The tension between those who support aggressive GHG emission reductions and those who favour gradual phase out while Canada continues to emit GHG in the oil and gas industry may point to an underlying concern for jobs.
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| Keeping jobs in the fishery |
CBC interviewed Boris Worm, a professor of marine biology at Halifax's Dalhousie University, contributed science that was assessed in the new report of the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate that emphasized the ocean is warmer, more acidic and less productive.
When Stuart Beaton started fishing for lobster in 1971, the ocean waters off the northern coast of Nova Scotia and the marine creatures that lived beneath the waves behaved differently than today.
There is now less ice coverage in the spring, new species have arrived and lobsters are flocking to more northern waters amid rising ocean temperatures. His family, with three generations of lobster fishermen, have watched the changes in real time over half a century.
"In our business, we're very exposed to what happens. If two degrees kills the oceans..." said his son, Gordon Beaton, during an interview on a wharf in Ballantynes Cove, N.S., before his father added: "We're going to be the first to know."1
The Guardian offers a report on the climate crisis explained in 10 charts. The level of CO2 has been rising since the industrial revolution and is now at its highest for about 4 million years. The rate of the rise is even more striking – the fastest for 66m years – with scientists saying we are in “uncharted territory”.
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| Increasing GHG |
Greenland has lost almost 4 trillion tonnes of ice since 2002. Mountain ranges from the Himalayas to the Andes to the Alps are also losing ice rapidly as glaciers shrink. A third of the Himalayan and Hindu Kush ice is already doomed.
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| Greenland ice disappearing |
Sea levels are inexorably rising as ice on land melts and hotter oceans expand. Sea levels are slow to respond to global heating, so even if the temperature rise is restricted to 2C, one in five people in the world will eventually see their cities submerged, from New York to London to Shanghai. As heating melts the sea ice, the darker water revealed absorbs more of the sun’s heat, causing more heating – one example of the vicious circles in the climate system.
Mariners see sea level rise
Scientists think the changes in the Arctic may be responsible for worsened heatwaves and floods in Eurasia and North America.2
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| Arctic Sea Ice shrinking |
The CBC reports on the attitude of some oil industry executives to the climate strikers. Gary Mar, CEO of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada and a former Alberta Progressive Conservative environment minister, said some of his three grown children have taken part in environmental protests before and he supports their right to do so.
He said if one of his children wanted to skip school to attend the strike Friday he would "be OK with that."
However, he said it's unrealistic for the climate change strikers to demand the immediate end of oil and gas production.
"We're not opposed to the environment," Mar said of the energy industry.3
The concern on the Atlantic and in the West about jobs may be connected to the problem of which workers are well trained to transition to energy jobs and which are going to have a more difficult training for the jobs of the future. The National Post reports that new research says job growth from clean energy will dramatically outpace that from fossil fuels over the next decade — as long as future Canadian governments maintain or increase attempts to fight climate change. "The clean-energy sector is a good-news story that no one's talking about," said Merran Smith of Clean Energy Canada, a think tank based at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. "There is nothing to fear about moving forward on climate action."
Smith said the data shows clean energy employment could reach nearly 560,000 by the end of the next decade. That's 160,000 new jobs, more than enough to make up for the 50,000 jobs which fossil fuels are expected to shed.
The study also forecasts money flowing into clean energy will grow 2.9 per cent a year. Fossil fuel investment is expected to shrink.4
Perhaps the strategy has changed since April when the United Conservative Party notes Jason Kenney said that many other changes proposed by the UCP would also help kickstart the industry, especially the Job Creation Tax Cut, carbon tax elimination, the Red Tape Reduction Action Plan, and the Open for Business Act.
“However,” he concluded, “to get Alberta back to work, and to create jobs in our energy sector, it is necessary for Alberta to move from a defensive, passive, and apologetic approach to a strong, assertive, and strategic defence of our economy, our workers, and our way of life. And with a United Conservative Party government in office, that is what we will do – get pipelines built, fight back against foreign-funded special interests and stand up for a fair deal in Canada.”5
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| Choices and important questions |
The campaign to Vote Energy highlights the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) promotion of an Energy Platform for Canada to define a strategic, long-term vision for oil and natural gas growth. That policy includes:
• Support completion of currently proposed major pipeline projects and actively support development of additional projects.• Supply Canada’s domestic oil and natural gas needs with domestic production, in particular by facilitating transportationof oil and natural gas from Western Canada to markets in Central and Atlantic Canada.• Increase the participation of Indigenous communities and businesses in Canada’s oil and natural gas sector.• Double current investment in the sector within four years, to return to or surpass 2014 investment levels.• Grow Canada’s contribution to global oil and natural gas supply.+ Canada becomes the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, surpassing Iraq and China.+ Canada becomes the world’s third-largest natural gas producer, surpassing Iran and Qatar6
The continuation of the emission of GHG, in Canada, and worldwide, will cause the oceans to become warmer and more acidic.
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| Sea level rise in Nova Scotia |
Decline of the fishery in Canada will impact the livelihood of many people who are less prepared to retrain for energy jobs than those men and women who already have energy work experience in the western petroleum industry.
References
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