When wildfires encroached on  the outskirts of Fort McMurray the morning of May 3, 2016, the general messaging from officials was “Go about your life as normal.” By noon, as John Vaillant reports in his book Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, the tune had changed dramatically, to “Everyone out! Now!!” Eighty-eight thousand people fled the city, many carrying traumas that last to this day. Roughly 2,400 homes were destroyed, many in an explosive burst of incinerated fury, because the heat was so extreme. By the time the fire expired 15 months later, it had consumed 5,900 square kilometres of forest and caused $9.9 billion in damage. They called it The Beast. 

Fire in the forest is normal; the boreal forest has evolved to burn every hundred years. Spruce fir trees actually wait for fire to release their seeds. But when you consider that eight of the world’s worst wildfire years have happened in the last 10 years, this certainly isn’t normal. This year there have been furiously destructive fires in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, Kazakhstan, Sicily, Sardinia, Lombardy, Athens, Corfu, Rhodes, France, Romania, Andalusia, Catalonia, Portugal, Arizona, California, Montana, Oregon, Maui (killing more than 100 people and destroying Lahaina), and now, as I write, Yellowknife. They are even burning in the Arctic.  

By early August, 5,500 fires had burned 134,000 square kilometres of Canada’s forests, six times more than the seasonal average, releasing a vast amount of stored carbon. That’s five times the size of Vermont, two and a half times the size of Nova Scotia. In northern B.C., the Donnie Creek fire is the largest ever recorded in the province. Canada has 3.2 million square kilometres of forest, so if this much was to burn every year, it would all be blackened and gone by 2047. All gone.  

The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking at it with sticks.

 

– Wallace Broecker, oceanographer, paleoclimatologist, 50 years in climate science. 

The “beast” is both fire and the climate system. Each fire has a specific local cause, but if we continue to feed the climate beast, increasing the heat and drought conditions that fire thrives on, we can be guaranteed that future fires will be worse, as will the downpours, floods and sea-level rise that the beast also causes. In 2022, a landmark UN report warned that the climate crisis would increase the risk of wildfire by 50% by the end of the century. 

As humans, we like our creature comforts. We also like our beliefs, and we are reluctant to admit that we might sometimes be wrong. It’s a matter of pride. If we can persuade ourselves that there is no climate beast, we can continue to enjoy our trucks, our boats, our flights, our vacations, our steaks and our other fossil-fuelled privileges without a guilty conscience. To bolster our belief, we can listen to professors like Jordan Peterson, who will assure us and his millions of followers that any talk of a climate crisis is a hoax designed to take away our cherished personal freedoms. 

Meanwhile, the fire keeps coming, and a new word has entered our vocabulary: pyrocumulonimbus. This is fire weather that explodes like a bomb, cauterizing the landscape; devouring houses, cars, trucks and equipment; vaporizing any water that the valiant firefighters might try to send its way. 

In Fort McMurray, as Vaillant describes with aching pain in his book, 20,000 of the residents who fled chose not to return, but 68,000 did return to continue feeding the beast, many of them digging bitumen out of the ground, cooking it with two billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, to produce three million barrels of crude oil a day, pumping it into pipelines, all so that we can keep on driving and flying our fossil-fuelled vehicles.  

In a few short decades, we have burned our way through fossilized energy that took millions of years to form. We have released all of its stored carbon into the atmosphere, where, as carbon dioxide, it traps heat. As a New Scientist editorial stated in June 2023, “The basic science of climate change is so universally accepted that only the most fringe elements of society now deny it.”  

Yet like an alcoholic who insists they are not drunk, many people refuse to talk about it. In Alberta, 53% of those who cast a ballot in the 2023 election voted for the United Conservative Party, made up of politicians who are determined to continue feeding the beast.  

Last week, a cold front passed through the province following several days of hot, dry weather. pic.twitter.com/fHbPsizjbr

— BC Wildfire Service (@BCGovFireInfo) August 22, 2023

It’s not just in Canada that people are having this difficulty. In the summer of 2021, the novelist Christy Lefteri flew to a small town on the coast of Greece near Athens to learn about the wildfire that ripped through the town in 2018, killing 80 people and destroying two– thirds of the homes. She wanted to hear people’s stories, to understand what it meant to be displaced by such a disaster. Everyone was distressed, but as soon as she raised the topic of climate change, they made it clear that such talk was “shut down immediately and completely.” 

In Lahaina, the historic town in Maui destroyed by an unprecedented blaze, the talk is of drought, hurricane winds, downed power lines, highly flammable non-native grasses, and the absence of warning sirens. After all, how can the myriad climate solutions help the victims of a fire that has come and gone? Far better to focus on prevention by protecting the wildland-urban-interface, fire-proofing people’s homes, and better training for firefighters to limit the damage from the fire beast’s assaults. We have our firefighter and first responder heroes, and our climate heroes are legion, but their efforts are being sabotaged, obstructed, and delayed by those who are addicted.  

If we continue to obstruct the climate solutions that can wean us off our addiction and lead us to a green, climate-safe future, the beast will destroy us all. It will burn our forests down, drive us off our farms, flood our homes, increase our torment with its heat, turn us into climate refugees, slowly cook the ocean and make our grandchildren curse us. Then it will melt the ice in Greenland and Antarctica and flood the world far beyond what anyone is expecting.  

So please don’t think “I’m glad it’s not my family that was living in Fort McMurray, Lytton, or Lahaina.” The beast will come for all of us. Ask instead how you can be one of the heroes who goes out to fight the climate beast. There is much that you can do: 

Have you: 

• written to your local, federal and provincial politicians, urging rapid action? 
• examined your investments and removed all those that support fossil fuels? 
• written to the directors of your bank, urging them to stop financing fossil fuels? 
• urged the companies you purchase from (and business friends in C-suites) to rapidly curb their emissions? 
• traded in your beast-mobile for an EV, bus or bicycle? 
• switched your home’s oil or gas heating to a clean electric heat pump? 
• held your children tight, and told them you will do whatever you can to stop the beast? 

Guy Dauncey lives in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island. He is the co-founder of the West Coast Climate Action Network. 

The post The fire beast is everywhere. A checklist for fighting back. appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Today’s climate impacts are the result of our emissions 40 years ago. And it’s not our emissions as such that are the problem, it’s our accumulated emissions. By the time we reduce our global emissions to zero the atmosphere will contain a 300 gigaton surplus of carbon, every molecule of which will continue to trap heat, bringing chaos, and needing urgent sequestration in forests, farms, peatlands and marine ecosystems.

When the alarm bells rang for the COVID-19 emergency everyone jumped to it, knowing that we were under an immediate threat. For the climate crisis, however, there is still a reluctance to act at sufficient scale  or with sufficient urgency. There is wide support for wind, solar and electric cars, but until workers see the prospect of actual green jobs they cling to the security of their known jobs, even when those jobs entail building pipelines intended to increase our carbon emissions. It’s Alice in Carbonland.

Might it be that our politicians don’t understand the powers of central and public banks? In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis the Bank of England, U.S. Federal Reserve and European Central Bank pumped trillions of dollars into their economies through a program known as quantitative easing, in a successful attempt to prevent an economic meltdown. In February, the People’s Bank of China pumped $172 billion of digital money into its economy to forestall an economic recession brought on by the coronavirus. On March 23, faced with a global financial calamity, America’s Fed conjured up $375 billion to buy Treasury Securities and $250 billion to buy mortgage securities. Congress set aside $454 billion to cover Fed losses, enabling it to generate more than $4 trillion in loans. In the final days of March, as Adam Tooze reports, the Fed was buying at-risk securities at the rate of $1 million per second.

Where does such money come from? Out of thin air, based on trust in the nation. In an emergency, central banks can do that. They just print it digitally. The risk is inflation, but the trillions that were created to head off a collapse in 2008 had no general inflationary impact outside of the financial and housing markets. So if central banks can do whatever it takes for one emergency, why not do the same for another, within the limits posed by the risk of inflation? Adam Tooze certainly thinks that they should.

I have worked on the climate crisis for more than twenty years, including writing two books on climate solutions, but until I began an in-depth study of economics three years ago I did not understand the powers inherent in banking. In January, realizing that the 2020s were the most critical decade in the history of our civilization, I published a major paper that integrates my understanding of banking and finance with my understanding of climate solutions, titled Climate Emergency: A 26-Week Transition Program for Canada.

I chose five methods to finance a program of rapid change that would cost $59 billion a year. The first is Climate Action Bonds worth $8.3 billion a year, issued by the government and purchased by the Bank of Canada. They are used to finance measures that don’t offer a financial return, including $1.5 billion a year for a two-year $50K Transition Income Guarantee for fossil fuel workers whose jobs disappear, $1 billion in bikeway infrastructure grants, $960 million for 1.5 million home energy audits, $1 billion in electric vehicle incentives and $1.25 billion for 50,000 Sustainable Building Skills Training Placements.

The second method requires a network of public banks to be established across Canada, one in each province and one for the northern territories. When a private bank advances you a loan, they don’t use their reserves. Instead, they create it digitally, charging interest on it. For every $1 million in reserves, they might be allowed to create $10 million, though Canada has no requirements as such. A public bank managed by professional bankers for the public benefit can do the same without the need to charge interest in order to generate profits for shareholders.

Public banks all over the world create money for social purpose. In Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain and France, community and state-owned banks serve as much as 64% of the banking market. Germany’s Sparkassen banks’ 15,600 branches have a return on capital several times greater than Germany’s private bank sector. Among other things, they provided 72% of the financing for Germany’s solar and wind installations. In Bangladesh, the Infrastructure Development Company financed the installation of three million solar panels. In Germany, the Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau has been the main source of financing for building retrofits and energy efficiency loans to manufacturers.

In my paper, public banks create $7.1 billion in interest-free loans a year to finance $3.5 billion in loans to replace all energy-zombie modular homes, $2.5 billion in district heat loans and $500 million in green freight investment.

The third method is $19.5 billion a year in PAYS and PACE loans. PAYS stands for Pay-As-You-Save, and it’s used by Hydro Manitoba to link loan repayments for a home retrofit to a home’s utility bill. PACE stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy, which originated in the States, where it has been used to finance 237,000 home and commercial retrofits worth $6.7 billion.

When it comes to the task of retrofitting Canada’s 15 million homes with deep efficiency upgrades and air-source or geothermal heat-pumps, PAYS and PACE finance can come from utilities or the private sector. In my paper, $15 billion a year is mobilized for home retrofits and $4.5 billion a year for solar installations, both of which pay for themselves over time. To add stability to the loans, the Bank of Canada commits to be the buyer of last resort, a role recommended by the world-renowned economic historian Adam Tooze.

The fourth type of finance is $13.8 billion a year in 5% Green Bonds, financed by the public, which are used to finance industrial and commercial building retrofit loans worth $4.8 billion, community renewable energy loans worth $5 billion, and Climate Smart investment loans to small businesses worth $4 billion. To add security to the investment, the Bank of Canada commits to be the buyer of last resort, guaranteeing the 5% rate of return.

The final type of finance involves using the $10 billion a year that’s currently being spent on fossil fuel subsidies within Canada and by Export Development Canada to finance $2 billion in transit infrastructure grants, $1.6 billion for free bus passes for young people, $500 million for a Green Prairies Futures Fund, $4 billion for the UN Green Climate Fund and $1.7 billion for 40,000 local Climate Action Coordinators. Each of the Coordinators will help 1,000 people transition to 100% renewable energy and climate and ecologically-friendly lifestyles over ten years, in a scale of effort similar to the organizing that occurred during World War II.

In all, the paper contains 164 policy proposals, including giving the Bank of Canada the mandate to tackle emergencies, the power to issue credit guidance and barring banks from extending credit to climate-harmful ventures. This is the kind of action that an emergency calls for and it’s akin to barring banks from financing an enemy’s arms production during a war.

For Alberta and Saskatchewan, which depend so heavily on fossil fuel production, the paper includes a $50K a year Transition Income Guarantee, free college education or training and business or cooperative start-up support, nine Prairie Solutions Citizens Assemblies and a $5 billion ($500 million a year) Green Prairies Futures Fund to support the transition to a post-carbon economy.

The paper also recommends extensive investments in ecological restoration as well as changed forestry and farming practices. It proposes that the government write off its investment in the Trans-Mountain Pipeline, end all support for LNG, phase out coal by 2027 and natural gas by 2035 and deny approval for any further fossil fuel expansion projects.

The investments would generate 550,000 direct jobs. Private sector investments in solar and wind would generate a further 238,000 jobs in addition to the associated indirect and induced jobs. This comes to a surplus of 519,000 direct jobs after the phasing out of fossil fuel jobs. For a green COVID-19 recovery, it’s exactly what we need.

COVID-19 and the climate emergency both pose a big challenge and Canada can meet them both if we are willing to combine big vision with big finance.

Guy Dauncey is author of The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming and Journey to the Future: A Better World is Possible and other books.

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