Mr. Speaker, next week in Fairbanks, Alaska is an all-important meeting of the Arctic Council where eight nations of the Arctic will be holding a meeting, represented by foreign ministers.

It is clear, based on the most recent science, that the Arctic is the fastest warming region in the world and that thawing permafrost and melting ice represent a threat not just to the future of the Arctic but to global climate systems.

Will Canada stand firmly with the Nordic nations in reaffirming the urgency of reductions of greenhouse gases and meeting the Paris agreement, no matter what the Trump administration might say?

Justin Trudeau – Prime Minister

Mr. Speaker, Canada is proud of its commitments under the Paris agreement. We continue to lead the way, not only in having ambitious targets but in ensuring we have a plan to meet those targets.

That is what is important, particularly important among Arctic nations. As the hon. member pointed out, Arctic populations and ecosystems are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than just about anywhere else in the world.

That is why we are working very strongly with all our friends and allies to ensure leadership on the environment that goes beyond our nation’s borders and that demonstrates our true commitment to protecting both the economy and the environment for generations to come.

The post Parliament: Question to PM Trudeau on whether he will reaffirm Canada’s commitment to meeting the Paris Agreement appeared first on Elizabeth May.

The keynote, based on the book ‘Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation’ assert that four technology categories will disrupt energy and transportation by:

1- Batteries / Energy Storage
2- Electric Vehicles
3- Self-Driving Vehicles
4- Solar Energy

The outcome of the Clean Disruption is that by 2030:

• All new vehicles will be electric.
• All new vehicles will be autonomous (self-driving).
• Oil will be obsolete
• Coal, natural gas and nuclear will be obsolete
• 80+ per cent of parking spaces will be obsolete.
• Individual car ownership will be obsolete.
• All new energy will be provided by solar (and wind)

Clean Disruption is a technology disruption. Just like digital cameras disrupted film and the web disrupted publishing, Clean Disruption is inevitable and it will be swift.

Copyright © 2016 by Tony Seba

More info at: http://tonyseba.com

The post Recommended Viewing: Tony Seba – Clean Disruption – Why Energy & Transportation will be Obsolete by 2030 appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Paris will be COP21. After decades of procrastination and missed deadlines, delays and industry sabotage, the Paris negotiations represent a real deadline. It is no longer possible to imagine a second chance to get this right. The levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have reached concentrations that make avoiding the worst and most catastrophic climate futures a matter of urgency.

The negotiations have made an effort to learn from past mistakes. The Copenhagen Accord, a stage managed US production achieved outside of the UN process, allowed nations to leave the climate negotiations with a promise to announce their domestic targets later. All nations agreed in the Copenhagen text to take collective action to avoid global average temperatures from rising above 2 degrees C what they were prior to the Industrial Revolution, and preferably to hold them below 1.5C. But as the pledges were analyzed, the scientists quickly realized that even if every country met its Copenhagen target, global average temperature would soar right past 2 degrees — to 4 degrees or higher. While 2 degrees C does not sound like much in a country with winter temperatures in much of the country well below 30 degrees C and summer temperatures swinging to above 30 degrees, it is important to remember that global average temperatures do not budge much at all. In fact, the difference between the global average temperature today and in the last ice age is only 5 degrees C. A 2 degree shift in global average temperature is huge.

In Lima at COP20, the negotiators decided that the targets must be tabled well in advance of the December 2015 conference. All countries, including Canada, agreed that planned emission and adaptation targets should be submitted to the U.N.by March 31, 2015. The goal of achieving a binding comprehensive treaty by early December 2015 requires substantial advance analysis.

Canada missed submitting targets by the March 31 deadline, but did announce them late Friday May 15, just before the Victoria long weekend. The upcoming G7 summit will be in Germany and Angela Merkel plans to make climate a focus. Apparently, Stephen Harper realized he could not get through a G7 with no target. So Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq has announced the weakest target in the G7.

Canada announced a commitment to a 30% reduction against 2005 levels by 2030. We used to have the same target as the US – adopted in Copenhagen. The U.S. is on track to hit its 2020 target of 17% below 2005 levels. Harper, having chosen the same goal as Obama, never put a plan in place to hit the target. By 2020, Canada is likely to have virtually the same emissions as we did in 2005 – despite substantial efforts by provincial governments. Even the GHG reductions achieved by Ontario shutting down all coal-fired power plants are erased as the oil sands expand.

The new US target is 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025. The real leader is the EU with a target to reduce 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. (Note the base year shifts. Cuts below 1990 levels are deeper and more meaningful).

Along with the announced target, Aglukkaq announced a few measures to be taken at the federal level. However, there will still be no regulation of carbon dioxide from the oil sands. The federal government will only regulate methane from the oil sands. This is not irrelevant, but it is not the major source of GHG pollution. The feds will also regulate the production of chemicals and nitrogen in fertilizer, as well as natural gas fired electricity.

Looking at the totality of announced federal action no credible reviewers believe this new target – weak as it is – can be realized. In fact, it appears that Harper is now prepared to abandon his previous opposition to what he once attacked as “hot air” credits. Leaks from the federal background papers confirm Harper anticipates buying credits from reductions achieved in developing countries. While such credits are open to fraud, properly designed, they could be of benefit in assisting poorer nations with multiple goals. For example, supplying solar cookers to villages where women spend most of their day scouring for firewood and then suffer ill health from poor air quality, cooking over wood burning stoves inside their homes, assists in improving health, reducing poverty, assisting women and reducing GHG. But when Minister Aglukkaq was asked at her press conference about whether the federal plan included buying credits, she ran from the podium.

We need a much more aggressive target for GHG reductions and we need a plan to achieve those targets. We need to constantly make the case that such a plan will create good Canadian jobs and boost our economy. Fortunately, there’s an election between now and when the Paris negotiations take place. We must ensure that climate becomes a key election issue.

The post Harper’s new climate targets – same emperor, same clothes appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Having worked on the climate issue from 1986, back when it was a future threat, to present times, where it is the stuff of daily headlines, I have to admit that it would be easy to feel discouraged. We have squandered decades that would have allowed humanity to avoid the climate crisis altogether.

Still, I am more optimistic now than I have been in the last nine years. Nine years ago—2006—was also a year that changed everything.

It was the 2006 election which allowed Stephen Harper to form a minority government—even though cooperation between the Liberals and the NDP would have prevented this. (Conservatives had only 124 seats, the Liberals had 103 and the NDP had 29. Imagine what our country would have been spared had the opposition parties been willing to work together.)

My non-partisan approach to politics at Sierra Club had made me fully aware of how firmly Harper opposed climate action. It was recognizing the horrors of partisanship that led me to leave my position of 17 years as executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and run for leader of the Green Party. I knew, especially given the climate threat, that we needed to find a new kind of politics.

I had tried to brief Stephen Harper for years. In the spring of 2005, I had a very revealing conversation with a Conservative MP who was actually in favour of climate action and believed his ideas would be in his party’s platform. I urged him to get Harper to make the commitment to Kyoto. Despite being sympathetic himself, he said, “We will never do that. Stephen will always see Kyoto as one of those UN things.”

And so it was that even with only a minority, with no vote in the House, within the first few weeks of becoming prime minister, Stephen Harper cancelled our commitment to Kyoto and the climate plan put in place less than a year before. That Canada had no meaningful plan to meet Kyoto from when we signed on in 1997 until 2005 was appalling. But the plan put forward in spring of 2005 would, according to the Pembina Institute, have led to Canada getting fairly close to our Kyoto target.

With no analysis and no debate, however, the whole climate plan was shut down and billions of dollars in funding cancelled. Harper dispatched his first environment minister, Rona Ambrose, to a global climate negotiation which she, ironically, chaired in spring 2006. The mantle of President of the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was one occupied ex officio by Canada’s Minister of Environment. We had hosted the negotiations in Montreal, scant months before and held the presidency until the next Conference of the Parties could be held. Rona Ambrose inherited the mantle from Stéphane Dion. Other nations could barely believe that Canada was prepared to flout our legally binding Kyoto target (6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012) and replace it with 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2020 (which it’s now clear we won’t meet).

As Harper took a machete to our climate goals, gradually we seem to have forgotten we ever had them at all. It is as though we have a collective amnesia.

Did we ever have a plan? People, even MPs, seem to have completely forgotten. Harper has even cancelled his own weak targets to replace them with weaker ones as he did in Copenhagen in 2009. The House of Commons passed Bruce Hyer’s private members’ climate bill, Bill C-311, in 2010—only to have the unelected Senate kill it prior to a single day of committee meetings. (My friend and fellow Green Bruce Hyer, MP for Thunder Bay-Superior North, was an NDP MP when he managed to twist enough arms to get the bill passed.) The Senate had never abused its nominal power to kill a bill passed by the elected House in its entire history. But amnesia settled in.

Harper decreed that climate scientists were not allowed to speak with the media—so reporting on climate dropped by 70 percent. He violated a practice of all previous governments in disallowing opposition MPs inclusion on Canadian delegations to international meetings—especially on climate. And so opposition parties stopped sending MPs to the Conferences of the Parties. The manipulation to a deliberate forgetting was skilful and far more effective than I would have ever imagined.

It has become familiar framing to say that Canada lacks federal leadership—or that Stephen Harper has not been active on climate change. If only it were so. In fact, Stephen Harper has been hyper-active—boosting GHG emissions from a constant growth and expansion policy for the oil sands, while destroying any science to study or programmes to reduce GHG emissions at home.

In Lima at COP20, Canada agreed that all countries should table their planned emission and adaptation targets with the UN by March 31, 2015. The goal of achieving a binding comprehensive treaty by early December 2015 requires substantial advance analysis. Incredibly, not only did Canada miss the deadline, Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq has tried to blame the provinces for federal failure. She claims the data on GHG emissions from provincial governments is needed before Canada can develop its targets. The national media never asked the obvious question: How did the European Union coordinate 28 individual nation states into a shared submission by the deadline, while Canada could not handle talking to 10 provinces and 3 territories?

The so-called “sector by sector” approach isn’t a climate plan; it’s spin. Harper claims credit for a GHG emission downturn that was entirely related to the 2008 financial crisis, and which ever since has shown a steady rise. Stephen Harper signed on to the Copenhagen weak target without any intention of meeting it.

From my vantage point, as a longstanding participant in the annual UN Conferences of the Parties, Harper’s actions amount to sabotage.

So why am I optimistic?

The rest of the world is moving. The USA and China have announced targets. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) are all calling for carbon pricing and an end to fossil fuel subsidies. The IEA is calling for two-thirds of all known fossil fuel reserves to be left in the ground until at least 2050.

Last year was the first one in which GHG levels did not rise globally, in the absence of a major financial disaster; 2014 was also the first year in which global investments in renewable energy outpaced investments in fossil fuels. These are bets made by people who want to make money. They are not a manifestation of global altruism. In some parts of the world, the lifetime cost of a new solar facility is actually cheaper than the lifetime cost of new coal.

And my single largest source of optimism for success in Paris is the knowledge that Stephen Harper will not be Canada’s prime minister by October 20. We will have scant time—five weeks—to pull the new parliament together to re-orient Canada. I am encouraged that we will have many more Green MPs, working across party lines to make up for lost time—nine years of lost time. Canada’s delegation will once again include opposition parties and civil society organizations, and give a prominent role to First Nations and youth. We need to be the country at COP21 that twists arms and pushes others to deeper and stronger commitment. All this we can do. 2015 is the year that changes everything.

Elizabeth May is the Member of Parliament for Saanich Gulf-Islands and the leader of the Green Party of Canada.

Originally published in Focus Online.

The post 2015: the year that must change everything appeared first on Elizabeth May.

I learned climate science from Environment Canada scientists back in the 1980s when I worked for the federal Minister of Environment. No one thought there was controversy about the basic science as we organized the first major international conference on the threat in Toronto in June 1988. The myth of doubt had not yet been invented, nor heavily financed to delay action.

Procrastination, corporate lobbying and lack of political will has led to a tragic loss of more than two decades when actions would have been easier, greenhouse gases could have been reduced before hitting the current 400 parts per million (ppm), before condemning glaciers and sea ice and coral reefs and other ecosystems to dangerous levels of damage. Over the previous one million years, carbon dioxide concentrations never exceeded 280 ppm. Humanity has already changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, just as carbon dioxide mixing with ocean water is changing the acidity of our oceans.

The process of negotiating a treaty to move the world to a low-carbon future has been on-going since 1992. The third Conference of the Parties (COP3) took place in Kyoto, giving the protocol its name. Kyoto in its second phase still exists, but Canada dealt it several mortal blows.

The next big negotiation deadline was 2009 at COP15 in Copenhagen. That COP was a train wreck of an event. It sowed deep seeds of distrust as President Barack Obama took a handful of big industrialized countries, plus China, into a hotel room – outside the integrity and transparency of the UN process – and cooked up the bogus “Copenhagen Accord.” The targets were not legally binding but “politically binding.” It was accompanied with a blatant attempt to bribe the developing world into not protesting rising seas and droughts by providing a new Green Climate Fund, with promises to ramp up to $100 billion/year by 2020.

Prime Minister Harper personally attended Copenhagen, although he was not present as Obama crafted the back-room deal. Harper agreed to adopt the same target as the United States – 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. This amounted to the second weakening of Canada’s pledge since Harper became prime minister.

While Obama has delivered the US pledge, sadly, Canada has totally missed the target. Using Environment Canada’s own figures, Canada is set to miss its Copenhagen target of 126MT reductions by 116MT. With only five years left before Harper’s pledge falls due, his administration has failed to establish any plan to meet it. It will be challenging for any government to meet that target now.

Meanwhile, the world’s scientific body reviewing climate action, the IPCC, found that even if all Copenhagen targets were met, the world would shoot past 2 degrees risking far more catastrophic impacts.

Much more dramatic action is required. In fact, the IPCC is now calling for the world to cease using fossil fuels for energy entirely by the end of this century. The ramping up of renewable and green sources of energy is urgent.

The global negotiations continue. The deadline for the acceptance of the treaty that failed in Copenhagen will be next year at COP21 in Paris. COP20 last December in Lima was supposed to create an ambitious agenda propelling the last phase of negotiations forward. The Peoples Climate March and UN Climate Leaders Summit last September were all about injecting momentum into Lima. Still, COP20 fell far short of what is needed.

The tensions created by Copenhagen are still with us. At COP20, industrialized countries wanted the developing world to accept texts leaving out the litany of broken promises from industrialized countries, while giving the rich a weak set of self-selected targets of dubious enforceability. The Lima negotiation’s overtime hours only slightly improved a weak decision. References to assistance to developing countries and a call for more action for industrialized countries were mere sops to the chorus of complaints.

Before next year’s COP in Paris, Canada’s elections will likely deliver a new Prime Minister with a Parliament with a greener hue. It is my hope that the new Parliament, post-2015 election, will place Canada in the lead. We can be the country that saves the Paris talks. We know how to do this. Canadian negotiators, given proper instructions to negotiate the clear, aggressive and equitable climate treaty the world needs, can do it.

Between now and December 2015, we have to focus on the parallel challenges – get our own house in order by implementing meaningful climate action domestically while being prepared to play the role of global leader we once delivered for the world. Greens will ensure that climate is a key issue in the upcoming election.

Originally published in the HillTimes.

The post 2015: The Year of Climate Challenges appeared first on Elizabeth May.

She pointed out that if she had said that to me back then, it would have been pretty remarkable. She was three years old in 1986.

It is one of the moments that horrifyingly brings home to me that I have been working to arrest the threat of climate change a very long time – and not succeeding.

In June 1988, I worked within Environment Canada to organize the first international scientific climate conference in Toronto. It made an impact – that same year, the United Nations created a scientific organization to keep politicians informed of the growing threat, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The world appeared to be off to a pretty good start back in 1992 when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed by every nation on the planet at the Earth Summit.

Procrastination, corporate lobbying and lack of political will have led to a tragic loss of more than two decades when actions would have been easier, greenhouse gases could have been reduced before hitting the current 400 parts per million, before condemning glaciers and sea ice and coral reefs and other ecosystems to dangerous levels of damage.

Over the previous one million years, carbon dioxide concentrations have never exceeded 280 ppm. We have already changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, just as carbon dioxide mixing with ocean water is changing the acidity of our oceans.

The process of negotiating a treaty to move the world to a lowcarbon future has been going on since 1992. The third Conference of the Parties (COP3) took place in Kyoto, giving the protocol its name. Kyoto, in its second phase, still exists, but Canada dealt it several mortal blows.

The next big negotiation deadline was 2009 at the Conference of Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen. It was a train wreck of an event. It sowed deep seeds of distrust as U.S. President Barack Obama took a handful of big industrialized countries, plus China, into a hotel room – outside the integrity and transparency of the UN process – and cooked up the bogus “Copenhagen Accord.” The targets were not legally binding but “politically binding.”

It was accompanied by a blatant attempt to bribe the developing world into not protesting rising seas and droughts by providing a new Green Climate Fund, to ramp up to $100 billion a year by 2020. It was primarily designed to give Obama political cover in Washington to pass the Waxman-Markey climate bill. But in the end, the White House pulled its support for Waxman-Markey.

By then, the bill was so riddled with compromise, no one could really mourn its loss. Plus, trying to give that hopeless bill cover sabotaged global negotiations.

So here we are five years later in Lima at COP20. The deadline for the acceptance of the treaty that failed in Copenhagen will be next year at COP21 in Paris. The tensions created by Copenhagen are still with us. As is the distrust.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s pledge to cut emissions has been ignored by his administration and we have no hope of reaching it based on current plans.

Last year at COP19 in Warsaw, the failure to meet promised Green Climate Fund commitments took over the COP, with the popular button of the conference being “WTF?” – “Where’s the financing?” At COP20, industrialized countries wanted the developing world to be happy with text that leaves out such annoying promises, while giving the developed world a weak set of self-selected targets of dubious enforceability. The Lima negotiations went into overtime hours, adjourning more than 36 hours late. The deadlock was predictable and the compromise only slightly improves a weak Lima decision.

For years, I have been the only opposition MP at COP. Before next year’s COP in Paris, Canada’s elections will likely deliver a new prime minister with a Parliament with a greener hue – more Green MPs committed to working cooperatively. It is imperative that at least one opposition MP knows the negotiated trail that got us to this point.

Despite the tortuous path and dashed hopes of other COPs, we have no alternative. There is no other forum to navigate a course to global action for a carbon neutral world. We need to see our way through the thicket to reach the clear, aggressive and equitable climate treaty the world needs.

Elizabeth May is the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands and leader of the Green Party of Canada. Originally published in the Victoria Times Columnist.

The post Climate talks: A long road from Lima to Paris appeared first on Elizabeth May.

As greenhouse gases build in the atmosphere, the patterns that sustained a hospitable climate for the development of human civilization over the last many millennia are being disrupted.  The world has always known punishing droughts, floods and extreme events that disrupt agriculture, such as sudden early frost, or early thaw followed by a cold snap.  Weather is the constant worry for farmers, but climate was not something they have had to worry about – until recently.

The increase in extreme weather events due to human-generated greenhouse gas pollution, compounded by loss of forests, is already threatening global food production.  The agencies within the United Nations that monitor food security —  World Health Organization, World Food Programme, and Food and Agriculture Organization –  recently reported in their annual 2014 report that 805 million people already experience food insecurity. The good news is that that number is down 0ver 200 million since the early 1990s, and down 100 million in the last decade.  Nevertheless, the UN agencies agree that the climate crisis could reverse that progress:

“If we fail to act, we risk a downward spiral in which poverty and climate impacts reinforce each other. It is the poorest communities that will suffer the worst effects of climate change, including increased hunger and malnutrition as crop production and livelihoods are threatened. And poverty is a driver of climate change, as desperate communities resort to unsustainable use of resources to meet current needs. “

The Danish think tank, Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, has calculated the cost of climate change on food production over the last few decades:

“Historical studies demonstrate that climate change has already had negative impacts on crop yields. Maize, wheat and other major crops have experienced significant climate-associated yield reductions of 40 megatonnes per year between 1981 and 2002 at the global level (Lobell and Field 2007)….

“Flooding due to climate variability is a significant problem for rice farming, especially in the lowlands of South and Southeast Asia. Flooding already affects about 10 to 15 million hectares of rice fields in South and South East Asia, causing an estimated $1 billion USD in yield losses per year. These losses could increase considerably given sea level rise as well as an increase in the frequencies and intensities of flooding caused by extreme weather events (Bates et al. 2008).”

One of the surprises of the warming world has been the way in which disappearing Arctic ice has created more extreme storms around the world.  Scientists at Rutgers University have identified the mechanism that over thousands of years kept the jet stream moving at mid-latitudes in a relatively predictable fast, east west clip.  The jet stream used to stay quite horizontal at the mid point between the Arctic and the equator.  The Rutgers research points to the mechanism that propelled that behaviour by the jet stream was the temperature differential between the cold Arctic and the hot equator.  As the Arctic ice melts and as its waters warm, the temperature differential has stalled.

In place of the relatively predictable east west jet stream, we are now experiencing the jet stream in long and lazy loops.  These jet new stream patterns now remain sitting on large areas of the northern hemisphere for a very long time.  Low pressure zones stick around for months.  Just on the other side of the stream, high pressure zones sit on other regions.  This summer, that pattern explains why central Canada was unseasonably cool while Atlantic Canada and British Columbia were unseasonable hot and dry.  Or a few years ago, in 2012, why Russia was experiencing drought and flames while Bangladesh was under water.  The loopy jet stream is also the likely cause of the intensity and abnormal pattern of Super storm Sandy.

Keeping ice covering the Arctic is critical if we are going to reduce the potential for the very worst potential impacts of climate change. While we must reduce greenhouse gases as rapidly as possible, we also must accelerate adaptation plans for food production – in Canada and globally.  We need to both aggressively and right now, we are ignoring both challenges.

Originally published in Embassy News, October 8, 2014

The post Climate Change is a threat to food production – one we are ignoring appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Stephen Harper’s branding of the Arctic has been a key part of his remaking of the Canadian identity. According to Paul Wells in his analysis of how Harper worked his way to a majority (The Longer I’m Prime Minister), Stephen Harper set out to re-make Canada’s identity by spinning traditional symbols into Conservative emblems. The insertion of “royal” into the military titles, the revisionist history that inspired spending $28 million on the bicentennial of the War of 1812, and any other homage to war dead while ignoring the plight of those living with the wounds of war, and the re-branding of the Arctic.

The Prime Minister has made it an annual summer ritual to travel to our North. His core messages are about protecting Canadian sovereignty, although the enduring visual may be his jumping on an all-terrain vehicle while declaring he “make(s) the rules.”

The prime minister’s Arctic is muscular. No “fragile North” for him.     Harper declared “use it or lose it.”   “Use it” is not a call to greater eco-tourism.  The prime minister’s vision is linked to opening up resources in oil, gas and minerals.

Yet, his promises for deep sea ports, ice breakers and new research stations are now more noted as absent than fulfilled.

For example, the ice-breakers were promised in 2005 and again in 2008, and have been delayed once again.  China, with no Arctic coastline at all, now has icebreakers in Canada’s waters while our Coast Guard’s Amundsen is in dry dock.

The construction of the deepwater port naval port in Nanisivik promised in 2007 has yet to be begun, despite promises it would begin two years ago.   Also two years ago, the Prime Minister announced a major new satellite project, the Radarstat Constellation Mission.  It now appears to be mired in budgetary delays.

The other aspect of Harper’s vision is of a militarized Arctic.  In February 2009, Defence Minister Peter MacKay and the prime minister crowed about an alleged incident involving Russian aircraft.  Their version of events was that two Russian jets violated Canadian airspace, that the CF-18s were scrambled to instruct the Russians to stay out of our airspace – or as MacKay put it – to “turn tail and head back to its own airspace,”

The Russians painted a far more banal version of events describing the Canadian reaction as “farce.”

Every trip to the Arctic involves promises of deep sea ports, a satellite project, ice breakers and new research stations.

Meanwhile, there is a very different picture of the Arctic.  It is of a canary in a coal mine: a global warning sign of dangerous levels of climate change. Ironically those very policies with which Stephen Harper is most identified – rapid exploitation of fossil fuels – speeds the rate of change in Canada’s Arctic.

My sense is that globally, it is the image of a stranded polar bear on an ice floe that says “Arctic” to the world.  A politician on an ATV riding through a sensitive eco-system will not be an image that comes to mind.

The CBC series on the search for the Franklin Expedition was more of the re-branding of how we think of the Arctic. It was more Harperization of the North.  Chris Turner, award winning journalist, got into a twitter debate with Peter Mansbridge over the coverage.  Turner’s classic line was that sending a CBC film crew to the Arctic in the summer of 2013 to investigate the fate of the Franklin expedition, without mentioning climate change, was like sending a network team of journalists to Syria, as the civil war raged, to find the exact spot on the Road to Damascus where St. Paul turned around.  Mansbridge, of course, disagreed, saying the flagship CBC news show, “The National,” covers the climate issue.

For anyone who understands the extent of the threat and the urgency of a rapid shift away from dependence on fossil fuels, it is clear that the Canadian media overall is doing a lamentable job. Coverage of climate issue in Canada is far more limited than even in the United States and much less than in European media.

Canadians need a crash course in climate science.  And understanding what is happening to the Arctic is a key place to begin.

The rate of climate change in the Arctic is galloping.  It is warming approximately three times faster than the global average.  It drives up the global average.

The melting of Arctic ice had been an anticipated climate change impact for decades, but the pace at which the ice is melting exceeds earlier projections.

When I first learned about the threat of climate change, it was 1986 and I was Senior Policy Advisor to the federal Minister of the Environment, Tom McMillan.  I was fortunate to be serving a minister of the environment who was committed to progressive environmental policies; McMillan was fortunate to be serving under a prime minister who still operated a Cabinet government.  McMillan could take his concerns to Brian Mulroney, and the prime minister actually listened.  Public policy was based on sound science, ground through the lens of a highly competent, non-partisan civil service.  So when Tom McMillan learned about the climate crisis, Mulroney agreed to position Canada in the lead.

What the Environment Canada scientists told us back in the 1980s was based on modelling the impact of trapping more greenhouse gases near the earth’s surface.  There was no debate about the science. The industry-funded campaigns to create doubt had not yet begun.  The doubt that existed was about the regional impacts. There was no uncertainty about the basics – dumping millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere would destabilize the climate system and could wreak havoc.

Globally, we were told, that unless our economies started using less fossil fuels we would experience more frequent and more severe weather events, that the sea ice could melt, and glaciers could retreat.

I remember clearly that Environment Canada scientists thought the glaciers would begin to retreat by 2030.  That the melt started decades sooner has to do with two things. Firstly, we have not, in Canada or globally, reduced our use of fossil fuels.  On the contrary, the emissions of greenhouse gases have climbed due to the increased use of dirty energy.  Secondly, the impacts have been accelerating through positive feedback loops.

We are rapidly losing sea ice and permafrost.  Each of these phenomena contains feedback loops which accelerate the rate of change.

Understanding positive feed-back loops is key to understanding why we must rapidly reverse course. Positive feed-back loops create more serious impacts and a potential runaway global warming process that we could be helpless to address.

Here’s the core notion of a feedback loop.  Human action in burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases that put in motion a change that itself serves to increase global warming.

An easy example is hotter, drier conditions increasing the risk of forest fires.  A burning forest releases the carbon dioxide that had been stored, through the initial transformational miracle of photosynthesis, from sunshine to released oxygen and sequestered carbon.  A bit more complex example of a feedback loop is that experienced by the interior forests of British Columbia.  Warmer winters allowed the pine beetle to grow into a devastating epidemic.  The usual winter cold snaps simply did not happen. Those cold snaps killed off most of the pine beetle population season to season.  Warmer winters spelled an economic catastrophe for the forest industry as the interior lodgepole pine forest was killed off by ravaging beetles.  We lost a forest twice the size of Sweden.  And here’s the feedback loop: the dying forest gave up its carbon.  The amount of carbon from the dead forest is larger than all the fossil fuel emissions from all the cars and trucks on British Columbia’s highways, from all the natural gas burned in our furnaces, from all industry and all human activity in the whole province.

There are two very pronounced feedback loops occurring in the Arctic: loss of ice and loss of permafrost.

As the Arctic warms, permafrost melts.  Permafrost is, as the name suggests, ground that has been – or was – permanently frozen.  As it melts, whole communities can be destabilized.

The ground that was frozen was largely muskeg – or bog.  It has a lot of methane frozen and kept out of the atmosphere.  Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas.  Molecule for molecule, it packs twenty times the warming punch of carbon dioxide.  The reason the focus of the danger is so much on carbon dioxide is that there is just so much more CO2, and, that it is much longer lived in the atmosphere.  Released methane loses its warming impact in ten years; CO2 holds its warming impact in the atmosphere for one hundred years.

Back to the permafrost feedback loop: as the permafrost melts, it releases vast quantities of methane.  The released methane warms the atmosphere driving more permafrost melt.

As sea ice melts it also triggers a dangerous feedback loop.  The loss of ice compromises the albedo effect, a cooling effect.  The white ice bounces the sun’s heat back to space, whereas the dark ocean water absorbs it, speeding the warming. Less ice equals warmer waters, melting more ice.

The warming Arctic has devastating impacts on the entire planet.  Research at Rutgers University identified a plausible mechanism by which the melting Arctic has impacted areas far to the south, causing increasingly serious extreme weather events. It turns out the difference between Arctic cold and Equatorial heat has kept the jet stream moving fast and relatively horizontal over mid-latitudes.  With the warming Arctic, the difference in temperature is lessened.  As a result, the jet stream has gone wobbly.

Fires, floods and droughts have increased globally as the jet stream slows down due to a warming Arctic. Moving more slowly, it lies in lazy loops, leaving high pressure and low pressure zones in place for unusually long periods. It is too early to diagnose the causes of the ferocity of Hurricane Sandy, but clearly the melting of the Arctic is implicated.

There is not much harm in letting Stephen Harper play cowboys and Indians every summer using the Arctic as his stage. However, there is serious and long-term damage in ignoring what is really going on in our North.   Arctic sovereignty, if it means nothing else, means– if we can no longer arrest the decline in summer ice — keeping, at least, the winter ice intact. It requires that we arrest the galloping increase in greenhouse gases and meet the commitment Harper pretends to have embraced – stopping global average temperature increase from rising above 2 degrees C. This must become our central focus.

Originally published in Policy Magazine.

The post Competing Images of the Arctic appeared first on Elizabeth May.

The list of measures is impressive: new standards for trucks and heavy-duty vehicles, investments in energy efficiency for residential, institutional and commercial buildings, more renewable energy projects on federal lands, plans to invest in climate-resilient infrastructure, adaptation planning to prepare for extreme weather events we can no longer avoid and, most importantly, a commitment to regulate carbon from coal-fired power plants.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper weakened Canada’s greenhouse gas target to the same 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020 to which Mr. Obama committed the U.S. The difference is that the U.S. has a plan and is on track to meet that target. Canada, with a patchwork of some strong provincial actions and nothing federally to regulate the oil sands, has no plan and is nowhere near on track for anything but failure.

Elizabeth May, Leader, Green Party of Canada
Originally published in the Globe and Mail

The post Letter to the Editor: Climate specifics appeared first on Elizabeth May.

The list of measures is impressive: new standards for trucks and heavy-duty vehicles, investments in energy efficiency for both residential as well as institutional and commercial buildings, more renewable energy projects on federal lands, plans to invest in climate resilient infrastructure, adaptation planning to prepare for the extreme weather events we can no longer avoid, and most importantly, a commitment to regulate carbon from coal fired power plants.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper weakened Canada’s greenhouse gas target to the same 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 to which Obama committed the US. The difference is that the US has a plan and is on track to meet that target. Canada, with a patchwork of some strong provincial actions and nothing federally to regulate the oil sands, has no plan and is nowhere near on track for anything but failure.

Elizabeth May, O.C.
Member of Parliament
Saanich-Gulf Islands

Leader
Green Party of Canada

Published in the Globe and Mail.

The post Re: “Kerry refuses to be forced into early Keystone XL decision,” Paul Koring, January 18, 2014 appeared first on Elizabeth May.