean Energy Canada.
Eighty-six per cent of Canadians say climate action will impact their vote. Six in 10 say it’s essential or very important come election day. Based on those kinds of numbers, Clean Energy Canada’s Trevor Melanson argues climate concerns wounded Conservatives in the recent byelections.
It’s worth highlighting some campaigns piercing the smoke for the public. This week, doctors headlined #CanadaIsBurning rallies in 30 communities across Canada.
In Toronto, organizers had to decide whether to call off the event because of fire smoke — a bitterly ironic climate conundrum. The protest went ahead in front of Chrystia Freeland’s constituency office, calling on the feds to stop funding fossils.
In Vancouver, Dr. Melissa Lem described the climate impacts she’s witnessed on physical and mental health.
Days of action take time to arrange, so the organizers couldn’t have predicted how incredibly timely the day of action would be. It gave reporters the link between smoky headlines and the fossils fuelling the fires.
Also this week, the David Suzuki Foundation launched an ad campaign against misinformation by the fossil gas industry. The industry plans for a major scale-up of fracking in places like northeastern B.C.
The ads open with the kind of beautiful nature image and upbeat soundtrack favoured by the oil and gas industry, quickly burned away by the kind of flames the industry is fuelling.
