Just a year ago, the town of Lytton, in southern British Columbia, was ravaged by flames, as the province experienced an unprecedented heat wave. The mercury reached 49.6 degrees, the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada. Three days of fire, a community reduced to ashes, two lives lost, hundreds more brutally uprooted. Lytton is the canary in the mine of climate change, it was repeated, while the ashes of the city were still smoldering.
Lytton is a municipality of just over 200 souls, bordered by an Aboriginal community that has settled on this territory at the confluence of the Fraser River and the Thompson River for millennia. A significant proportion of citizens manage on a modest income. Public services are fragile, difficult to finance. On this plot of land are gathered all the elements that accentuate vulnerability to climate change. All it took was a spark, on the last day of June 2021, to turn the life of this community upside down, which, a year after the fire, is slow to rebuild.
The wounds caused by the flames are still clearly visible, they are struggling to heal. Many displaced citizens are still waiting to be able to rebuild their lives; public infrastructure has been reduced to nothing. The difficult reconstruction of Lytton spells the fate of all communities who must bear the burden of their vulnerability to climate change and environmental disruption alone. Whether it is the erosion of banks, the destruction of natural environments or the compromise of the health of citizens by industrial activity in the name of economic profitability.
The Lytton case is a warning that should ring louder, much louder, here as elsewhere. But it looks like we’ve gotten used to flames, both literally and figuratively. June 2022 will have been the third hottest June on record globally. However, it seems that we are just as comfortable with the normalization of the climate emergency as with the rise of reactionary political forces that precipitate the catastrophe while ordering the hierarchy of human lives.
In this regard, the Supreme Court of the United States, concluding a cycle of particularly destructive decisions, decreed last week in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)that it will be impossible for the Biden administration to implement a national policy capping GHG emissions from the energy sector, through the regulatory powers of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The judgment, signed unsurprisingly by the conservative bloc of the Court, does not prevent the regulation of emissions from each of the power stations taken individually. That said, the decision does indeed cut short the possibility of mobilizing the federal agency to limit emissions from the most polluting power stations in a coherent and concerted manner, in order to accelerate the transition to clean energies.
This represents a significant and depressing victory for corporate interests that aggressively support the status quo in the US energy sector. By destroying a regulatory lever, this victory will force the environmental movement to disperse its forces on the various local fronts, while it is urgent to act on a large scale. We can of course say that this has little to do with what is happening at home. Except that, of course, greenhouse gases ignore national borders, and when the largest emitter in history — we owe it one-fifth of the emissions accumulated from 1850 to 2021 — puts everything in place to miss its reduction of emissions, the matter concerns us all.
The Supreme Court certainly did not invent environmental laxity in the United States — successive governments could all have done much more. Still, it is terrifying to see the judiciary arrogate to itself the power to divide up the capacity to act in climate matters, while the hope of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees is dwindling.
It is also not so clear that we know how to do much better here. The hypocrisy of the Government of Canada (just like that of Quebec) in terms of capping emissions and energy transition is notorious, uninhibited. An arrogance which can be explained, in part, by the weak citizen vigilance. A study recently published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford indicated that Canadians — following the trend of northern societies — inform themselves little about climate change, despite the disasters that are already unfolding. under our eyes. Only 39% of participants surveyed said they were interested in news content on climate change, one of the lowest proportions of all the countries surveyed.
Maybe it’s denial, or maybe it’s the flame habit. One thing is certain, this lack of interest confers a license to destroy those who benefit – politically, economically – from laissez-faire.