ALBERTA FIRST! Province Wins Fossil of the Day Award at UN Climate Conference
Alberta took home a coveted Fossil of the Day award, Quebec became co-president of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, and the Saskatchewan government faced a blistering hometown parody of its $764,000 COP28 pavilion as the first week of make-or-break climate negotiations in Dubai drew to a close.
Since 1999, civil society groups attending the annual United Nations climate conference have issued the daily fossil award to the country or negotiating bloc that has done the most to obstruct meaningful progress on emission reductions and climate adaptation. It’s rarely bestowed on anyone who isn’t a party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), so provincial and state governments aren’t usually eligible.
But “today’s winner managed to outshine their peers and earn the rare honour, or should we say dishonour, of being a subnational government getting a fossil of the day,” organizers said in a release. “The province of Alberta, Canada has come to COP with one mission, to sabotage the negotiations.”
“I don’t think we could have won this award without being the deadliest death economy in all of the world, in all of Canada,” said Dr. Angele Alook of York University, Nehiyaw Iskwew and member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, who accepted the award on Alberta’s behalf. “We like to poison the water, kill the forests, and violate Indigenous Peoples’ rights.”
The release cites Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who arrived at the COP last Friday in the company of a reported [pdf] 100 fossil industry delegates, as a politician whose “previous work as a fossil fuel lobbyist was good experience for disrupting Canada’s stance on the fossil fuel phaseout debate at COP. But she can’t take all the credit, she had the support of an extensive delegation of oil and gas representatives.”
CBC adds that the award was partly a response to Alberta’s decision to slap a seven-month moratorium on new solar and wind development earlier this year. The announcement sidestepped the concerns of some rural municipalities and cost the province an estimated C$33 billion in economic activity and 24,000 jobs, at a moment when Alberta was leading the country in renewable energy deployment.
“Alberta, we don’t want you to end up like your namesake, the long-extinct Albertosaurus,” Climate Action Network-International says in the release. “Listen to what people in your own province want—a plan to transition from dependency on volatile fossil fuels to the opportunities of clean energy, in a way that protects workers—or you’ll get left behind.” |Read more https://www.theenergymix.com/alberta-first-province-wins-fossil-of-the-day-award-at-un-climate-conference/ | theenergymix.com/alberta-first…
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