Cameron Fenton2013-05-25T00:02:40-04:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=cameron-fentonCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Cameron FentonGood old fashioned elbow grease.If We "Go With Canada," the Environment Is Doomedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32724232013-05-15T12:30:50-04:002013-05-15T12:30:58-04:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/
Peter Kent, Canada's Minister for the Environment, is making his way across Europe lobbying against the European Fuel Quality directive, an initiative which would see tar sands crude labelled dirty for its increased impact on the climate. Kent's tour is coming on the heels of similar trip by Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources, where Oliver threatened that action by Europe could lead to a trade fight with Canada at the World Trade Organization.
At the same time, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is headed to New York City on a junket to drum up support for the Keystone XL pipeline, with Canada launching a new tax-payer funded advertising campaign aimed at convincing the United States of Canada's environmental and climate stewardship.
According to Canada's new advertising campaign website Go With Canada, our government is taking steps on environmental protection, climate action and industry monitoring. Reality paints a different picture of rising emissions, gutted environmental regulations and an industry being given free reign to develop with impunity, no matter the impact on people or the planet.
The government public relations website celebrates the fact that Canada and the United States have the same greenhouse gas reduction target of 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. Both Canada and the United State have signed on for 17 per cent targets under the most recent United Nations agreement, for Canada this was a significant reduction in ambition from our legally binding commitment to the Kyoto Protocol, a global pledge we made in 1997, and pulled out of in 2011 (during that time our emissions actually increased by nearly 25 per cent). Even were this target not a backward stumble, even while Canada is celebrating our shared target, we are set to miss that target by roughly 113 megatons .
It's easy to miss your climate targets though when you make statements like the Keystone XL "will have no discernable impact on global GHG emissions." According to the International Energy Agency, tar sands expansion rates are on track to increase extraction to over three times the climate limit. That means triple the amount of bitumen being burned that our global, not mention Canada's national, carbon budget can handle.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency also flat out disagrees with Canada's assertion, stating that "over a 50 year period the additional C02 [emitted] from oil sands crude transported by the pipeline could be as much as 935 million metric tons." Frankly, I would trust your scientists over my own government.
The advertisements also claim that tar sands "emissions have dropped 26 per cent per barrel between 1990 and 2011". they neglected to mention that according to Environment Canada, tar sands emissions have risen from 15 megatons in 1990 to 55 megatons in 2011, even with a decrease in per barrel emissions intensity.
If this wasn't enough, the new advertising website touts changes to Canada's environmental protection regimes. In fact their assertion that the new Environmental Assessment Act is "providing greater certainty for industry" may be the truest statement on the site, but its coming at a major cost. Over the past two years Canada has hamstrung regulations and environmental impact assessments for all kinds of projects, especially pipelines and tar sands projects. The number of agencies responsible for overseeing environmental reviews was slashed from 40 with specific mandates to only three, funding to the body responsible for these reviews was drastically cut and the federal government was given veto power over the decision of independent reviews.
Late in 2012, Canada passed a bill which re-designated thousands of rivers and lakes to no longer fall under the jurisdiction of the Navigable Waters Protection Act, another rollback of environmental protections that bulldozes the way for new fossil fuel projects. It was later discovered, that these changes were made at the suggestion of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, a lobby group for tar sands pipeline corporations.
This newest ad campaign is just the latest attempt by the Canadian government to push tar sands crude on the rest of the world. They are lying to the rest of the world in order to defend an industry which is breaking the planet, and to the United States and Europe I am genuinely sorry. This government needs more than just fact checking when it comes to climate change, environmental protection and the tar sands. Quite frankly, they need a reality check.
]]>Canada's Plan to Break the Carbon Banktag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30700532013-04-12T17:03:40-04:002013-04-12T16:57:43-04:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/an article for Rolling Stone called "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math." The piece, based on research from the Carbon Track Initiative and backed up by the World Bank and International Energy Agency, laid out three numbers at the heart of the climate crisis. First, is the ceiling for temperature rise, the magic number of 2 degrees Celsius, the maximum warming that even Canada's climate ignorant government has agreed to. The next number is our global carbon budget of 565 gigatonnes (Gt), the maximum amount we can emit to still have a decent chance of hitting that 2 degree threshold. The third, and scariest, number is 2,795 Gt, the proven reserves of the global fossil fuel industry, and all the carbon they are planning to burn.
All this adds up to sobering equation that to avoid catastrophic climate disruption, 80 per cent of the oil, coal and gas on our planet needs to stay underground, math that Canada's Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver doesn't seem to believe. Oliver really should be paying attention though, because if McKibben's math was terrifying, new research from the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives paints a grim picture of that it means for Canada.
Breaking down the global carbon budget by country would leave Canada with a fair share of 9 Gt based on its share of world GDP, and 2.4 Gt based on population. Even taking into consideration Canada's energy exports, Canada's fair carbon budget would climb to an absolute maximum of 20Gt. On the other side of the equation, add up all of Canada's oil, coal and gas reserves and you have 91Gt, three fifths of this in bitumen and coal. This is nearly 20 per cent of the available global carbon budget and almost five times our maximum fair share. It also means that at least 78 per cent of these reserves are unburnable carbon.
Canada is on track to blow past our carbon budget. The tar sands alone are being put on a path to grow to at least three times the size that the International Energy Agency calls the upper limit for demand and production for a 2C warming limit. If the Keystone XL debate is anything to go by, the Harper government is hedging its bets on breaking the carbon bank, something which could come at the expense of Canadians' own bank accounts.
It's no secret that Canada's economy is skewed towards the fossil fuel industry. The Toronto Stock Exchange is home to 405 oil and gas companies, a number that grows even higher when you add in coal producers and pipeline companies. High yield investments in Canada are almost guaranteed to be heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry, which is why reports like the recent one from HSBC should be so worrying.
According to HSBC, major oil companies could see up to two thirds of their market value lost because of unburnable carbon, especially in high carbon reserves like the tar sands. Another report from Standard & Poor claims that tar sands companies could be facing major credit downgrades in the next five years as state and non-state climate action shrinks the market for high carbon energy and creates what they call a "stress scenario" on producers.
For Canadians, this means that our public and private investments are at risk. The Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives looked at over 100 fossil fuel companies listed on the TSX and found that with a $50 equivalent social cost on carbon, those companies were holding nearly $850 million in carbon liabilities. Increase the social cost of carbon, and these liabilities climb into trillions. Carbon liabilities are the costs that would be imposed on innocent bystanders -- like students, workers, retirees, and anyone holding investments in unburnable carbon -- should those fossil fuels be combusted and put into the atmosphere. This should be of particular concern to Canada given the large amount of high carbon fuels like in Canadian fossil fuel reserves. In fact, the European Union is already considering action to restrict the import of fuels produced from Canada's tar sands.
After a year of record breaking heat that was punctuated by Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Bopha and more, climate action has been forced back onto the agenda of countries around the globe. India recently announced it would be boosting its solar capacity eight fold, wind energy became Spain's number one source of energy and even at home Ontario has commited to phase out coal fired power by 2014. These are just three examples of the kind of action on climate change that the Canadian government is hedging its bets will not happen.
We literally can't afford this. Students on over 300 campuses across North America have already done the math and launched campaigns to divest their University endowments from fossil fuels. With more joining every day, the student divestment movement is growing across Canada, and posing all of a question, what kind of Canada are you invested in? A look into your investments, your city or your pension fund might just surprise you, and help us all deflate this carbon bubble.]]>B.C. Election 2013: No Such Thing as a Young Votertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30075382013-04-03T15:30:20-04:002013-04-03T16:26:11-04:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/
Politicians, political organizers and pundits have made a lot of hay over the past decade decrying, appealing to and discussing the crisis with what they tend to call "young voters". With an election in British Columbia right around the corner, it's beginning again.
Why were we sharing this moment of frustration? Because there is no such thing as a young voter.
Our generation has many identities. We are artists, writers, film makers and poets. We are musicians, fashion designers, community organizers and educators. We are workers, business owners, friends, allies and family members. No young person defines their primary identity, even their political identity, through such a narrow and reductive lens. Even our political identities are seldom reduced to something as asinine as being a young person who marks a sheet a paper every four years and shoves it in a box.
This is not to say that my generation is divorced from, or uninterested in politics and how governments can impact the world we are inheriting, its just that were not deluded enough to think that voting alone will change anything. We are not a generation of apathy, but a generation that cares enough about politics to demand to know the origin of our coffee beans, how far away our food was grown, where our beer was brewed and whether or not what we are using and consuming is facilitating another's oppression.
Where politicians and pundits are right is that there is more political power in our generation than even we realize. Organizations, social movements and politicians lusting after "young voters" is actually making the problem worse. The narrowing of electoral participation as a direct translation to political action has led us to miss the forest for the trees, a forest that in Canada is probably being threatened to be clear cut, plowed for a pipeline, or removed to make way for a new mine -- and that's a big, big problem.
Take one of the most commonly cited success stories for youth political action during the past federal election: the student and youth organized "Vote Mobs" that went viral across Canada. A great effort to get youth to the ballot box that despite engaging thousands of youth across Canada and being lauded by celebrities and the mainstream media, was followed by an election where youth voter turnout fell.
The problem was not the action itself, nor the intent. It made a clear statement that thousands of youth across Canada cared about the direction Canada is headed in. The flaw was a symptom of constant reinforcement from political parties and organizations that our generation's only power lies in the ballot box.
QUEBEC STUDENTS MOBILIZED
Canada was lucky enough last spring and summer to witness the rise of one of the most powerful youth led social movements in history, and the most successful youth electoral victory in my lifetime. It was misunderstood by many mainstream political organizations in Canada and shunned by the majority of pundits, yet it managed to depose a leader it opposed, resist violent oppression and succeed in overturning legislation.
The Quebec student movement that filled the streets for months in the spring and summer of 2012, and continues today, mobilized hundreds of thousands of young people from all walks of life, along with allies of all ages. They constantly turned out crowds in the tens to hundreds of thousands into the streets and politicized a generation like no organization in Canada has done in decades.
Of course this was not a movement limited to the ballot box. It was in the streets, on the bridges and in the general assemblies where the Quebec students searched for victory, and while the terms of that victory remain contested by many, for the sake of argument lets look at what they did win at the ballot box. The exact age breakdowns of the Quebec student movement will not be released until this summer, but according to an estimate given at a recent event held by youth electoral group Apathy is Boring, the numbers may have jumped from 57 per cent before 2012 to 75 per cent last fall. This with many students choosing to boycott the election and stay in the streets.
It is impossible to say without a doubt that this is a direct result of the student strike, but I would hazard a guess that it played a significant role. What's more, those groups who continued to organize for the streets, not trusting the electoral system to deliver what they need, were able to re-mobilize this spring when the new government turned on their promise to stop the tuition hikes. Some other groups who went all into the electoral strategy have found themselves struggling with co-optation by the same policies they were fighting only a year ago.
B.C. YOUTH SHOULD TAKE HEED
Any attempt to explain the reasons for the success of Quebec students is going to be reductive by nature, the movement was years and thousands of meetings in the making, but there is one key lesson I learned from watching this movement rise, and a lesson that groups and youth in B.C. should take heed of as we enter an election.
Getting youth to vote was not the goal of students in Quebec. In fact if you asked 50 students why they were at a march or what their plan for political change was, you would probably get at least a hundred answers. For some organizations, a coming election in the province became a useful campaign target, for others it was a chance to remove an opponent from playing field, and even for those who boycotted the ballot box, it was a chance to raise the stakes, but very few were on the search for "young voters."
I was lucky enough to attend a number of the hundreds of thousands strong marches, and at each one youth and students adopted and flew beautiful versions of the movement's red square. The casseroles, that each night filled communities with the music of banging pots and pans rang not with calls to Elect Marois, but of the passions, desires and dreams of thousands of youth, students and others inspired by their actions.
The student movement appealed to youth -- and people in general -- because it was not prescriptive. It did not tell youth to be voters, or even to be of any particular political stripe. It rallied a frustrated generation against an unfair law symptomatic of a broken system. In doing so, it created a space open to artists, writers, musicians, workers, students, allies and more. Most importantly, even when groups asked supporters to vote out Jean Charest, they were never calling on "young voters," they were calling on a movement.
Another example of this kind of power has starting to rise across North America over the past year with over 300 student campaigns being launched to push for campuses to divest from fossil fuels. This is only three years after the youth climate movement suffered a massive blow when the Copenhagen climate talks ended in failure, and after both of the most recent elections in the United States and Canada were devoid of any talk about climate change, and not for lack of effort by organizations like my own and the Energy Action Coalition south of border. Of course divestment alone wont solve climate change or stop the tar sands, but neither will voting without action.
There lies the lesson that groups in B.C. this spring, and more widely across Canada as we look to 2015 should take to heart. There is more power in our generation than you, or frankly even we, know. There are millions of youth who may be cast as apathetic but are really filled with a slowly simmering discontent that with the right heat and pressure could come to full boil.
We are a generation facing some of the highest unemployment in years, a generation weighed with student debt that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago, and at least I think, a generation that's sick and tired of business as usual.
Using the political opportunity of the coming B.C. election is important for social movements in the province, especially for groups working to stop tar sands, fracking and the multitude of pipelines that are threatening, or already, pumping dirty energy across B.C.
That being said, by trying to appeal to the mystic species known as "young voters," this election will go down as another missed opportunity to build the kind of political power that we need in B.C. and across Canada to revolutionize our energy system, and build a more fair society. As young people, we need to step up our game, but politicians and organizations also need to seriously reflect on how they view young people. We do not need to be appealed to or convinced to vote, we need to be given the resources and support to organize our generation.]]>How Students Are Leading the Fight Against Climate Changetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29671642013-03-28T17:00:00-04:002013-03-28T17:48:21-04:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/new movement has emerged on campuses across North America. Students, alumni, faculty and community members are coming together to push universities to divest their endowments from companies involved in the extraction of fossil fuel fuels.
With over $400 billion held by the endowments of the largest 500 schools in North America, divestment has the power to move a lot of potential resources from dirty energy to building a sustainable and just energy economy.
But that's not the only reason we're seeing the rise of one of the largest and fastest growing student-led environmental movements in decades.
At a recent convergence in Swathmore, Pensylvania student leaders declared,"Divestment is a tactic, justice is the goal." In other words, while the main tactic of this movement appears to be an economic one, the goals of this movement go far deeper.
As a student at Concordia University in Montreal, I spent a lot of my free time organizing around climate change and taking action against extreme extraction. Alongside other students and community members, we organized film screenings, community dinners, workshops and public actions about the then-'shelved' Line 9 tar sands pipeline project.
I wrote a weekly column for the school paper about the issues, was arrested in the House of Commons, and much more, but for all of our efforts, I still felt that up against governments and some of the world's largest and wealthiest corporations we were up against unfathomable odds.
Top 10 Toxic Industries
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Divestment is changing that. Positioned as centres of social and technological innovation, what happens on campuses ripples across our society. Campus divestment may not be working with enough financial resources to drastically impact the bottom line of the fossil fuel industry, but they hold enough social capital to take away the one thing that corporations can't buy -- their reputation.
In other words, Canada's fossil fuel reserves add up to nearly 20 per cent of the carbon budget of the entire world. Within this, the tar sands alone are on track to grow three times the size that the International Energy Agency calls the maximum demand and supply for the same warming limit.
When we say that justice is the goal we mean more than simply limiting the parts per million that we emit; whether or not we stop the fossil fuel industry from breaking the carbon bank has real implications for people around the globe.
Extreme weather, desertification, drought, deforestation, species loss, and the countless more climate disruptions these emissions are driving mean hunger, lack of water access, displacement and worsening impacts on people around the world. Typically, these are the people least responsible for historical climate emissions.
Canada has been lucky enough to be narrowly missed by extreme weather like Hurricane Sandy, but over the past decade the impacts of our warming world have been no walk in the park. Flooding and shifting precipitation patterns have left farmers fields drowned or cooked, Hurricanes like Irene have cost East Coast communities billions, unseasonal storms have damaged homes and cost people hundreds of thousands of dollars, the mountain pine beetle and wildfires have left the British Columbia forestry industry gutted -- and these are just a few examples.
The reason we are calling for divestment does not end at the impact of rising mercury. The extraction of the fossil fuels that, left unchecked, will emit more than five times our carbon budget often violate the basic rights of people, endangering their lives and livelihoods.
In Appalachia, mountain coal removal mining is blasting coal dust into the air and lungs of surrounding communities. Fracking for oil and gas shale is endangering the water of communities from Nova Scotia to Fort Nelson. The tar sands continue to be one of the largest sacrifice zones on our planet.
Just this week, a Suncor tailings facility leaked a still unknown quantity of toxic waste water into the Athabasca river, the same body of water that communities like Fort Chipewyan have pointed to as evidence of for the toxification of the land that Indigenous peoples in the area depend on for their traditional way of life.
Universities across Canada are heavily invested in companies like Suncor -- for example, the University of Ottawa has nearly $6 million in Suncor stocks. My own alma matter, Concordia, has nearly $12 million invested in oil, gas and pipelines like the Enbridge, KinderMorgan and Pacific Trails pipelines being proposed at the core of B.C.'s carbon corridor.
Students calling for divestment are calling not just for their schools to start walking their talk on sustainability, but also to respect the rights of communities across Canada and around the world. When we say that justice is the goal, we are using the social capital of our campuses to support the rights of people to say no to un-checked fossil fuel expansion that will destroy communities and cook the planet.
Along with the need to divest from fossil fuels to preserve the health of people and the planet, divestment may also be necessary for economic justice. A recent report from the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives makes the case that Canada's investment structure, which heavily favours high carbon investments in projects like the tar sands, is not just endangering the planet, but the financial security of Canadian investments.
According to the report, as climate action by governments and the private sector increases, much of Canada's fossil fuel reserves -- especially coal and bitumen -- are going to become stranded assets, or "unburnable carbon." With only a $50 social cost on carbon factored in, Canadian fossil fuel companies will be holding over $800 billion in carbon liabilities.
More simply put, a recent HSBC report claims that major oil companies could see their market value drop by up to two thirds, a frightening prospect for the stability of pension funds, especially in a climate of economic uncertainty.
Back on campus, not divesting from fossil fuels now could mean significant economic shortfalls for campus endowments, limiting access to education for future students.
Divestment is just one tactic in the climate fight. But just like during the student-led campaign to divest from companies complicit in South African Apartheid, others have followed. Already two cities in the United States are reviewing divestment, Seattle and San Francisco, along with a number of public funds and faith institutions.
As students and youth, we know what's at stake if we don't act swiftly to move away from fossil fuels and build a sustainable world today -- after all we will inherit the mistakes being made today.
Can we do what needs to be done in the time we have? I don't know, but I do know that the consequences for inaction, the results of bankrolling climate change and the justice denied by allowing fossil fuel corporations to bust Canada's carbon bank are costs that none of us should be willing to bear.]]>The Gloves are Off in the Youth Climate Change Fighttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.23975852013-01-02T17:22:43-05:002013-03-04T05:12:01-05:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/Auld Lang Syne, but instead to the sounds and sights of blockades, round dances and the drums of Idle No More. The Indigenous-led movement that is inspiring people around the globe comes after a year of political awakening across Canada -- a year that saw historic mobilizations from the Quebec student movement to Defend Our Coast.
But, the past year has also made the cold math of a warming world even starker. From record setting deadly heat waves, to super storms like Sandy and Bopha, to the unprecedented Arctic and Greenland ice sheet melt, history will remember 2012 as the year the climate changed. That means that 2013 needs to be the year that we bring the warming back home.
That's why the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition is taking a leap of faith and leaving charitable status behind. The decision to move away from charitable status was made because, frankly, we need to take the gloves off when it comes to fighting climate change. We are up against the most powerful and wealthiest industry on the planet, one which spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each day to keep business as usual on track, and to keep the planet warming.
The math is deceptively simple. We have 565 gigatonnes of space left in our atmosphere to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, the red line that even the Harper Government has adopted. Meanwhile, the global fossil fuel industry has 2,795 gigatonnes in their proven reserves, and they want to burn each and every ounce of it.
Our job is to stop that.
We're putting our energy into building a movement that can take on the fossil fuel industry, and we're starting on campuses across Canada by joining the fossil fuel divestment movement. Already schools like McGill and the University of Ottawa are working to divest their campuses from dirty energy in Canada, and in its first month in the United States over 192 schools have started up campaigns.
So as 2013 begins, we are setting our own resolution, to work with campuses across Canada to make this year the start of something big in Canada, we hope you'll join us.
]]>Can This Group Help Fight Climate Change?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22613372012-12-10T00:00:04-05:002013-02-08T05:12:01-05:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/
As the final hours of COP18 dragged towards their close, the question was on the tip of the tongue of all of civil society. After 18 years, the United Nations climate talks have failed to reach maturity. Even the most significant and celebrated milestone of the past decades of climate talks, the Kyoto Protocol, may have been delivered its final death blow on the air conditioned floor of the Qatar National Convention Center.
For the past two decades the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been considered by governments and civil society groups as the platform that would deliver a global climate deal to keep us beneath dangerous warming trends.
Yet after the Copenhagen talks failed to deliver the global deal it was built up to, the past three years have seen the United Nations climate process lose steam year after year. Historical polluters have successfully undermined some of the founding principles of these talks; equity and the recognition that historical polluters have a greater responsibility for addressing climate change than the developing world. More simply than this, the UN has enshrined policies that have set the world on the path for a 4f-degree world, blowing past its own mission and mandate to limit warming be 2 degrees.
So again, what now?
The climate talks have not failed alone. We are not falling off the climate cliff without first being pushed by the fossil fuel industries dirty energy, dirty money and dirty politics. Each day the fossil fuel industry spends $167,000 on lobbying the US congress. The fossil fuel industry has worked to undermine clean energy legislation in Europe, California, Australia, South Africa and Japan.
They have been bankrolling climate denial since I was a baby. Simply put, in order to meaningfully address climate change, we need to deal with the political and financial clout of an industry that holds nearly six times the limit of carbon that can be emitted to maintain a 2-degree limit, that's where we go from here.
We need to build a movement that can take on the greatest, and fastest planetary shift that we have ever seen. Not simply numbers, we need a movement that runs deep, recognizing the connections between social movements around the globe, and a movement that can harness the moral voice and imperative of youth around the world.
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This June is the first step with the launch of Global PowerShift. Bringing together hundreds of young organizers from climate justice movements from all corners of the world to Istanbul, Global PowerShift is the first stage in a plan to launch the youth climate movement like never before.
The math is simple. We have 565 gigatonnes worth of carbon space left in the atmosphere and 2,765 gigatonnes worth of fossil fuel reserves that big oil, coal and gas are planning to burn. With current projections, we have 13 years before we break the carbon budget.
Thankfully we also have millions of youth around the globe who have grown up in a world 1 degree warmer than the pre-industrial average, and who refuse to inherit a world on track for a 4-degree warming path. Over the past two years youth have been at the lead of movements pushing the political boundaries, from the Occupy movement to the Quebec student strike, the Arab Spring and beyond.
In the past month the movement to divest campuses in the United States from fossil fuels has exploded. Even as the climate talks continued in their monotonous din of inaction, the frustration of youth could be felt as climate inaction was juxtaposed against the backdrop of Typhoon Bopha. Rallying to stand with the Philippines and offering solidarity to those countries fighting for real, just climate action young people from around the world sent a clear message; if you stand for youth, we will stand with you.
By the end of this decade, the world will be on track for an unprecedented level of warming, unless by the end of 2013 the world will have witnessed an unprecedented level of climate organizing world-wide, united in the pursuit of science and justice-based transformative action on climate change. As Munira Sibai told the final plenary of the UN talks "outside of these walls, a movement is growing."]]>In Doha, We're Getting a Raw Dealtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22395232012-12-05T12:10:01-05:002013-02-04T05:12:01-05:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/Super-Typhoon Bopha, made landfall. At the 18th round of United Nations climate talks in Doha, Qatar the Philippine's negotiator told plenary that "at a time when we should be getting ready for Christmas, we may soon be counting our dead in my country."
These comments came as the talks in Doha are setting up to deliver a text which postpones any real global climate action until 2020, effectively ensuring that business as usual is given nearly a decade to continue. Entire pages on ambition, finance and more -- the fundamental tenants of ambition, equity and justice -- are being left blank. Countries already bearing the brunt of a world one-degree warmer than the pre-industrial average have been asked to again delay action, this time for nearly a decade.
The global carbon budget is nearly to the limit allowable in order for us to have a reasonable chance at keeping global temperature rise below two degrees -- the upper limit of warming agreed on by all parties to the United Nations climate talks. Already in the range of 400 parts per million of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, we have roughly 565 gigatonnes left of space. The fossil fuel industry holds over five times that amount in their proven reserves.
Put simply, the climate deal being proposed in Doha locks in inaction, enshrines a lack of ambition, sidelines equity and suspends justice, and it does that at the behest of governments like Canada and the United States. It means that those nations facing the worst impacts of climate change are left without a recourse to hold historical polluters accountable, without the resources to adapt to a changing climate, and without a mechanism to deal with the loss and damages wrought.
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At the centre of all this is one key decision that leaders and government must make, people or polluters? The United Nations climate talks can only work if the interests of people and planet win out over the interests of polluters and profits. The voice of fossil fuel corporations simply cannot ring louder when addressing climate change requires keeping two thirds of global fossil fuels in the ground.
An eight-year delay in global climate progress means that until 2020 big historical polluters will be shielded behind a lack of justice, ambition and equity on the global scale. Domestic action will have no global measuring stick to be held to save for the promise of change nearly a decade down the road.
This is the failure of the Kyoto protocol -- the original plan to save the planet. The actions of some of the biggest historical polluters undermine not only emissions cuts, but the fundamental principals on which the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was founded. Deeper than that this is moving us farther behind the just climate legacy that we need to build for youth and future generations.
No deal is better than locking the world into a decade of global climate inaction. The world needs an ambitious climate plan by 2015, and I for one stand with those calling for justice, equity and ambition to trump political feasibility.]]>The Human Cost of Climate Change Is Too Hightag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22277762012-12-03T08:54:07-05:002013-02-02T05:12:01-05:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/floodwaters broke across Great Britain.
Meanwhile, representatives from some of the wealthiest polluting nations around the globe told the 18th round of United Nations climate talks that after this long, Doha would not be a "pledging conference."
Long story short, something is wrong.
Across the globe, the impacts of a planet nearly one degree warmer than the past decades are being felt. People are connecting the dots between extreme weather, droughts and famine, desertification, deforestation, rising sea levels, flooding, wildfires, and a range of devastating impacts the result of a changed climate. They are connecting these dots to a history of the fossil fuel industry and wealthy, developed nations having free reign pollute.
Somewhere along the way, those with the power to prevent the planet from warming beyond a two degree climate limit lost the path. Here in Doha there are missing dots: Justice, Equity and Ambition.
According to a recent report from the World Bank, locking in business as usual policies today would place us on a four degree warming path. Add the expanding unconventional fossil fuel reserves coming into the equation and by 2035 were looking at something closer to a six degree warming target.
In the Cancun agreements, which laid the groundwork for the negotiations currently underway in Doha, the world agreed to limit global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius. The ledger on this doesn't add up. Rich, heavily polluting nations' targets fall far short of adding up to meet the kind of reductions we need to keep temperature rise below this level. Furthermore, most of these targets are divorced from, or fail to take into account the reality that to reach this target, two thirds of fossil fuels available on this planet need to stay in the ground.
Developed countries, when they put 30 per cent emissions reductions or less on the table are effectively putting death, displacement and devastation on the table. To call current targets enough, is to effectively announce that on this planet there are acceptable losses in those regions least responsible for causing climate change.
Historically, the global north is responsible for 75 per cent of historical emissions. Despite the blame of big polluting nations like Canada and the United States, China and India emitted less than one third of U.S. emissions between 1900-2004. In order to address this, the UN climate framework operates within three key principles, formulated in the Rio Convention which the UN climate convention is founded upon: common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), historical responsibility, and equity.
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Last year, Canada's environment minister set the tone we are seeing for equity in Doha, rejecting what it called "guilt payments" to the developing world, in reference to CBDR. The principle survived Durban, but only as something that the same minister referred to as "what we've got to work against."
In Doha, CBDR remains a persistent point of contention, with developed, historical polluters working to remove or undermine the principal in order to alleviate them for their historical climate debt. On the table in Doha is a plan to review the principles of equity over a two year period, effectively delaying the inclusion of real equity into a post-Kyoto agreement, and potentially removing it altogether, as some developed nations are pushing for.
Underlying all of this is a basic tenant that a failure of equity and ambition is a failure to deliver justice. Those who have done the least to cause climate change are suffering the most, and in Doha, there still remains no finance to support those most impacted. Despite the creation of the Green Climate Fund, and other financial mechanisms, funding for adaptation and mitigation has yet to be pledged, let alone given.
Canada, again playing the role of pariah, announced that it will refuse to put money in the Green Climate Fund until developing countries take on legally binding commitments. This is against the Rio Convention principles, and insulting to vulnerable countries that desperately need support to adapt to a problem they did nothing to create while they try to adopt lower carbon development pathways.
Countries with some of the weakest domestic climate plans and lowest international targets are effectively holding the developing world hostage and without an international compensation mechanism, countries who suffer are going to have to pay for themselves -- which has the potential to exacerbate the problem, as many of these countries would be forced to expand environmentally destructive industries in order to finance adaptation projects.
When it comes to dealing with climate change we are running out of runway. A new, ambitious deal needs to take off in two to three years and needs to aggressively cap emissions within the next decade. In the meantime, rich nations need to make deep cuts now and follow through on their previous commitments. The implications of failing to do this are unimaginable.
Climate charged disasters like the current flooding in England, or Hurricane Sandy hitting the United States is the failure of historical polluters coming to bear. The developing world has already been battered by climate change, and it's only set to get worse. Droughts will expand, widespread crop failures are predicted, sea level rise and storm surges could wipe entire coastlines and nations off the map, all while those with the historical responsibility and the resources to act defend business as usual.
Like I said, something is very wrong here.
]]>Fossil Foul in Doha: An Open Lettertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21905742012-11-26T07:23:15-05:002013-01-26T05:12:01-05:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/This post was written by the author in collaboration with youth from around the world to the head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. You can find a full list of signatories of this letter here.
Dear Christiana Figueres, (Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)
As young people, we write today with both grave concern and powerful hope.
Unfortunately, our concerns are beginning to outweigh our hope more and more each day. We were raised in a world nearly 1 degree warmer than the pre-industrial average; where disruption of the climate system has become increasingly visible in the few years since we were young children.
In this strange new world, we have already witnessed unprecedented Arctic ice melt, rampant wildfire, droughts that have crippled farmers and consumers, flooding, hail storms, and most recently, a super- charged hurricane that has devastated communities from the Caribbean to New York City. Extreme weather is becoming the new normal.
The UNFCCC process which you oversee is designed to protect us from these harsh disruptions and to achieve the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner."
Taking a hard look at climate politics today, it appears the UNFCCC is failing to meet that mission, therefore failing to live up to its mandate. The math just doesn't add up.
The member states of the UNFCCC have not decided much, but they have been very clear that global average temperatures must not rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.
At present, we are on target to hit this terrifying target by 2030 and to suffer upwards of six degrees of warming by the end of the century. Major international bodies, from the IEA to the World Bank, have warned that even over the medium-term, the costs of allowing emissions to rise at their present rates will come in the form of hundreds of millions of human lives and economic costs capable of driving the world economy into prolonged global depression.
According to the best science we have, there is room for 565 gigatonnes more CO2 in our atmosphere before we lose any chance of keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees and preventing the enormous damage associated with such a rise.
All together, the global oil, coal and gas industries are planning to burn over five times that amount, roughly 2,795 gigatonnes of carbon. Indeed, their share prices depend on exploiting these reserves and you are surely aware of the enormous sums they have spent to prevent governments from protecting the habitability of our planet, thus reducing the value of their assets. Their business plan is incompatible with our survival.
Frighteningly, there are also states, parties to the convention, with the same plan. Canada, for example, has signed onto the Copenhagen Accord and committed to allowing no more than 2 degrees of warming. However, in direct conflict with this commitment, Canada has also publicly admitted that its position at the UN is to defend the oil sands industry whose projects alone would increase global emissions by three times the world's carbon budget. States like this are blocking progress in the name of an industry with the potential to break the planet.
Ms. Figueres, we know that you are a person of conviction with a genuine desire to see the UNFCCC meet its mandate. We believe that you want to see a fair and ambitious global climate accord that keeps us below the 2 degree threshold. We know you've done the math. This is your climate legacy, and our generation's inheritance.
You have the power to fix this process, to move us towards real climate progress, but it means being willing to call out those who stand in the way of a safe and prosperous future. The secretariat needs to acknowledge that there are groups at the UNFCCC whose goals undermine the mission and mandate of the convention. Observer organizations can be penalized, and even removed from the convention if we violate the protocols for participation. Perhaps there should be a similar process for observers and parties whose mandates fundamentally contradict the convention.
Simply put, we have a choice in front of us, we can have a healthy planet and safe climate, or the oil, coal and gas industry can have a healthy pocketbook. We can't have both, and its time for you, and for the UNFCCC to decide what is more important; the lives and livelihoods of people, or the balance sheets of Exxon, Shell, and Chevron.
With regards.
]]>What Will Canada's Climate Legacy Be?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21589252012-11-19T16:27:59-05:002013-01-19T05:12:01-05:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/announced that it had granted approval for the multi-billion dollar Joslyn tar sands mine. Coming shortly before Canada's withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, the announcement said more about Canada's climate legacy than anyone at that summit could have known.
The only strong target, in regards to climate change, that even Canada has agreed to is the upper limit of warming that we can allow on our planet be kept below two degrees Celsius. Right now we are living in a world that is nearly one degree warmer than the average over the last 100 years. In this one-degree reality we have seen increasing incidents of drought, wildfires, severe storms and the sort of unpredictable extreme weather that ripped from the Caribbean to the Rockaways all the way to Toronto with Hurricane Sandy.
Before last year's climate summit, Environment Minister Peter Kent went on record that Canada's position on the summit was to take no action that would curtail the growth of the tar sands. Adding credence to the argument that Canada was negotiating to protect the oil patch, an Access to Information request revealed in April that Canada had vetted its negotiating position, along with a number of other key foreign policy positions related to tar sands projects, through industry representatives. Industry called it an "elegant" approach.
According to the IEA tar sands production would need to be capped at a maximum of 3.3 million barrels per day. Right now, production is at 2.28 million barrels per day, with approved projects, projects under regulatory review -- like the Shell's Jackpine and Pierre River mines -- and projects under construction set to bring production to 7.1 million barrels per day, over twice the climate limit.
According to IEA scenarios, even at only 4.6 million barrels per day with business as usual policies, we are set for over four degrees of warming. While Canada has repeatedly stated its commitment to the Copenhagen Accord and its two-degree target, the math doesn't add up.
If the past year of domestic policy cuts to environmental monitoring and assessment projects is anything to go on, it is unlikely that this cozy pact between the tar sands and policy decision is going to break in Doha. The good news is that this climate crashing expansion is currently being fought across Canada, the United States and around the globe.
Around 100,000 barrels per day of immediate expansion are being stopped by constitutional challenges to the Shell Jackpine project by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. Community mobilization in BC is putting upwards of 1 million bpd worth of potential expansion export capacity in question from the Kinder Morgan and Northern Gateway projects. The Keystone XL mobilization across the United States has repeatedly thwarted over 800,000 bpd more of pipeline capacity, along with more and more questions being raised about the 300,000 bpd of the Line 9/Trailbreaker reversal project.
We are living in a world that is nearly a degree warmer than the average over the past 100 years. The realities of a one-degree world are harsh: more unpredictable weather, increasing drought and fluctuations in growing seasons, a rapidly melting arctic, flooding and storms that destroy homes and displace people. Canada has taken a global position to ensure that emissions grow far and above the climate limit, a limit that they were a part of setting in 2009.
So what is going to be our climate legacy? Right now were on well on path for global pariah, heads too buried in the tar sands to see the coming storms.]]>Sandy: The Poster Storm for Climate Changetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20497502012-10-31T17:46:20-04:002012-12-31T05:12:01-05:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/
The Atlantic ocean is now five degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average as a result of tons of carbon being dumped into our atmosphere. This warmer ocean is increasing evaporation and thus precipitation levels. Arctic ice melt is increasing sea levels, and higher sea levels translates directly into higher storm surges.
In short, our changing climate is making extreme weather more powerful, more prevalent and more unpredictable. Hurricane Sandy is only one part of a emerging trend that sees extreme weather becoming the new normal, as we continue to drive the planet's warming, these kinds of deadly, unpredictable storms will happen more and more and more and the simple fact is that we can only be so prepared for their impacts.
One of the key pieces of any effort in disaster response is understanding the cause of a disaster and mediating as best as possible. It's why we learn where fault lines lie and how they work. It's why we study tsunamis, why we track storms, why planes and boats have equipment to detect dangerous weather, and so on.
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Climate change is being worsened because the fossil fuel industry is using our atmosphere as a dumping ground. As Bill McKibben laid out this summer in the Rolling Stone, they want to burn nearly six times the amount of carbon that even our government has agreed we have room left for in the atmosphere. Stopping this from happening is not simply climate action, it is disaster preparedness.
Hurricane Sandy is a stark and loud wake up call, but we also need to remember that we are only now feeling the impacts that people around the globe have been feeling for years. Climate change and extreme weather have destroyed and displaced whole communities. Even this storm first touched down in the Caribbean destroying homes and taking nearly 70 reported lives.
But the impacts are not only felt when extreme weather hits. Imagine the stress of living on a small island state living with the reality of a disappearing coastline, and possibly the complete sinking of your home. The lack of action by our governments and the free reign of the fossil fuel industry is creating a situation where entire islands, shorelines, communities and countries will become chalk-lines on a map.
Even closer to home, the stress and fear we feel when a storm like this hits our families and friends is the daily life of those communities living directly in the spillway of the fossil fuel industry. Inundated daily by toxic pollution, the impacts of extracting and burning fossil fuels has created a slow moving un-natural disaster in communities like those being directly impacted by the tar sands.
I am still afraid because I know that this is not a rogue incident but that as long as business as usual continues this is the new normal. That fear is coupled with a profound faith in the power of our generation, and the power of people to change business as usual and shatter the status quo.
Right now hundreds of youth are spreading out across Canada ready to build solutions to the climate crisis from the ground up, to make sure that the new normal is not crisis, but a more resilient world. The climate has changed, we have created cracks in our planet's natural systems. We have a chance now to let those cracks open wider, to let inaction define our society, or we can work together to rebuild the foundation, and after this last weekend, I think we can do it.
]]>A Bad Week to Be a Big Pollutertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20054952012-10-24T09:13:38-04:002012-12-24T05:12:02-05:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/thousands of people are gathered in Victoria, B.C. risking arrest to send a clear message that Canada's west coast is united in opposition to the expansion of tar sands pipelines and tanker traffic.
By the time this is online, hundreds more will rally in support of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation's constitutional challenge to Shell's planned Jackpine expansion and Pierre River tar sands mine projects.
In other words, it's a bad week to be a big polluter, or their friends.
These actions are inspirational, and represent the physical manifestation of the growing movement to stop the expansion of fossil fuel projects, to block pipelines from spilling into pristine watersheds, to stop tankers from endangering fragile coastlines and to stand in the way of more and more carbon being dumped into our atmosphere.
But defending, blocking and stopping is only part of the solution. Climate change poses one of, if not the single greatest challenge that our planet and society has ever faced. We need to make deep and profound changes to the systems that power our lives, moving away from those which depend on infinite extraction, expansion and growth to those which represent the just and sustainable world we know that we need.
It's fitting then that a week that begins with a strong defense is going to end on offence. This Friday a thousand youth from across Canada are going to congregate in Ottawa because our generation knows that what politicians and polluters are promising us is not the future we want, or the planet we want to pass on to future generations.
Our generation also knows that we cannot solve the climate crisis, without also addressing the crisis of debt and unemployment that our current economic system lays upon the shoulders of students and youth. We know that addressing climate change means supporting and standing in solidarity with those communities and people on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Whether they are downwind and downstream of polluting projects, having their small farms devastated by extreme weather or living in the ever more fragile North, solutions need not only to limit pollution, but also respect the rights to life and dignity of those people bearing the worst burdens.
There is no one size-fits-all solution to these issues, but that's exactly what PowerShift is all about. It is about bringing together the collective imagination and energy of young people from all across Canada to build solutions that embody our generation's vision of a better world. We likely wont agree on everything, our tactics, fields of engagement and personal pathways may diverge, but if we align our collective momentum, we can build a movement that's power lies in that diversity and in our ability to defend, build and shift the politically possible all at once.
That being said, we do think that there are places to start, and one of those is ending the $1.4 billion that fossil fuel companies are getting in handouts from Canada. Simply put, there are too many better things to spend that funding on than giving it to the richest companies on the planet. Over five thousands people across Canada agreed, and sent messages to their Members of Parliament to make that clear, at PowerShift we are going to double down on that by taking our message to the streets of Ottawa on Monday.
Arundhati Roy is famously quoted as saying that "another world is possible" and it is with that sense of hope and optimism that PowerShift is organized, but we also know that unless we change the status quo another planet will be necessary. I think that we can do it, that we can build a world where our values are worth more than the price of oil, and I'd venture that the thousand youth coming to PowerShift believe we can too.
Do you?
]]>Big Oil Is Gambling Our Future on End Pit Lakestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19542842012-10-10T12:06:56-04:002012-12-10T05:12:02-05:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/
Wednesday morning I woke up, opened the paper and saw a full page spread on plans to create massive End Pit Lakes, a process that involved filling the massive, visible from space, open pit mines created by tar sands extraction in Northern Alberta with tailings and water.
According to industry this is a long term solution to both tailings ponds, one of which currently sits behind the second largest damn on the planet, and massive open pit mine sites. One day, according to reports, this whole area could be Alberta's very own "Lake District," that is if this actually works, which it is going to take around a century to find out.
Take a minute to let that sink in.
The fossil fuel industry is effectively asking us to let them perform a 100-year-long experiment in Northern Alberta. Just to take stock, this is the same industry responsible for the deaths of hundreds of ducks, the same industry that built a three sided tailings pond, the same industry responsible for the 2009 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Kalamazoo spill, and so on. The creation of tailings ponds lacked the foresight to figure out how to deal with them, the digging of gargantuan open pit mines, the same, and the "Lake District" solution once again.
I wish this was an isolated incident, but in fact this is indicative of the modus operandi of the entire fossil fuel industry. As a friend of mine stated at a talk at the University of British Colombia last week, this industry is in the business of taking risks that are gambling our future. The entire industry, when compared with climate science, is basically a cosmic gamble that somehow, someway a silver bullet solution, like those advocated by billionaire industrialist Richard Branson, will be miraculously discovered. The reality though is that real solutions take time, investment, and require a shift in our priorities that will challenge the core of the status quo, especially that of how we produce and consume energy.
The first step to solving the problem of tailings ponds, massive pits, and the massive amount of emissions created by these projects, is to stop building more mines. Common sense would dictate that if you don't know how to clean up a mess, you should do everything you can to prevent that mess. If the oil industry does not have a foolproof plan for remediating the damage they have already done, the first thing that should happen is that they should be immediately stopped from causing any more damage.
Right now, that means putting an immediate stop on projects like the Shell Jackpine expansion, and the Pierre River Mine. Not only are these projects set to exacerbate a problem, that industry's best solution to is a one hundred year crapshoot, but they are also facing a constitutional challenge from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation.
Why is that so important? The logic is the same, industry is asking Canada to violate treaty rights. They are asking us to gamble that either the constitutionally enshrined relationship between Indigenous peoples and the crown can be rebuilt a hundred years down the road or worse, and more likely, that if these projects continue to expand at their proposed rate that communities on the frontlines wont be there to fight them in a hundred years.
This is gamble that former Minister of the Environment Jim Prentice decried when he spoke out against the failure of government and industry to consult with Indigenous communities.
An empty pit filled with tailings and water is being lauded as cheaper than attempts at real remediation, but it's not a solution. It's definitely not a fully remediated Boreal forest, an ecosystem that takes hundreds of years to develop complex webs of life and provides key planetary life support systems. But more than that, and at the bottom line, an industry whose top five players made nearly $140 billion last year should not be proposing the cheapest solution, they should be proposing the best.
More than that, people in Canada need only to look at the Sydney Tar Ponds for a vision of what this sort of short sighted project can lead to, where figuring out a clean up plan has taken a quarter century, without any guarantees that even the current plan will work.
Of course, expecting these corporations to do the right thing is part of why we're in this mess in the first place. This plan shows plain an simple that when it comes to environmental protections, tar sands operators, and the fossil fuel industry as a whole, is more interested in the cheapest, easiest answers, not the right ones. Real solutions are only going to come when people work together to build solutions, and to take away the social capital of corporations who are will to risk the interests of people and our planet in favour of increasing their already massive profit margins.
Gatherings like this fall's PowerShift 2012 are meant to build that power, to connect young people in a way like never before in order to create these solutions between youth from diverse backgrounds all across Canada.
Believe me, we need it. They are betting the air, water and land. They are betting on changing the chemical composition of our atmosphere, and they are asking us to loan them 100 years for their next bet, not a good prospect for an industry that's been a losing gambler lately.]]>Our Home and Troubled Landtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18909992012-09-18T16:44:25-04:002012-11-18T05:12:02-05:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/one of the most sobering accounts of where the world within our changing climate sits. He laid out some simple math that painted a pretty frightening picture of where we are and where we're headed if we can't create change. Since then, the situations hasn't gotten much rosier with temperature records being broken around the globe, extreme weather on the rise and ice sheets registering rapid, and never before seen ice melt.
This fall, hundreds of youth will come together in Ottawa for a weekend of education, training, networking and more to empower our generation to build the movement we need for a just and sustainable future. Called PowerShift, this is both a gathering but also a call for what Canada desperately needs. We need to shift the way we power our society and give people the power to build the future they want. Don't believe me?
Here are 10 reasons Canada is in desperate need of a PowerShift.
10. Arctic Ice Melt has reached an all-time high
This summer, scientists announced that Arctic Sea Ice had reached record high melt levels. On August 27, Arctic sea ice fell to under a quarter of the size it had occupied around the same time 40 years ago. Scientists in Canada are expecting that this melt may lead to an exceptionally cold winter across the U.K. and Europe.
Earlier this summer, the Greenland Ice Sheet shocked scientists with nearly 97 per cent of its surface area showing signs of melting, as opposed to a typical 40 per cent and a previous record high of 55 per cent.
9. Extreme Weather is increasing and costing us billions
As I write this I am sitting in my parent's kitchen in Alberta. Beneath me, their basement has been gutted because of flooding from early July rain and hail storms that pummeled Alberta. Recent reports estimate these storms alone will cost upwards of $200 million, the fallout of which includes rising insurance costs set to hit Albertans. The same storms cost farmers entire crops and untold amounts in revenue.
This is just one example in a long, hot summer. By June, thousands of high-temperature records were broken across the United States, Canada and the globe. This followed the warmest spring on record, and has also meant seeing extreme weather around the globe, ranging from the rain and hail in Alberta to tornados in Brooklyn and across the United States, to the hottest rain in the planet's history, to massive wildfires and deadly heatwaves.
This summer also saw the release of a new NASA study that linked these events to climate change as well as an Oxfam study that shows how climate change and extreme weather are set to drive global food prices through the roof.
8. The student and youth unemployment rate was the highest in recent memory this summer.
Despite claims of job growth and prosperity this summer, the prospects for young people in Canada continue to get dimmer. In August, while 34,000 jobs were created overall, employment among youth dropped by 22,000 jobs while the student employment rate registered at what Statistics Canada called "among the lowest on record." Overall, the summer student employment rate was nearly 3 per cent lower this summer than last, and nearly 3/4 of a per cent lower than during the low point of the recession in 2009. Youth unemployment overall climbed half a percent in August, up to nearly 15 per cent, meaning that nearly one in every five youth in Canada is without a job.
Together we can build a movement that can revolutionize our energy system, our food system and our transportation system and create thousands of green jobs for young people all across this country.
7. The cost of tuition is at an all time high, and climbing.
September data released by Statistics Canada shows that on average, tuition in Canada is rising at nearly five times the rate of inflation. In total, over the past two decades, tuition has risen 206.9 per cent, nearly triple the total inflation rate for the same period.
Put into hard numbers this means that in 1990-91 a year of schooling cost $1,744 while an academic year cost an average of $6,186. And by 2015-16 the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives estimates that tuition will be an average of $7,330.
As I type this, student debt in Canada continues to climb, currently towards $15 billion.
6. Drastic cuts to science and environmental monitoring are risking our air, water and land.
Since the passage of Bill C38 in Canada's House of Commons, environmental protections and scientific monitoring has been cut across Canada. Most recently it was discovered that ozone monitoring had been outsourced to IT professionals, and shortly before, that 3,000 projects had their Environmental Impact Assessments cancelled.
In late August, the Environment Minister issued a statement on changes to Canada's environmental assesment regime citing three examples of projects that he states "generated unnecessary paperwork, time and expense and diverted resources from major project assessments."
First of all, the irony is that no doubt some unfortunate staff member(s) in the minister's office, or at Environment Canada likely spent hours poring over assessments to find these three examples of wasted resources. More importantly though is the idea that a small handful of allegedly wasteful reviews is reason to weaken the environmental assesment process. If a doctor is worried that a patient may have cancer and does tests only to find out that their worries were unfounded, should the entire medial practice be overhauled? Environmental regulation and monitoring are the cornerstone to ensuring the protection of the air, water and land, all things that our generation is going to need.
5. Pipeline, pipelines everywhere.
East, west, north and south pipelines are fast becoming some of the most important political issues of our time. Conduits for tar sands oil and natural gas, these pipelines tie together questions about Canada's energy future, jobs and the rights of Indigenous people across the country.
For many, these pipelines have become the concrete and steel of the question as to where Canada is headed as a country. Are we going to work together based on mutual respect and recognition of the inherent rights of Indigenous communities to say no, or bulldoze those rights, and the lands and livelihoods they protect to ship oil and gas? Are we going to meet the challenge of climate change and build a robust and just clean energy economy, or are we hedging our bets on a dangerous gamble with extreme energy? For me the choice is clear.
4. Quebec Students showed us it can work.
Agree with their message or not, the Quebec student strike should show our generation one thing. When we put our voices, our spirits and our desire for a better future together, we can change the word. In the longest running student strike in Canada's history, Quebec students managed to engage and empower thousands of young people, flooding streets, meeting halls and awakening a new generation of change makers. In the end the victory was not won how many thought it would be, but right now the tuition fee hike has been cancelled, Law 78 has been repealed and a Premier and government have been defeated, all because some young people in Quebec decided they were going to change something.
3. Extreme extraction is growing.
Simply put, the world is running out of, or in many cases has run out of, cheap and accessible oil, coal and natural gas. These energy sources that currently power most of our society are instead now being sought after in unconventional forms that require dangerous, highly polluting technologies for extraction. Here in Canada that means primarily the tar sands, fracking for shale oil and shale gas and offshore oil development, including in Canada's fragile and now melting Arctic.
From coast to coast to coast, communities are digging in to protect their air, water and land from the dangers of unconventional extraction that threatens their homes, their farms, their fish, their traditional way of life and much more.
2. We're giving away billions of dollars to rich corporations while public services are cut.
By now the word austerity has become daily economic parlance. Around the world people are being told that we need to tighten our belts and cut back public services from education to health care and beyond. Yet at the same time we are giving nearly $1.4 billion in tax breaks to some of the wealthiest corporations on the planet. In 2011, the five wealthiest of these groups made nearly $140 billion in profits. Last year alone, Shell received a $32 million tax break. This simply doesn't make sense.
This might not seem like that much, but its enough to reduce university tuition across Canada by 57 per cent overall. Enough to fund 60 per cent of a national childcare program, enough to create a robust green job training program and much more. Beyond that, every single political party in Canada has agreed to end these subsidies, so this represents a rare occasion for the House of Commons to collaborate.
1. We don't have room to burn any more fossil fuels.
In his article McKibben laid bare a simple fact. Right now we have roughly 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide worth of space in the global carbon bucket to have a shot at keeping global temperature rise below two degrees celsius. The problem is that we also have 2,795 gigatonnes of carbon in the proven oil, gas and coal reserves of the fossil fuel corporations around the globe. In other words, we are planning to burn five times the amount of carbon we have room to burn.
We often talk about shifting our energy infrastructure to a clean and just system as being impossible or improbable. These two numbers show us one simple thing, not shifting this is unthinkable and will make out planet un-liveable for millions of people.
And if none of these are reason enough, a government communication was found this summer that claimed that youth were "uninformed" on climate change, and not engaged. Come help us prove them wrong.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that student debt in Canada continues to climb to $15 trillion. The figure should have read $15 billion.]]>Why the Rio Agreement Is Good as Toilet Papertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16212462012-06-25T00:00:31-04:002012-08-24T05:12:03-04:00Cameron Fentonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/cameron-fenton/
Now I don't really know where that phrase comes from, but its pretty on-point. While the failure of Rio is certain, the question that organizers, youth and change makers fighting for a more just and sustainable planet need ask ourselves is "Why?" Why were negotiators unable to find common ground above the weakest possible positions? Why were world leaders little more than props for a glorified photo op? Why did this supposed historical conference produce an agreement better used as toilet paper or kindle in the post-climate apocalyptic wasteland we're headed towards?
I could keep going, but I think you get the point. Something is wrong, there is a proverbial floater in the punch of international climate politics. At its core, the problem is simple: There are a small group of corporations making obscene profits for whom protecting our planet and taking the steps towards addressing climate change is bad for business. If fossil fuels cause climate change, and you make your billions on oil, gas and coal, you aren't going to want there to be a solar boom or a wind power windfall because you can't put a tap, a pipeline, or a gas tank on the sun.
Climate activist Tim DeChristopher said it best once: "We've tried to make our ideas palatable to those in power but it's never really worked, because shifting away from fossil fuels is actually a threat to our current economic system and to our current political system."
Rio failed because the if it had succeeded, it would have fundamentally undermined some of the most powerful forces on the planet: big polluters.
A just transition to a clean energy society would create meaningful, long-term jobs by the thousands, it would clean up our air and water, it would stop us from driving out planet towards climate catastrophe, but what's more is that it would democratize the production and consumption of energy.
The simple fact is that there is no way that someone could install a tiny coal-fired power generator on the side of their house, mine some coal in the centre of town and make energy. Yet coal is the primary source of electricity for most of the world. On the other hand, I can think of ways that, were it made affordable and accessible to people around the globe, I could power my home, my block or even my city and community with a combination of small-scale, renewable energy and energy conservation systems.
Think about that. What if all the electricity in your city was made by the people, and not by a power company? Energy democracy would revolutionize our planet, they way we live, and it would fundamentally alter our economic system. Real, sustainable energy for all would put dirty energy out of business, and Petrobras, Shell, Chevron, BP, Exxon and the rest are not going to work with governments to put themselves out of business.
There is no fortune to be made by the corporate elite solving climate change. Instead there are jobs to be had, cleaner air to be breathed, safe water to be drank and a better future. What makes more sense to you?
So now we have the why, the next step is to figure out the how.
We know that in principle the solutions that the people and the planet need exist. We know that there is a strong, wealthy and powerful lobby standing in the way of this, and we know that we will never be able to match them in wealth, access to world leaders, or any conventional resource.
But we have one thing they don't: We have numbers. Together we represent a force more powerful than any dollar amount, the currency we have to trade in is our bodies, our minds and our creativity.
This fall in Canada we are taking the first step to building that movement that our planet needs, holding the second Power Shift Canada gathering. Bringing together hundreds of youths from across Canada, Power Shift will be a decisive moment in the fight to end dirty energy and build a just and sustainable future.
Power Shift is organizing to push forward a bill in the House of Commons to stop polluter handouts, and to empower youth from across Canada to build the solutions we need. The Earth Summit may have been a #RioFail, but this can be our chance build a movement that makes it impossible for world leaders to continue putting polluters ahead of people.]]>