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So, how was your summer?
It seems a very long time ago, those images of straggling columns of tourists — evacuees from resorts on the Greek islands dragging lobster-burnt children and wheelie bags. Over 30,000 heading towards docks or beaches for a Dunkirk-style rescue from their holiday-turned-fiery-nightmare.
Later we learned of more desperate escapes, too frantic for smartphone video. Staff and holiday-makers running headlong into the sea to escape an inferno. Terrifying, barely imaginable moments repeated through the summer from the Mediterranean to Maui.
Those pictures of stricken families in Rhodes felt seared into memory at the time. But later superseded in a grim palimpsest of climate horrors. So many more evacuations: columns on foot, caravans of gridlocked vehicles, queues snaking towards airports, cars melting as drivers raced through tunnels of angry flame. Algeria, the Canary Islands, France, Portugal and Spain. Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia (the Lytton First Nation, yet again) and, of course, the North: K'atl'odeeche First Nation, Enterprise, Fort Smith, Hay River. Over 20,000 forced to flee from the territorial capital, Yellowknife.
If you weren’t directly affected, you could almost be forgiven for forgetting the fires that erupted in Nova Scotia, utterly blindsiding Maritimers before the northern summer even officially began.
And then, the perversity of atmospheric physics — floods as well as fires. “The heaviest rain ever” in Japan. More evacuations in Spain, the Philippines, Myanmar, Slovenia, Sudan. Just this week, record rains in Saudi Arabia, deadly flooding in Turkey and Bulgaria and Greece. “I'm afraid the careless summers, as we knew them ... will cease to exist,” said the Greek prime minister. “From now on, the coming summers are likely to be ever more difficult.”
There was widespread snickering over mud-bound Burning Man but the floods in China are no joke — cars, homes and people washed away as Fuzhou received 554 millimetres (1.8 feet) of rain on Tuesday, an hourly record of almost 150 millimetres (0.5 ft.). Hong Kong appears to have recorded even greater torrents this week — 158.1 millimetres in an hour.
Catastrophic flooding unfolding in Chai Wan, Hong Kong 🇭🇰
— Scott Duncan (@ScottDuncanWX) September 7, 2023
158.1mm of rain fell in just one hour. This breaks the heaviest one hour rainfall record. Records date back to 1884.
🎥 via @yangyubin1998pic.twitter.com/Pu1b7suJCF
And all this climate chaos against the silent backdrop of searing heat. Burn units filled with patients who passed out and were seared by the sidewalks and roads of Phoenix, Ariz., where concrete reached 150 F (66 C). The fifth-largest city in the U.S. topped 110 F (43 C) for 31 consecutive days.
As you probably know, we had the hottest day in 120,000 years this summer while ocean temperatures as well as sea ice loss around Antarctica absolutely shattered records.
Globally, “it was the hottest August on record — by a large margin,” according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. August as a whole is estimated to have been about 1.5 degrees above the pre-fossil fuel era. The only hotter month in the historical record was July. And, as you can see, this summer was a marked jump from previous records.
Is it worse than expected? That’s a big question simmering in climate circles. As a very general breakdown, it appears that scientists who study impacts and specific regions are shocked to see the scale of impacts, hitting sooner than expected. Scientists who track the broad trends insist we’re tracking within the range of their predictions, albeit along the high end. Frustratingly, it’s not a question science can answer quickly — one year could be a freak. Sober scientists will have to observe the averages over time.
It’s a strange quirk of psychology but in some weird way, worse than expected feels better than the alternative. At least that was my reaction to Barry Saxifrage’s latest charts tracking carbon and Canada’s forests.
This summer’s ferocious forest fires must surely be freakishly “off the charts”? The various fire agencies kept saying so, repeatedly extending their Y-axes at one press conference after another. The scale is mind-boggling — well over half the world’s countries are smaller than the area burned this year. The fires have spewed about 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide so far (more than double the 670 million tonnes Canada officially reports for the entire economy).
And yet, “it fits the curve,” Saxifrage told me after crunching the numbers. Never has that old expression from math class felt so chilling. Before the turn-of-the-century, forests were sucking up carbon, on balance. But 2001 was a tipping point: “Logging, wildfires, insects and the many forms of decay are now turning trees into CO2 faster than the forest can grow back,” says Saxifrage.
Every year since 2001 Canada’s forests have disgorged more and more carbon than they’ve sequestered. The “curve” of cumulative CO2 is shocking when it’s laid out. And sure enough, “As extreme as this year’s wildfire emissions have been, they are just the latest escalation in a multi-decade flood of CO₂ pouring out of Canada’s ‘managed’ forests and forestry.”
The New York Times covered Saxifrage’s analysis, zeroing in on the role of logging forests that are already in such trouble and highlighting the looming question of where this is all headed:
“In theory at least, there is a lot more to hemorrhage,” writes David Wallace-Wells in Forests are no longer our climate friends. “The 3.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide released by Canada’s forests since 2001 are only a small fraction of the 100 billion tons stored in its trees and soil.
“It all seems very Canadian. This is a country that promotes itself as a soft-spoken environmentalist leader, endowed with an endless forest landscape, but which nevertheless expands its pipelines, mocks the idea of leaving fossil fuels in the ground and routinely arrests climate activists.”
Canada is one of the few countries with more per capita emissions than the United States,” Wallace-Wells continues. “In fact, its overall carbon production has actually grown since 1990, with the country producing more than 20 per cent more carbon dioxide in 2019 than it did three decades earlier.”
Ouch. It may be incredibly annoying to be chastised by Americans given their preposterous politics and the world’s biggest oil and gas industry, but there’s no denying the U.S. cut climate pollution over the same period.
It would take a herculean effort to ignore the ferocious impacts of climate change this summer. The fossil fuel industry and its political boosters seem game to try.
Enbridge is buying three big American gas companies — a whopping $19 billion strategic decision, doubling the size of its fossil-fuelled utility operations. The company claims the deal will make it the largest gas utility on the continent. Enbridge is also being accused of using “deceptive marketing” in its campaigns against electrification. Environmental Defence, Ontario Clean Air Alliance, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and a group of Ontario residents have filed a complaint with Competition Bureau Canada.
Suncor’s new CEO has announced the company had “a disproportionate emphasis on the longer-term energy transition” and will get back to an oil-centred business strategy. “Waving the white flag on climate change,” Suncor is eliminating the job of chief sustainability officer, among other moves.
In the midst of the worst fire season in modern history, the premiers of Alberta and Ontario stubbornly refuse to acknowledge climate change as a driver. Alberta actually put a surprise freeze on renewable energy projects. The moratorium is ostensibly about concerns over decommissioning renewable energy sites when they close down even though the province has tens of thousands of inactive and orphan wells estimated to cost well over $100 billion to clean up.
The moratorium generated some dark humour — Alberta’s energy minister travelled to Germany to celebrate with the German chancellor and inaugurate a geothermal plant developed by Calgary-based Eavor, all while such projects had been iced by her own government back home. And the freeze raised opposition in unusual quarters. The mayor of Caroline, Alta., was furious its solar project was stranded. "(The province) is doing the same thing as those goobers down in Ottawa,” The mayor told CTV Edmonton. “This project could be toast."
There was dark irony for Pierre Poilievre who had to cancel “axe-the-tax” rallies in B.C. and the Yukon because of fire.
Pierre Poilievre cancels his anti-carbon pricing rally because of wildfires fueled by climate change. You can't make it up.
— Catherine McKenna (@cathmckenna) August 19, 2023
Just remember this when it comes time to vote. #ClimateEmergency pic.twitter.com/j7XsNnaiZX
“While the Conservative party still debates whether climate change is real, the world is on fire,” Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault told Canada’s National Observer. “Mr. Poilievre is forced to cancel events due to climate-fuelled catastrophes but he still can’t bring himself to face reality.”
But, if we can rinse the PM2.5 from our eyes, we find far more encouraging reactions to this chilling hot summer all around the world. “Perhaps this collective experience — in which we all stared the crisis in the face and tasted the disruption to come — will signal a shift in the zeitgeist we’ve long awaited,” writes Seth Klein as he reflects on the precarious terrain between hope and despair.
Ecuador
Ecuador held a referendum and voters decided to stop oil drilling in an important region of the Amazon. About six in ten Ecuadorians defied their president’s plans and Petroecuador will be required to dismantle its operations in Yasuni National Park. “When in history has a popular vote ever forced an oil company to cease active drilling?” asked Steven Donzinger, a lawyer detained for almost three years in the U.S. after helping Indigenous people win a major case in Ecuador. “Never.
“What the referendum in Ecuador teaches us is that democratic processes when coupled with strong grassroots organizing can produce startlingly effective results.”
California
The State of California, historically no slouch at pumping oil, just became the largest economy to endorse the call for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.
"This decision of the State of California is a commitment to take down the single biggest contributor to the climate crisis: the fossil fuel industry,” said Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “California joins the millions of voices across Turtle Island and Mother Earth calling on Biden to follow in the footsteps of our Pacific Island brothers and sisters from the small Island states and negotiate a mandate for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
European Union
The European Union is heading to the next climate summit seeking a deal on phasing out fossil fuels. Reuters got hold of the EU’s draft negotiating position, which reads in part: "The shift towards a climate-neutral economy will require the global phaseout of [unabated] fossil fuels and a peak in their consumption already in the near term."
United Nations
And the UN, for the first time, articulated the need for “phasing out all unabated fossil fuels” in its report as part of the “global stocktake” required by the Paris Agreement. It was no surprise the report found governments are far off track, with a gap of 20 to 23 gigatonnes of CO2 between the current emissions trajectory and the cuts needed by the end of this decade. But it was the first time the UN climate agency openly recognized that meeting the Paris goals will require phasing out fossil fuels, “an acknowledgement that some oil-producing countries may find hard to take,” reports The Guardian.
Nanaimo
Much smaller jurisdictions are stepping up as well. Nanaimo, B.C. became the latest Canadian municipality to ban gas (or other fossil fuel) heating in new buildings.
Massing for protest
Civil society groups like On2Ottawa have been organizing civil disobedience from Victoria to Montreal. Others have disrupted sports events like the US Open. One protester glued their feet to the floor of Arthur Ashe Stadium during a semifinal match. Coco Gauff (who went on to win) said she couldn’t “really get upset” with the climate protesters because she agreed with their cause and “throughout history, moments like this are definitely defining moments.” The tournament is happening amid sweltering temperatures in New York, leading world No. 3 Daniil Medvedev to warn that a “player is going to die” in the heat.
And a huge coalition is massing to demand an end to fossil fuels. Mobilizations are being organized around the world for Sept. 15 to 17, including a march in New York City as world leaders attend the UN secretary general’s climate summit. “End Fossil Fuels — Fast, Fair, Forever” is the rallying cry.
Arctic oil and gas
Perhaps not coincidentally, the Biden administration announced it will cancel seven oil and gas leases in the Arctic and protect over 13 million acres. The leases had been granted by Donald Trump. who bragged about opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling after decades of controversy. In announcing the cancellations, current Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said: “With climate change warming the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, we must do everything within our control to meet the highest standards of care to protect this fragile ecosystem.”
Honest government
I’ll leave you this week with a bit of comic relief. If you thought David Wallace-Wells was harsh on Canada’s climate performance, you ain’t seen this new video from The Juice Media, an Australian outfit that describes itself as “98.9% ‘genuine satire’, responsible for turning bollocks-news into socio-poetical analyses everyone can relate to and understand.”
The Juice has produced one of its signature “Honest Government Ads” about Canada, “land of beauty and home to countless vanishing wonders.” Among them, “The Greenbelt … and trees that aren’t on f@#cking fire.”
This issue of Zero Carbon was produced by Canada's National Observer as part of The Climate Solutions Reporting Project in collaboration with I-SEA, the Trottier Foundation, the Ivey Foundation, the North Family Foundation, the Vohra-Miller Foundation, and the McConnell Foundation.