Globe 2020 challenged to reconcile action on climate with supporting jobs for Canadians
Credit to Author: Derrick Penner| Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2020 02:25:03 +0000
Best-selling climate-change author David Wallace-Wells pointedly called out Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to “stop living in climate hypocrisy” in his call to action at the Globe 2020 conference on business and sustainability.
The world has five times more fossil fuel in reserves than could be burned “without pushing the climate past the point of catastrophe,” Wallace-Wells said, telling the conference that countries can’t afford to continue developing oil reserves at the same time as they reduce carbon emissions.
“We have to stop living in climate hypocrisy, too, where we declare an emergency, as Canada did, and the very next day approve an oil pipeline or consider the new oilsands projects Prime Minister Trudeau is considering,” he added.
However, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi suggested “it’s time to turn the Instant Pot to quick vent and release the pressure on these conversations a little bit” and have a more pragmatic discussion on how to reconcile action on climate change with preserving people’s livelihoods.
Tuesday’s session at which the two men spoke was setting the stage for the Globe conference by setting up the challenge of climate change, which Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, called an “all encompassing, universal force.”
The Globe conference draws about 1,900 business people, politicians, non-profit leaders and climate experts to the Vancouver Convention Centre to talk about how business can take action on climate change and other environmental concerns.
If countries fail to meet their goals to cut carbon and hopefully hold global warming below two degrees Celsius by 2050, the result could be 200 million or more climate refugees fleeing places that are too hot for habitation and the permanent loss of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, Wallace-Wells said.
“There are huge obstacles to action on climate change,” Wallace-Wells said, but urged those at the conference to “see that we remain authors of this story.”
This year’s conference comes as tensions rise over climate action, including climate-action protests and protests against pipelines being built in B.C.
Environment Minister Johathan Wilkinson said he is motivated by how his own teenage daughter comes home and “literally every night … says ‘dad, you’re not doing enough to fight climate change.’”
However, Wilkinson argued the Trans Mountain pipeline is a piece in Canada’s eventual transition away from fossil fuels.
“I think it is important that we are testing everything that we’re doing around the lens of ensuring that when we are producing hydrocarbon fuels during this transition, that we’re doing it in the least environmentally impactful way we can,” Wilkinson said.
Coming from a city that has suffered economic harm from the downturn in oil, Nenshi told the conference Calgarians deserve to have a discussion about the future of their key industry.
“This has been incredibly dislocating, and for some, incredibly jarring,” Nenshi said, in a city where a quarter of office towers are vacant. “People are very uncertain about the future and that’s boiling over, and justifiably, with frustration.”
Nenshi said single projects, such as the Trans Mountain expansion or Teck Resources Ltd.’s Frontier oilsands mine proposal, “carry all of the sins of the carbon economy.” The federal government is due to make a decision on approval or rejection of Teck by the end of the month.
Nenshi said “even climate optimists” estimate the world will still be burning 85 million barrels of oil a day in 2050.
“Does it make sense for that last barrel of oil we burn in the world at some point in the future to be a barrel of Canadian oil, as opposed to one from somewhere else?”