I spoke to Bowen’s Rotary Club this week (28 March) about two monumentally important – and intimately related -- events that happened within days of each other just one month ago: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the release of the newest, most shocking UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/).
My colleague, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Christiana Figueres, describes perfectly the link between these events: “The atrocities in Ukraine have been financed by our addiction to oil and gas. We can and must tackle both the acute and the chronic crises together.”
I argued to the Rotary Club that this is not a time, as Canadians, to double down on extracting more dirty oil and deepen our, and the world’s, fossil fuel addiction, but an inflection point to transition away from it.
The IPCC Report could not be any clearer: the science is unequivocal, delayed action risks triggering impacts so catastrophic that our world will become unrecognizable. We have a very narrow window to realize a livable future. Governments, civil society and business must all step up together. There is no alternative.
UN Secretary General António Guterres said about this report: “I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this. Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership... the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.”
The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) predicts that we could see a billion climate refugees over the next decades. As we watch the suffering and disruption of more than 3 million Ukrainian refugees right now, try to imagine the impact on our world of 300 times that number.
And let’s not forget that in 2020, fossil fuel pollution killed three times as many people around the world as COVID did.
With what all of us here on Bowen and in British Columbia have seen over the past year of fires, floods, extreme heat and cold, we shouldn’t need another reason to act. But if we did, this war in Ukraine provides even more compelling motivation to transition away from fossil fuels.
The fact that Vladimir Putin has financed this war with the oil and gas sales that account for 60 per cent of Russia’s export earnings reinforces this conclusion.
Canada’s Environment Minister, Steven Guilbeault, has been exactly right in advocating the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy as fast as possible.
Fortunately, as 350.org founder, Bill McKibben lays out this week in The New Yorker magazine, the price of renewable energy has dropped by 90 per cent over the past decade making it the cheapest power on the planet. Credible studies show we could transition away from fossil fuels quickly enough to even meet the critical 1.5 degree C target set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Although Canada has enormous reserves of oil in Alberta’s tar sands - some 173 billion barrels - it is also true that exploiting that oil would heat the planet nearly half a degree Celsius. That would be a ‘game over’ scenario for most life on the planet caused by Canadians, who comprise only 0.5 per cent of the world’s population. We just can’t do that to every other country and species on Earth.
Canada’s fossil fuel reserves total 167,000 trillion watts, but Canada also has 71,000 trillion watts each year of potential renewable energy from wind and solar power alone. This doesn’t even include BC’s vast hydropower. That means that in less than two and a half years, Canada can produce more energy from renewable sources than the total amount of energy in Alberta’s tar sands.
There is simply no alternative to taking this difficult decision now to shift from dirty oil to clean solar, wind and hydro.
Canada and the U.S. showed during World Wars I and II they could massively reconfigure and transform their industrial production to win those wars. Canada must now step up to be a global leader in solar and wind energy and not exploit this situation by simply replacing Russia’s oil, like a drug dealer to sustain the addiction of others.
Learning from this war in Ukraine to turn away from fossil fuels once and for all would be one way to support and honor the courage and sacrifice of the Ukrainian people.
