We are at the forefront, in Canada, of a great demonstration of the crass irresponsibility of which the human race is capable.
Just a few days ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its latest report, the conclusions of which are unequivocal. The only way to avoid unprecedented suffering and disasters for human societies is to do everything possible to counter the climate crisis, and do so now. The global temperature has already warmed by 1.09°C compared to the pre-industrial era. On average, almost 20 million people are already forced to leave their homes each year to flee floods, drought, sea level rise, desertification or environmental degradation, according to the United Nations Agency for refugees.
And if the 1.5°C threshold is exceeded, it could become impossible to mitigate the effects of the crisis on the most vulnerable populations and ecosystems. Even adaptation measures and technological innovations have their limits. The IPCC tries, year after year, to convince our leaders not to exceed it.
The news of this latest IPCC report is buried by the war in Ukraine. In addition to the human cost, this conflict has considerable economic consequences. At the start of the year, Russia was still the world’s second largest exporter of crude oil, behind Saudi Arabia. Russia was also the world’s largest producer of natural gas, supplying around 40% of the gas consumed in the European Union, according to the International Energy Agency.
The war, which is largely taking place on the sanctions front, has a direct impact on the price of these resources. With the punitive measures announced week after week by the NATO powers, pressure is mounting for the private sector to follow suit. The multinational Shell, for example, pledged this week to stop using Russian oil and natural gas in its operations. BP had made a similar promise a few days earlier.
With such a rapid drop in supply, the rising cost of gasoline is directly felt by consumers. We are now approaching $2 a liter at the pump, right here in Quebec. In Europe, a significant proportion of homes are heated with natural gas. Lucky that spring is coming. Europe has a few months to adapt to the sanctions war.
Faced with the emergency, some EU countries, Germany first and foremost, are committing to radically accelerating their transition to green energies. The advantage of wind or solar is not only environmental, but geopolitical. Obviously, no one can constitute a monopoly of the sun or the wind. However, the intrinsically local nature of these resources makes them less vulnerable to boom-bust cycles that destabilize economies.
Ukrainian climatologist Svitlana Krakovska argued in late February that the climate crisis and the war in Ukraine are both rooted in the same problem: fossil fuels, and our dependence on them. In 2019, fossil fuels made up nearly 40% of federal state revenue in Russia, which of course comes from sales of their resources around the world. Vladimir Putin’s regime could not have acquired so much power if the energy transition had already been achieved.
Today we are bitterly aware of this, but it is not too late to break, once and for all, with the toxic cycle of dependence on gas and oil. After all, this is not the first time that Western economies have been deeply disrupted by armed conflict. Canada and the United States, for example, had to rapidly transform their manufacturing production during the Second World War. The adaptability of our societies has been further tested with the COVID-19 pandemic. To accelerate the energy transition, it will certainly be necessary to rely on these experiences.
So let’s get back to this crass irresponsibility mentioned at the start of the column. For the past few weeks, Canadian oil and gas lobbyists and their allies have been trying to portray the conflict in Ukraine as an “opportunity” for the Alberta oil sands. Rather than participating in this double war effort – both against the climate crisis and against the Putin regime – we are trying here to postpone the end of our dependence on fossil fuels ever further. The editorial of Globe and Mailon Wednesday, was headlined “The World Needs More Canadian Oil”.
With rising prices at the pump, expect a heavy-handed attack on the relevance of a carbon tax in the coming months. By asking that we stop stigmatizing Alberta oil (among the most polluting in the world), the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, is trying to save his skin on the eve of a vote of confidence which will announces badly. Of course, we ignore the fact that a pipeline project can take a decade to complete and that this is therefore not a solution to the present geopolitical upheavals.
The world is at a crossroads. In response to the conflict in Ukraine and the latest IPCC report, we can either roll up our sleeves to avoid catastrophe, or listen once again to the sirens of the fossil industry lobbies which are leading us straight into the wall. And it is in good part here, in Canada, that this debate will have to be settled.