In an email last week, Outreach Director Angela Bischoff said 63 groups
and 19 municipalities have endorsed the phaseout call, but it’s running
into opposition from “gas giants”
like Ontario Power Generation, Enbridge Inc., and the Association of
Power Producers of Ontario (APPrO). “We can keep our lights on (and our
beer cold) without using polluting gas-fired generation,” she wrote.
“But we can’t save our climate if we keep using gas for electricity
generation.”
This March, the federal government will deliver what Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has called the most significant budget of our lifetimes. For Prime Minister Trudeau, it will be a moment of truth — will he deliver on the promise of a green & just recovery from covid-19 or will he keep funding the fossil fuel industry? The answer could even trigger a federal election since the Liberals’ minority government will need other parties’ support to pass the budget.
Why a net-zero future depends on the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon
Two people walk their bicycles along a flooded street on the waterfront of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as Hurricane Irma passes through on Sept. 10, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson
Most of us growing up along Canada’s East Coast never worried about hurricane season. Except for those working at sea, we viewed hurricanes as extreme events in remote tropical regions, seen only through blurred footage of flailing palm trees on the six o’clock news.
Today, a warming ocean spins hurricanes faster, makes them wetter and drives them towards Atlantic Canada and even further inland. Hurricanes, winter storms and rising sea levels will continue to worsen unless we slow climate change.
The lifeblood of coastal economies and societies has always been the connection between land and sea, and that’s become more evident with climate change. But this isn’t just a coastal story anymore.
The oceans moderate the world’s climate through the absorption of heat and carbon. And just how much carbon the ocean will continue to absorb for us remains an open question. Whatever we do, it must be grounded in our growing wisdom of the deep connections between life on land and in the sea.
As Canada commits to a net-zero future and plans its post-COVID economic recovery, innovations and investments could backfire if they reduce the ocean’s ability to absorb our excesses.
Links between land and sea
The ocean has always directly affected the climate on land. The well-being of communities across the globe is directly linked to the ocean’s capacity to continue its regulating role of heat and carbon cycles.
Drought in the Prairies is tied to water temperatures in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. When temperatures are most extreme, they signal the possible arrival of a “megadrought.”
In Australia, the occurrence of below-average rainfall, lasting several years, can be predicted by high Indian Ocean temperatures. This dries soils and lowers river flows, resulting in major community impacts such as water restrictions, declines in agricultural production and increased frequency of bushfires.
Fire burns in the grass near Bumbalong, south of the Australian capital, Canberra, on Feb. 1, 2020. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)
The success of Canada’s climate policies will therefore hinge on understanding how ocean processes are changing and society responds. The opportunity is at hand: Canada has committed to net-zero carbon in 2050, and to economic recovery once the COVID-19 pandemic has passed.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addresses the nation after the throne speech on Sept. 23, 2020.
The federal government’s throne speech in September highlighted the oceans as critical to economic recovery post-COVID. The “blue economy,” mentioned in the throne speech, includes fisheries, aquaculture and offshore wind energy.
These two commitments are fundamentally linked: economic recovery and carbon neutrality both depend on the ocean’s ability to continue to regulate climate through heat and carbon absorption.
But the development of national policies on climate change, both in Canada and internationally, has generally ignored the ocean in climate calculations. Scientists lobbied intensely before the Paris Climate Agreement just to make sure the ocean was mentioned.
Ocean carbon and heat absorption also provide a critical natural timescale against which we can measure our effectiveness in battling climate change. Fluctuations in the ocean “carbon sink” — the amount of carbon the ocean can remove from the atmosphere — will change the urgency with which we need to act.
Hurricanes and winter storms will continue to worsen unless we slow climate change. Hurricane Lorenzo hit the Portuguese island of Faial in October 2019. (AP Photo/Joao Henriques)
For example, a waning carbon sink shrinks our window to curb land-based carbon emissions. But a growing sink might give us more time to enact difficult but necessary carbon policies that will have disruptive economic consequences.
There is no time for delay, and rewards come quickly; strong scientific evidence demonstrates that ocean processes controlling this absorption can either weaken or strengthen measurably in just a few decades.
Heat is absorbed physically from the atmosphere and mixed through the ocean on the scales of millennia. But carbon is absorbed through a complex network of chemical and biological processes, including coastal ecosystems such as kelp, mangroves and seagrasses that sustain local economies. Plankton (the tiny plants and animals that feed everything from mussels to whales) store carbon, so their behaviour and biology become a critical factor in the climate discussion.
We urgently need better observations of the ocean’s continued role as our heat and carbon sink.
Shifting carbon sink
The North Atlantic Ocean is the most intense carbon sink in the world: 30 per cent of the global ocean’s carbon dioxide removal occurs right in Canada’s backyard. If we extend Canada’s net-zero calculation to our exclusive economic zone (waters within 200 nautical miles of our coast), our net carbon emissions could change significantly.
Current estimates suggest including the oceans would reduce net emissions and help us get to net zero faster, but what happens if that changes? We must understand fully the processes controlling the “sink” to make the right climate policy choices.
This recalculation could shift our thinking on how to rejuvenate the Canadian economy. Investment in controversial industries such as deep-sea mining, which can supply materials needed for renewable ocean-based energy technologies like those used in offshore wind, can at the same threaten the very ocean ecosystems and food systems on which we depend. Formulating effective policies in the face of these uncertainties is a major challenge. Our path forward must build on our growing understanding of the deep connections between societal and ocean well-being.
Canadian researchers, including those at the Ocean Frontier Institute where we are based, are poised to address the fundamental questions about the ongoing role of the ocean in absorbing carbon, and to help develop appropriate policies. These conversations cut across traditional academic boundaries. In the past, ocean research was separated into the natural and applied, the social and human sciences. Now, we all need to work together.
The role of the ocean has been neglected for too long and must be drawn to the centre of the carbon discussion as we plot our trajectory to net-zero carbon in 2050. Canada’s carbon policies can lead the way internationally if they are grounded in strong, and strongly integrated, natural and social sciences. It is time for the research community to step up in their support.
Friends of the Earth climate campaigner Rachel Kennerly told DeSmog
that Shell was using “smoke and mirrors” in its updated plan.
“There’s one way to stop climate breakdown, and it’s to leave coal,
oil, and gas where they are and ramp up investment in renewables,” she
told DeSmog. “It’s no surprise that Shell wants a business-as-usual
model,” but that only makes it clear that governments “must set high
standards and strict laws” to hold off a “Wild West for extractive
companies, now with added green spin.”
Seattle environmental activist Eileen V. Quigley is one of the authors of Washington state’s official plan to nearly eliminate the use of fossil fuel.
Exactly 10 years after that Republican majority retook the House, Quigley and her colleagues can point to a new and officially endorsed blueprint for how Cascadia — the eco-friendly region comprised of Washington State, Oregon, and B.C. — can successfully kick the fossil-fuel habit.
Working early on from a converted garage with a balky heater, Quigley toiled for years with her policy shop, the nonprofit Clean Energy Transition Institute, to provide technical assistance in support of Washington state’s energy strategy. The 428-page 2021 remake released earlier this month by the Washington Department of Commerce maps out how to eliminate all but a sliver of fossil fuel emissions through a massive shift to renewable energy.
According to Dogwood, “Right now, B.C. hands over a billion tax dollars a year to the oil and gas industry—that’s twice as much as we spend fighting climate change, and five times as much as we get back in royalties.”
The province still needs to investigate the human health impacts of fracking in the province’s northeast as well.
The issue was flagged by Dawson Creek doctors as a potential cause for concern after they saw patients with symptoms they could not explain, including nosebleeds, respiratory illnesses and rare cancers, as well as a surprising number of glioblastomas, a malignant brain cancer.
Selenium poisoning from coal mines is closing down communities water sources, and there are lawsuits emanating from the United States as the toxic water pollutes their rivers. See the video with the story of B.C.’s quiet water contamination crisis.
The eco-friendly region comprised of Washington State, Oregon, and B.C.have a lot of challenges before them if they hope to kick the fossil-fuel habit.
