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Climate Action- Right Way, Wrong Way

November 15, 2022

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Climate action shouldn’t mean choosing between personal and political responsibility

January 30, 2020

Climate action shouldn’t mean choosing between personal and political responsibility

© fotografixx / iStock

Can your individual behaviour make a real difference to the environment? And should you be expected to voluntarily change your life in the face of our worsening environmental crises? Some argue this emphasis on personal responsibility is a distraction from the real culprits: companies and governments.

We often treat the decisions to find alternative ways of living more sustainably and to pursue political resistance against big polluters and inactive governments as separate. But our recent research found that the relationship between alternatives and resistance is really far more complex. One can often lead to the other.

Previous studies have shown that taking individual responsibility for the environment or developing green alternatives often go hand in hand with political action. Our research suggests that this relationship can form over time, and that when people change their lifestyles for environmental reasons this can galvanise their political action more generally. But we also found that this doesn’t always happen and that bringing the two together can be difficult.

Our first study, carried out with Soetkin Verhaegen of UCLouvain in Belgium, looked at the environmental actions of a group of over 1,500 politically interested Belgians between 2017 and 2018. We found that citizens who took individual actions such as buying ethical products, changing how they travelled or producing their own food or energy, became more politically active over time. This included interacting with political institutions (for example, contacting elected politicians) and other actions such as taking part in protests.

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The Climate Crisis Is Real: Here’s the Expert Advice on What We Need to Do

November 1, 2019

The Climate Crisis Is Real: Here’s the Expert Advice on What We Need to Do

A global primer on next steps, from keeping oil in the ground to changing our diets to shifting to a green economy.

GretaThunbergMarch.jpg
Greta Thunberg helped launch a movement. But dealing with the climate crisis is up to us. Photo by campact Creative Commons licensed.

“The world is waking up,” Thunberg told world leaders at the recent UN Climate Action Summit. “And change is coming whether you like it or not.”

But how long that awakening takes could be decisive for warming this century. A report published ahead of the summit declared that the impacts of climate change are accelerating — global emissions of carbon dioxide grew by 20 per cent between 2015 and 2019, while the average rate of sea level rise has increased to five millimetres per year over roughly the same period.

One author warned that limiting global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius would require tripling current commitments to reduce emissions. To hold temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, global ambition would need to increase by a factor of five.

The debate over whether climate change is happening is over, and the conversation about what should be done is beginning in earnest. We’ve asked experts from around the globe to describe how the world should respond to the threat of climate breakdown. We share their insights here.

The state of the Earth

Nowhere are the effects of climate change more visible than in the Arctic, a region that’s estimated to be warming at least twice as fast as the global average. Arctic sea ice reached its second-lowest extent on record in September 2019.

A new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has revealed the changes that are under way in the oceans and the ice-covered regions of the world, and the message is stark.

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How Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly helped climate action

April 29, 2019

How Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly helped climate action 

Holding a Citizens’ Assembly on climate action is one of just three demands by the headline-grabbing activists of Extinction Rebellion, whose city-stopping protests now progress to local movement building. Yet many people don’t even know what a such an assembly is, even as the City Council in Oxford, UK, prepares to organise their own. But Frances Foley, of the Citizens’ Convention on UK Democracy, writing here for the Rapid Transition Alliance, says that a ground-breaking Irish experiment in deliberative democracy shows that citizens’ assemblies really can help deliver climate action.

A national roll-out of low-carbon public vehicles, state support for community energy generation, higher taxes on carbon-intensive sectors, incentives for responsible agricultural land use and carbon sequestering, government-backed planting of forests, an extension of bus and cycle lanes and climate change at the centre of all government policy making.

It reads like a Christmas list for a climate activist. A bold, comprehensive and realistic government commitment to taking climate change seriously. Real leadership, real ambition – a real shift.

Credit: Climate change march by Sarah King, IDS.

Yet this policy programme comes not from the Green Party central office, nor from yet another environmental thinktank report. The 13 recommendations were reached through a serious exercise in democratic decision-making in Ireland. The government signed up and set up; the citizens turned up and scaled up. It was a show of good faith from every side – political class, citizenry, media. It was a leap of democratic faith.

It reads like a Christmas list for a climate activist. A bold, comprehensive and realistic government commitment to taking climate change seriously.

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14 New Massachusetts State Reps Support 100% Renewable Energy by 2050

January 9, 2019

14 New Massachusetts State Reps Support 100% Renewable Energy by 2050

Kids holding pro-renewables signs at a Gulf of Mexico drilling lease protest in New Orleans in 2016

With the swearing in of new members last week, the Massachusetts legislature, not unlike the U.S. Congress, is receiving an infusion of brand-new state representatives who already are pushing an aggressive agenda focused on addressing climate change and transitioning to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2050.

So far, 14, or over half of the 24 new recruits, have formed an informal but unified group known as GreenTeamMA. Their initiatives are straightforward. They’ve agreed to refuse campaign contributions from fossil fuel PACs, they support carbon pricing, and they’ll be working with constituents to drive higher demand for wind, solar, and hydropower in the Bay State, where today almost one-sixth of electricity comes from renewable sources.

“It’s a bottom-up approach that may well work,” said newly elected State Rep. Patrick Kearney of the South Shore’s 4thPlymouth District. “It’s a bipartisan effort we’re undertaking because the climate affects the health and well-being of every community.”

Graduation Day at New Legislators Academy for newly elected Massachusetts State Representatives, sworn into office on January 2, 2019.
Graduation Day at New Legislators Academy for newly elected Massachusetts State Representatives, sworn into office on January 2, 2019. Credit: Patrick Kearney

Building Grassroots Support for Climate Action

GreenTeamMA members view climate change as a clear and present danger that requires an energy recalculation.

With one of the richest offshore wind reserves in the world and the capacity to build onshore wind and solar power plants to meet the growing energy needs of Massachusetts, the commonwealth is “poised to embrace a clean energy economy,” says State Rep. Tommy Vitolo of Brookline’s 15th Norfolk District.

To catapult that economy, GreenTeamMA members plan to target Massachusetts voters who rank health and climate change as key issues and call on them to make a consumer switch to renewable electricity.

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As Harper Stalls on Climate, Canada Moves Without Him

June 15, 2015

As Harper Stalls on Climate, Canada Moves Without Him

Students, provinces, investors and unions are taking action. How long can he ignore it?

One of the first things Stephen Harper did after winning a majority in 2011 was to build a system of levees around the Prime Minister’s Office. They weren’t physical levees, of course, like the type designed to keep water from flooding New Orleans. Rather, they were ideological ones, erected on the belief that climate action is at odds with a healthy economy. Surrounded by those levees, Harper did whatever he wanted on climate change, which for the most part meant ignoring it completely.

His Conservative government passed laws to accelerate the growth of Canada’s oil and gas industry, while pledging carbon regulations that never came. He pulled Canada from the Kyoto Protocol, muzzled federal scientists and cut funding to their research, strong-armed the U.S. on bitumen pipelines and set climate targets he had no clear intention of meeting. But something unexpected happened. A frustrated cohort of students, provinces, investors and unions decided to take decisive climate action on its own.

Harper’s done his best to withstand this rising tide. He’s argued that climate is low on the list of “significant challenges,” for instance, after 400,000 people marched for action in New York; that regulating the emissions of polluters is “crazy,” as Ontario readied a system of cap-and-trade; that Canada is a fossil fuel “superpower,” as billions of investment dollars flowed into clean energy; and that taxing carbon is “job-killing,” as Canada’s largest private sector union argued the exact opposite.

Levees don’t break bit by bit. They collapse all at once — and with a destructive fury. The storm surge that breached New Orleans’ defences in 2005 killed 1,800 people. The surge of anti-Tory opinion in Alberta’s recent election swept away a 44-year-old political dynasty. For four years Harper has been governing on climate change, as well as many other issues, from behind a system of ideological levees. As the federal election this fall nears, how long will Harper ignore the forces rising against him?

 

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Oil Industry Can No Longer Ignore Climate Action

May 26, 2015

Oil Industry Can No Longer Ignore Climate Action

Global momentum towards action on climate change is building in the lead up to international negotiations, set to take place later this year in Paris. With the writing on the wall, some of the largest oil companies are banding together in order not to be left out in the cold.

The agreement emerging from Copenhagen in 2009 was widely seen as a failure. While the likelihood of a stringent international agreement with binding emissions targets resulting from the Paris talks is extremely low, the world appears to be mustering up the motivation to do something.

Whether that has a real impact on the fortunes of the oil and gas industry remains to be seen, but to avoid being left out of the conversation, oil companies including Total, Eni, Saudi Aramco, BG, Royal Dutch Shell, and others have come together to form an industry group to weigh in on the negotiations. The group will announce the establishment of a think tank in June.

Related: Shell Approval May Trigger Resource Race In The Arctic

Sensing an emerging threat from climate action, the new think tank will establish common industry-wide positions on responding to climate change, such as pushing natural gas as an alternative to coal. By speaking together they hope to have their collective voice heard and avoid being caught flatfooted in the event that aggressive emissions reductions policies get put into place.

Thus far, the group appears to consist of European companies, with oil majors ExxonMobil and Chevron staying out.

But ExxonMobil is eyeing the rising green tide as well. ExxonMobil even sent lobbyists to Vatican City as it became known that the Pope was going to write an encyclical – or a letter that lays out Catholic teachings – ahead of the Paris negotiations in favor of environmental protection. ExxonMobil wanted to brief the Vatican on its take on the future of energy.

 

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BC Climate Change Progress Stalled, Critics Say

May 11, 2015

BC Climate Change Progress Stalled, Critics Say

‘We know we need to do more,’ says environment minister.

Lately, Premier Christy Clark has been bragging about British Columbia’s record fighting climate change, but observers say that pride is misplaced.

“They’re talking a lot about being a world leader in climate action,” said Jens Wieting, a campaigner with the Sierra Club of BC. That’s misleading considering the province’s recent record on carbon emissions, he said. “We are currently moving in the wrong direction.”

A B.C. government press release dated April 13 trumpeted the “world-leading standard B.C. has set for climate action” and challenged other jurisdictions to meet or beat the province’s standard. It noted Clark was set to speak to meetings of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund on April 17 about the B.C. carbon tax, “which sets a powerful example for the world.”

Clark also congratulated California on new targets in late April that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030, noting, “In B.C., we have been leading by example since 2008, when we introduced our carbon tax.”

Even the election of Rachel Notley as premier of Alberta was occasion for Clark to say that maybe now that province would consider adopting a carbon tax like B.C.’s.

 

Rising emissions

But as the Sierra Club’s Wieting points out, the hot air from Clark and the B.C. government comes as the province’s climate change record has slipped.

While B.C. claimed to have met its interim target of a six per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2007 levels in 2012, a year later they had gone back up by 2.4 per cent to 63 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, Wieting said. He cited recently released figures from theNational Inventory of greenhouse gas sources and sinks.

“We can’t afford to move in the wrong direction and see our emissions increasing,” he said. “The science is clear we’re running out of time.”

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EU Energy Union May Be Biting Off More Than It Can Chew

February 10, 2015

EU Energy Union May Be Biting Off More Than It Can Chew

With oil and gas still flooding the scene it’s a buyer’s market. For some however, picking isn’t easy. For the European Union specifically, an abundance of choice comes with its own set of logistical and geopolitical problems.

February 4 marked the launch of the EU’s Energy Union – an ambitious project that will establish a long-term plan for European energy and climate policy and set the politico-economic union on the path towards decarbonization. The doubters are many, but EU Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Canete confirmed the plan “will contain concrete measures” as well as “full and proper enforcement.” The framework strategy – still very much under discussion – is due for adoption on February 25.

Among the goals of the Union are enhanced energy efficiency, diversification and flexibility, in addition to increased deployment of renewable energy. More specifically, the EU is targeting electricity interconnection of 10-15 percent, a renewable share of 50 percent, as well as emissions reductions of more than 30 percent by 2050 – initiatives that will cost approximately $3 trillion, or nearly 15 percent of the current EU GDP. Addressing these goals will require massive infrastructure overhauls and timely investment, not to mention cooperation among the 28 vastly different member nations. In the early goings, that last bit is proving tough.

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