Category Archives: Environment

7 lessons Canada should use from WW2 to fight the climate emergency

The Christie Mountain wildfire along Skaha Lake near Penticton, B.C., on August 19, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

Seth Klein, Simon Fraser University

Canada’s approach to climate change for the past 30 years is simply not working. Greenhouse gas emissions in the year 2018 (the last year for which we have statistics) were almost exactly where they were in the year 2000.

We have run out the clock with distracting debates about incremental changes. A new approach is needed.

I have spent the last year and a half writing a book, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, about Canada’s Second World War experience, searching for lessons for how to confront the climate crisis and quickly transition off fossil fuels.

Our wartime experience carries a helpful — and indeed hopeful — reminder that we have done this before. We mobilized in common cause across society to confront an existential threat. And in doing so, we retooled our entire economy in a few short years.

But to execute a successful battle, we need a plan. Here then are seven key strategic lessons that emerge from our Second World War mobilization.

1. Adopt an emergency mindset

When we approach a crisis by naming the emergency and the need for wartime-scale action, it creates a new sense of shared purpose. It renews unity across Canada’s confederation, and liberates a level of political action that previously seemed impossible.

Economic ideas once deemed off-limits are newly considered. And we become collectively willing to see our governments adopt mandatory policies, replacing voluntary measures that merely incentivize and encourage change with clear timelines and regulatory fiat to drive change.

Smoky skyline with boat in the foreground. — Metro Vancouver issued an air quality advisory on Sept. 8, 2020, due to the smoke from wildfires burning south of the U.S. border.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

2. Rally the public at every turn

Many assume that at the outbreak of the Second World War everyone understood the threat and was ready to rally. But that was not so.

It took leadership to mobilize the public. In frequency and tone, in words and in action, the climate mobilization needs to look and sound and feel like an emergency.

If our governments don’t behave as though climate change is an emergency — or they send contradictory messages by approving new fossil fuel infrastructure — they are telling the public that it is not one.

3. Inequality is toxic to mass mobilization

A successful mobilization requires that people across class, race and gender share a common cause. The public must have confidence that the rich, middle- and modest-income people are all making sacrifices.

During the First World War, inequality undermined such efforts. Consequently, at the outset of the Second World War, the federal government took bold steps to lessen inequality and limit excess profits.

Such measures are needed again today. Moreover, a 2019 survey of 2,000 Canadians shows that when ambitious climate action is linked to tackling inequality, support goes dramatically up.

4. Create the economic institutions to get the job done

During the Second World War the Canadian economy and its labour force pumped out planes, military vehicles, ships and armaments at a speed and scale that is simply mind-blowing.

The Canadian government (under the leadership of cabinet minister C.D. Howe) established 28 Crown corporations to meet the supply and munitions requirements of the war effort. The private sector had a key role to play in that economic transition, but vitally, it was not allowed to determine the allocation of scarce resources. In a time of emergency, we don’t leave such decisions to the market.

Two men lean over some scientific equipment. — C.D. Howe watches a scientist test the curve of a lens.
(National Film Board of Canada. Photothèque. Library and Archives Canada), CC BY

Howe’s department undertook detailed economic planning to ensure wartime production was prioritized, conducting a national inventory of wartime supply needs and production capacity and coordinating the supply chains of all core war production inputs (machine tools, rubber, metals, timber, coal, oil and more).

The climate emergency demands a similar approach. We must again conduct an inventory of conversion needs, determining how many heat pumps, solar arrays, wind farms, electric buses, etc., we will need to electrify virtually everything and end our reliance on fossil fuels. And we will need a new generation of Crown corporations to then ensure those items are manufactured and deployed at the requisite scale.

5. Spend what it takes to win

A wartime advertisement showing a woman holding a bomb — A poster from the Second World War.
(Library and Archives Canada, C-091436), CC BY

A benefit of an emergency mentality is that it forces governments out of an austerity mindset and liberates the public purse. This year, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s federal debt-to-GDP ratio will rise to about 50 per cent. At the end of the Second World War, it was 108 per cent.

To finance the war effort, the government issued new public Victory Bonds and new forms of progressive taxation were instituted. Yet these new taxes and what remains to this day historic levels of public debt did not produce economic disaster. On the contrary, they heralded an era of record economic performance.

As we confront the climate emergency, financing the transformation before us requires that we employ similar tools.

6. Indigenous leadership, title and rights

Indigenous Peoples played an important role in the Second World War. Today, their collective role in successfully confronting the climate crisis is pivotal.

As mainstream politicians dither on meaningful and coherent climate action, the assertion of Indigenous title and rights is slowing and blocking new fossil fuel projects. Some of Canada’s most inspiring renewable energy projects are also happening under First Nations’ leadership. It is imperative to both honour and support such efforts.

7. Leave no one behind

The Second World War saw over one million Canadians enlist in military service and even more employed in munitions production (far more than are employed in the fossil fuel industry today). After the war, they were all reintegrated into a peacetime economy, including income support to housing to post-secondary training for returning soldiers.

The ambition of these initiatives provides a model for what a just transition can look like today for all workers whose economic and employment security is currently tied to the fossil fuel economy, with a special focus on those provinces and regions most reliant on oil and gas production.

As I read the latest scientific warnings, I’m afraid. I feel deep anxiety about the state of the world we are leaving to our children and beyond. In truth, we don’t know if we will win this fight. But it is worth recalling that those who rallied in the face of fascism 80 years ago likewise didn’t know if they would win.

During the war’s early years, the outcome was far from certain. Yet that generation rallied and surprised themselves by what they could achieve. That’s the spirit we need today.

Seth Klein, Adjunct Professor, Urban Studies Program, Simon Fraser University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Arctic warming: are record temperatures and fires arriving earlier than scientists predicted?

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LuYago/Shutterstock

Christopher J White, University of Strathclyde

It was a grim record. On June 20 2020, the mercury reached 38°C in Verkhoyansk, Siberia – the hottest it’s ever been in the Arctic in recorded history. With the heatwaves came fire, and by the start of August around 600 individual fires were being detected every day. By early September, parts of the Siberian Arctic had been burning since the second week of June.

CO₂ emissions from these fires increased by more than a third compared to 2019, according to scientists at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. The wildfires produced an estimated 244 megatons of CO₂ between January and August, releasing thousands of years’ worth of stored carbon.

The summer of 2019 was already a record breaker for temperatures and fires across the Arctic. Seeing these events unfold again in 2020 – on an even larger scale – has the scientific community worried. What does it all mean for the Arctic, climate change and the rest of the world?

Sooner than predicted?

Even with climate change, the severe summer heatwave of 2020 was expected to occur, on average, less than once every 130 years. Wildfire observations in the Arctic are fairly limited prior to the mid-1990s, but there is no evidence of similarly extreme fires in the years before routine monitoring started.

Higher temperatures globally are likely to be driving the increase in wildfire frequency and duration. But modelling wildfires is difficult. Climate models don’t predict wildfires, and they cannot indicate when future extreme events will occur year-on-year. Instead, climate modellers focus on whether they are able to predict the right conditions for events like wildfires, such as high temperatures and strong winds.

And these climate model projections show that the kind of extreme summer temperatures we’ve seen in the Arctic in 2020 weren’t likely to occur until the mid-21st century, exceeding predictions by decades.

So even though an increasing trend of high temperatures and conditions suitable for wildfires are predicted in climate models, it’s alarming that these fires are so severe, have occurred in the same region two years in a row, and were caused by conditions which weren’t expected until further in the future.

Fire burns the understory of a boreal woodland. — The Arctic is warming at a faster rate than the global average.
Yelantsevv/Shutterstock

Climate feedback loops

So what is causing this rapid change? Over recent decades, temperatures in the most northerly reaches of Earth have been increasing at a faster rate than the rest of the world, with the polar region heating at more than twice the rate of the global average.

The fires caused by these hot, dry conditions are occurring in remote and sparsely populated forests, tundra and peat bogs, where there is ample fuel.

But these extreme events are also providing worrying evidence of climate “feedback loops”, which were predicted to happen as the climate warms. This is where increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to further warming by promoting events – like wildfires – which release even more greenhouse gas, creating a self-perpetuating process that accelerates climate change.

Record CO₂ emissions released from burning Arctic forests during the summer of 2020 will make future conditions even warmer. But ash and other particulates from the wildfires will eventually settle on the ice and snow, making them darker and accelerating their melting by reducing how easily their surface reflects sunlight.

Climate change is not the direct cause of this summer’s fires, but it is helping to create the right conditions for them. The extreme temperatures and wildfires seen throughout the Arctic in 2020 would have been almost impossible without the influence of human-induced climate change – and they are feeding themselves.

Ice surface with black stain from soot. — Soot-stained ice absorbs more of the sun’s heat and melts more quickly.
Trifonov Aleksey/Shutterstock

What about the rest of the world?

When we think of the Arctic, we don’t tend to picture wildfires and heatwaves – we think of snow and ice and long, brutal winters. Yet the region is changing before our eyes. It’s too early to say whether the last two summers represent a permanent step-change, or new “fire regime”, for the Arctic. Only observations over a much longer timescale could confirm this.

But these record-breaking events in the Arctic are being fuelled by human influences that are changing our world’s climate sooner than many expected. With climate models predicting a future where already hot and fire-prone areas are likely to become more so, 2020’s record temperatures paint a worrying trend towards more of the same.

The Arctic is at the frontline of climate change. What we are witnessing here first are some of the most rapid and intense effects of climate change. While the impact is devastating – record CO₂ emissions, damaged forests and soils, melting permafrost – these events may prove to be a portent of things to come for the rest of the world.

Christopher J White, Senior Lecturer in Water & Environmental Engineering, University of Strathclyde
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Small Minded Government To Use Hydrogen To Power Oilsands

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Alberta Tarsands: This photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

JWN Energy claims green hydrogen is set to be competitive with fossil fuels by 2040. Green hydrogen is made from renewable energy such as solar or wind. Blue hydrogen is made using natural gas. It’s more environmentally friendly than traditional fuel sources, but not as friendly as green hydrogen

Last month I published an article saying, Alberta eyes a cleaner future as a hydrogen superpower. It includes a quote by Simon Dyer, deputy executive director of the Pembina Institute, an environmental think tank. “Alberta has a lot of the building blocks in place to be able to compete in this space and develop a thriving hydrogen economy.” He said, “Hydrogen could represent a lifeline to Alberta’s oil and gas industry,”

Naturally, I envisioned Alberta becoming a world leader in producing and distributing hydrogen. It would give us the edge. When the world wanted Alberta’s bitumen, there wasn’t any mention of reaching tidewaters to get it to the market. They came and got it. Now that it’s the dirtiest and least valued oil in the world, no-one wants it. The government, whose budget relies on oil revenue to meet it’s budget, is completely delusional to think we can turn back time, to when it was in high demand.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney feels if markets were more accessible, Alberta could move more oil. He bemoans the province’s lack of pipelines to get the precious cargo to the coast. He’s sure if he had a way to load it onto tankers, that international markets would quickly snap it up. He needs to produce more oil, in fact, as we patiently wait for this opportunity that will never come. Unfortunately, the province has limits.

There is a 100 megatonne annual limit on provincial carbon emissions. In the oil industry, emissions are produced mainly from extraction, transportation and production. Rather than turning Alberta into a world leader in the production and distribution of hydrogen, Alberta will use hydrogen to reduce emissions and increase oil production.

According to a news article, “Alberta will announce, no later than October, a strategy to develop “blue hydrogen” as a cleaner alternative to using natural gas to extract crude at steam-driven oil sands sites, Associate Minister of Natural Gas Dale Nally told Reuters in an interview.

Robert Tremblay of the Alberta Party wrote in the Lethbridge Herald that Alberta is in desperate need of economically viable energy construction projects. This hydrogen project isn’t one of them. We are also in desperate need of politicians who have the vision to lead us into the 21^st century, rather than mire the economy in the mistakes of yesterday.

Mr Tremblay says, “Even better, the domestic and global movement for climate action shows us that these projects are not risky and will not face the severe legal and social headwinds that other energy projects have faced over the past two decades.”

Freeland, Carney May Be Canada’s Last, Best Chance for a Green Recovery

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Photo by Johannes Plenio from Pexels

Old habits are hard to break. Addictions are the toughest of all.

So when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau travelled to Houston in March 2017 and declared fealty to a fossil fuel industry already entering its sunset years, he showed it was bound to be a long, hard climb back to more sober-minded policy-making.

“No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there,” Trudeau told participants at the big CERAWeek oil and gas conference. “The resource will be developed. Our job is to ensure this is done responsibly, safely and sustainably.”

The question for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland as she settles into her new cabinet portfolio is whether that statement still rings true in the context of a global health emergency, an accelerating climate crisis, a mounting wave of fossil fuel divestment and stranded assets, and the meteoric rise of clean energy alternatives.

No Coherent Post-Carbonization Plan

Nearly 3½ years since Trudeau’s speech, the world has changed. Canada, for the most part, has not. But now time is running out for the federal government to get this particular monkey off its back while the new, post-carbon economy takes shape, around the world and in real time. With Canadian jobs, prosperity and innovation hanging in the balance, a new finance minister and the return home of the world’s most respected central banker may add up to the country’s last, best chance to avert the devastation that would result from missing this opportunity.

It isn’t as though Ottawa was taken by surprise. By the time Trudeau spoke in Houston, the early signs of the fossil industry’s now-accelerating collapse were in plain sight. Oil prices had been below historic levels since 2014, with some traders predicting 10 years of poor markets as far back as 2016. Fossil fuel divestment was gaining momentum. Renewable energy investment was rising as technology prices began to plummet, and analysts had already long suspected that electric vehicles would soon be cheaper to own and operate than the internal combustion variety—with dire consequences for the industry that supplies the raw material for gasoline.

Those emerging trends are now a landslide. In late May, the European Union confirmed “green strings” on a €1.75-trillion recovery plan and budget. In mid-July, Democratic nominee Joe Biden added a US$2-trillion climate plan to his campaign platform. And on August 11, Biden named a running mate, California Senator Kamala Harris, who’d proposed a $10-trillion climate plan and boasts a strong record for promoting environmental justice and prosecuting rogue fossil fuel companies.

Those milestones leave Canada as one of the last Western democracies with no coherent plan to cut ties with the industries that brought us a mounting global climate emergency. It’s a position that is helping to shatter Alberta’s fossil fuel-dependent economy, as oil and gas investment declines and jobs evaporate. It will cost Canadians millions of well-paid jobs in every part of the country, as a rapid transition away from carbon picks up speed just about everywhere else.

“If we’re caught flat-footed by a Biden victory, we may watch as entire sectors of our growing clean energy and cleantech sectors pack up and move to greener pastures in the U.S.,” Environmental Defence Executive Director Tim Gray warned in an early August blog post. “Or they may just wither as they fail to secure the government support needed to commercialize innovations.”

But you wouldn’t know it to listen to Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan. In mid-August, with divestment announcements swirling and fossil fuel companies themselves declaring billions in stranded assets, O’Regan said Canada’s tar sands/oil sands producers will boost their output over the shorter and longer terms—even as the country scrambles to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

“There is no way we are reaching net-zero [greenhouse gas emissions] without Alberta,” O’Regan told the Financial Times, adding that fossil industry investment will be critical to funding the country’s energy transition. “Our prosperity and our economy are still highly dependent on it,” he said. “It is what we do.”

Freeland Hints at a Different Path

Which essentially suggested zero policy movement since Trudeau’s Houston speech, in spite of extensive, meticulous analysis on the massive potential to build back better after the pandemic, in Canada and around the world. No change, that is, right up until Freeland herself hinted at a different path.

To [the] question about decarbonization as part of our economic plan going forward: Of course, it has to be part of it,” she said shortly after she was sworn in. “I think all Canadians understand that the restart of our economy needs to be green. It also needs to be equitable. It needs to be inclusive. And we need to focus very much on jobs and growth.”

Of course, the incoming minister’s remarks would include a strong talking point on a green restart—to coin a phrase, because it’s 2020. How her statement of intent translates into policy and action will depend on how well the government navigates the complications on the road to a green recovery.

Those complications begin at the top. Officials in Freeland’s new department are believed to be skeptical that the country will need green stimulus, or possibly any stimulus at all, after the pandemic. And up to now, the incoming minister had apparently been “less convinced than many other Liberals that climate ambition was a decisive factor in their re-election to government last year,” as Globe and Mail columnist Adam Radwanski wrote in mid-July.

But Canadians themselves are telling a different story. Two different questions in the same national poll in late April showed that, by a 23-point margin, respondents were more likely to support specific green job and recovery measures than a more general call to address climate change through post-pandemic stimulus.

In the main survey by Ipsos Canada, part of a wider omnibus poll covering 14 countries, a solid 61% of Canadians agreed pandemic recovery efforts should prioritize climate action. But a separate question commissioned by campaigners at SumOfUs showed 84% public support for a green recovery plan in response to the pandemic. The lower number was almost precisely the proportion of 2019 voters who supported parties with platforms calling for faster, deeper carbon cuts. The higher one showed that green jobs are a political winner in every part of the country.

A Link Between a Green Recovery and Women Workers

Federal policy-makers are also quite rightly focused on the gendered nature of this recession, Radwanski reported two weeks later. At first glance, that line of thought pulls them farther from a green recovery focused on sectors that have not traditionally employed women in large numbers. But as Tim Gray told me in a mid-August interview, high-tech fields are generally doing better at hiring a more diverse work force than legacy industries like oil and gas.

All of which brings to mind the old line about the number of psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb: only one, the joke goes, but the light bulb has to want to change. If Ottawa is really interested in stimulating job creation for a diverse work force while simultaneously bringing the country into the new, low-carbon economy, there’s a road map for that.

National advocacy group Efficiency Canada points to energy efficiency trades training as a ticket out of job loss for women caught in the COVID-19 “she-cession.” Much the same case can be made for the full menu of energy and other technologies on the road to a green, just recovery.

“Within the traditional trades sector, the work force is aging, the sector will be in need of new workers, and it’s going to have to have much greater gender diversity if it’s going to continue to function,” said the group’s policy director, Brendan Haley. “If it’s a challenge to try and move toward a more diverse trades community, there’s no time like the present.”

Moreover, “a gender-balanced recovery is not about trying to protect people who were in precarious, service-based employment by putting them back into that precarious situation,” he added. “It’s to provide higher-wage, longer-term, more secure employment,” whether those jobs are in child care, education, or a sector like energy efficiency.

A pivot toward women in trades and STEM would also help focus a green recovery on jobs and industries on the cusp of meteoric growth, in contrast to fossil fuel industries that are “de-manning” (by which, sadly, they do not mean hiring more women) even faster since the pandemic.

So, there’s no obvious reason for Ottawa to choose between two equally worthy policy objectives. But green recovery advocates may still end up winning all the arguments and losing the final decision. With any addiction, clear thought and visionary planning are early casualties. And Canada’s addiction to the fossil fuel economy dates back decades.

Carney’s Impact?

That’s why the return of Mark Carney—former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, driving force behind the finance sector’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and now United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance—is just the jolt of reality this country needs.

“Trudeau is leaning on the former Goldman Sachs banker as a sounding board for what officials are characterizing as an ambitious economic recovery plan,” Bloomberg News reported earlier this month. “The plan will seek to tackle everything from deficiencies in the social safety net to climate change, infrastructure, and immigration.”

The Bloomberg report, with its mention of climate and infrastructure and its reference to an initial announcement this fall, was the most specific published news on Canada’s green recovery in months.

There is much uncertainty about how Carney’s role will evolve. But the story so far may suggest a government that is considering two of the key steps in addiction recovery: admit you have a problem, and get the help you need. Even if the details have to wait for a September cabinet retreat, and for all the mail-in ballots to be counted in the U.S. election, Ottawa must not foreclose the essential option of making its pandemic and addiction recovery a green one.

This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

Alberta oil shipped through Panama Canal to Atlantic Canada to avert COVID-19 threat to energy supply

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An oil tanker passes fishermen as it moves through a channel in Port Aransas, Texas, in May 2020.
(AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Larry Hughes, Dalhousie University

On July 20, the tanker Cabo de Hornos delivered an estimated 450,000 barrels of crude oil to the Irving Oil refinery’s Canaport storage facilities in Saint John, N.B.

What made Cabo de Hornos’s delivery different was that it was the first time crude oil had arrived in Saint John by ship from Alberta. It came via the Trans Mountain pipeline to the Westbridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby, B.C., and then through the Panama Canal.

By the end of April next year, a second tanker will arrive at Canaport carrying 350,000 to one million barrels of Western Canadian crude oil. In this case, the oil will have come via pipeline from Alberta to a crude oil exporting terminal in Texas or Louisiana.

For most of the Saint John refinery’s 50 years of operation, it has relied on crude oil from sources outside Canada, including Saudi Arabia, the United States, Norway and Nigeria, to meet most of its demand. In 2019, about 80 per cent came from non-Canadian sources, with the remainder from offshore Newfoundland and Labrador by tanker and Western Canada by rail.

Any event — such as a COVID-19 outbreak in any of these oil-supplying countries — that disrupts the flow of crude oil to the refinery threatens the energy security of most people in Atlantic Canada.

Crude oil supply

Relying on non-Canadian suppliers has never been an issue for the refinery. Even during the low points of Canadian-Saudi relations in the summer of 2018 and periods of increased tension in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has been one of its principal suppliers. (Part of this may be attributable to the fact that about 60 per cent of the refinery’s output is shipped to New England and U.S.-Saudi relations could be affected if Saudi Arabia’s supplies to the Saint John refinery were disrupted.)

However, COVID-19 is a concern for those running the refinery. In April, Irving Oil applied to the Canadian Transportation Agency to use tankers from unspecified, non-Canadian suppliers for these two shipments, as per the requirements of the Coasting Trade Act. In each application it was made clear that the company’s overriding concern was the impact COVID-19 could have on about 80 per cent of its crude oil supply shipped from non-Canadian sources.

This is a legitimate concern.

Two cargo ships in the Panama Canal — Cargo ships navigate through Panama Canal waters in Gamboa, Panama, in June 2020.
(AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco)

Globally, the health of ships’ crews has become an increasingly critical issue since the start of the pandemic. In many countries, fear of COVID-19 on ships has stopped shipboard crews from disembarking and returning home to their families, and new crews from boarding ships.

This is forcing shipboard crews to continue working well beyond the end of their contractual period of employment. Reports of mental anguish, self-harm and suicide have also been reported.

A COVID-19 outbreak in an oil-producing country or on board a tanker could disrupt the flow of crude oil to the Saint John refinery and, consequentially, disrupt the flow of its refined products to most of Atlantic Canada and New England.

Oil consumption in Atlantic Canada

Atlantic Canadians consume about 20 per cent more gasoline per capita than Canadians as a whole. With limited access to natural gas, about 31 per cent of the energy used for space heating in the region comes from heating oil (compared with 5.1 per cent nationally).

Irving Oil’s decision to find alternate ways to access Western Canadian crude oil from British Columbia via the Panama Canal or the U.S. Gulf Coast will undoubtedly increase the diversity of its supply. However, Irving’s concerns over COVID-19 and its international suppliers and shippers are equally applicable to Western Canada’s oilfields and any ships used to carry the crude oil.

To be fair, Irving has few other choices: crude-by-rail is a possibility, but there is limited capacity in its rail yard; TransCanada killed the Energy East project and even if it could be revived, it would take years to complete.

While restructuring Atlantic Canada’s energy system to become less reliant on oil is the obvious answer, there are few short-term solutions. For example, although Churchill Falls could meet part of the region’s energy demand for electricity, heating and transportation, it will not be available until 2041, when the electricity sales contract between Newfoundland and Labrador and Québec comes to an end.

Without access to low-cost electric vehicles and easily accessible charging stations, gasoline will remain the principal fuel of choice for transportation in Atlantic Canada. On the other hand, there are alternatives for space heating, notably electricity and wood, each of which already meet about 30 per cent of the region’s residential demand for heating.

In the meantime, Atlantic Canadians can hope for an effective, widely accepted vaccine and prepare for periodic oil supply disruptions.

Larry Hughes, Professor and Founding Fellow at the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance, Dalhousie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Category Archives: Environment

7 lessons Canada should use from WW2 to fight the climate emergency

Arctic warming: are record temperatures and fires arriving earlier than scientists predicted?

Small Minded Government To Use Hydrogen To Power Oilsands

Freeland, Carney May Be Canada’s Last, Best Chance for a Green Recovery

Alberta oil shipped through Panama Canal to Atlantic Canada to avert COVID-19 threat to energy supply