Dear Reader,

On my way to work this morning, I heard CBC Radio’s Matt Galloway (host of The Current) grill Canada’s minister of the environment and climate change, Steven Guilbeault, about the UN Climate Change Conference (aka COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland.

In his pre-electoral life, Guilbeault was a vocal environmental activist. At five, he climbed a tree to protect it from real estate developers. At 30, he scaled the CN Tower in support of the Kyoto Protocol. He co-founded Équiterre, the largest environmental organization in Quebec and worked with Greenpeace.

Galloway wanted to know what someone with that background thought of COP26. Équiterre, it’s worth noting, didn’t say it was a failure but did publish a statement saying “it can certainly not be called a success”. Was Guilbeault happy with the outcome?

There was the usual back-and-forth about compromises and gains, but, pressed Galloway, was the minister happy with the compromised agreement? Echoes of Équiterre, he didn’t denounce the deal… but he wasn’t wildly ecstatic either. Ultimately, it sounded like he felt it was better to have a flawed deal than no deal at all. Such are the constraints of political life.

Colleague David Suzuki was much less restrained.

Speaking directly to the N.L. situation, he said the province’s offshore oil needs to stay in the ground. "We have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere. And that oil that has been so important to Newfoundlanders is now something that doesn't work."

While Suzuki opted out of the global climate summit, Premier Furey did not. He travelled to the U.K. to defend the province’s oil sector and what he described as its “clean gas”. This, while Equinor recommits to developing Bay du Nord as Canada’s lowest-emission oil project.

Is there really such a think as “green oil”? As Ashley Fitzpatrick detailed in her March 2021 cover story Greenwashing Our Hands Of It: “The hard truth is that N.L.’s oil is a significant source of greenhouse gas—full stop. Accepting that, it’s time to talk about where the province’s economy goes from here.”

Yes, the world’s climate is changing, ever faster and ever more dramatically.

And yes, we need drastic and painful action NOW if we’re going to slow the impacts of climate change.

At the same time, fossil fuels will continue to be the dominant energy source for the foreseeable future (I’m predicting 10 years).

Should N.L. sacrifice its oil reserves while other jurisdictions continue to develop their fossil fuels? Would that sacrifice make the difference between meeting carbon reductions targets and melting the polar ice caps?

I have questions… I wish I had answers.

 

Dawn Chafe Executive editor & co-owner dchafe@atlanticbusinessmagazine.ca