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Graphic Truth: Canada braces for wildfire season
As the weather warms, the US and Canada are bracing for the potential of another record-breaking wildfire season. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season was the most destructive on record, with more than 6,000 fires tearing through tens of millions of acres and blanketing the US East Coast and Midwest in smoke.
Meanwhile, the US saw the smallest number of acres burned in more than two decades last year, thanks tohigh levels of precipitation and snowfall, which kept the West mostly out of trouble. But it also experienced its deadliest wildfire in over a century in Maui, Hawaii.
Canada's federal officials are warning that this season could be even worse. Warm fall and winter conditions, combined with droughts and next to no snowfall from December to February in essential areas like southern British Columbia and the Prairies impact soil moisture levels, raising the risk of fires.Graphic Truth: Home insurance costs are on the rise
From devastating hurricanes and ceaseless wildfires to catastrophic floods, natural disasters are increasing in frequency and cost in Canada and the US. As climate change makes disasters more frequent and destructive, insurers are having to raise rates and reduce coverage.
In the US, the home insurance industry has had three straight years of underwriting losses. Insurance rates rose an average of 21% in 2023 as a response, with some insurers in disaster-prone places like California and Florida ceasing to write new policies altogether. As a result, homeowners are forced to pay higher premiums for the fewer insurance options that remain.
In Canada, last summer’s record wildfires compounded with historic floods, costing more than $3.1 billion in insured damage and spiking rates in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia.
For this week’s Graphic Truth, we looked at how much insurance rates have risen around the US and Canada.
Graphic Truth: When it comes to freshwater, Canada is king
Water covers 71% of the Earth’s surface, but good ol’ H2O is a much more precious resource than it appears.
Less than 0.8% of Earth’s water is freshwater in lakes, rivers, or underground aquifers. And much of that already tiny fraction has been rendered unusable by pollution or is lost to poor management and inefficient agricultural practices. What’s worse, climate change and overexploitation of existing water resources mean that communities from California to Cambodia are struggling to provide safe water at an affordable price.
The good news for Canadians is that they have an absolute abundance of fresh water, more than 74,000 cubic meters of renewable water per person – enough for each to fill 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools!
It far outstrips peer economies in the G-7, as well as Brazil, Russia, and China, who along with the United States and Canada constitute the five countries with the most freshwater in absolute terms. Americans can fill a bit over two Olympic pools each, but none of their peers in Western Europe could even fill one.
But here’s the bad news: Freshwater is not easy to move, as Americans in Western states can tell you. Folks in Michigan have plenty (though, as Flint’s experience showed, not all of it is safe to drink), but keeping a green lawn and a full pool in LA is going to cost you a hefty chunk of change.
So what’s the solution? As discussed at a GZERO Live event sponsored by Suntory last week, the low-hanging fruit is agriculture. A whopping 90% of the freshwater humans use today is for irrigation farming, where much of it is lost to evaporation or seeps into the ground without nourishing crops. More efficient techniques and equipment can help farmers achieve the same yields with less water — but they will need financing and proper policy support too.Participants enter the Dubai Exhibition Centre during the COP28, UN Climate Change Conference.
Can climate activism and AI coexist?
AI is on the lips of climate-policy negotiators gathered for the United Nation’s COP28 conference in Dubai, and for good reason — it presents a high-risk but potentially high-reward scenario.
The upside: AI has the potential to supercharge efforts to find real climate solutions. For example, scientists can send AI-powered robots to collect data in the Arctic and other challenging environs, and the technology can also be used to improve forecasting for extreme weather and climate-related disasters. On an even more basic level, it can be used to maximize the efficiency of all kinds of systems and reduce their carbon footprint.
But there’s a big catch: AI is an energy-guzzler. One analysis found that AI systems worldwide could consume 85 to 134 terawatt-hours per year — equivalent to the electricity diet of Argentina or the Netherlands. That’d be good for half a percent of the world’s energy consumption. (This analysis is based on the sale of popular servers from US chipmaker NVIDIA, used by much of the AI market.)
At COP28, government and industry leaders made bold announcements. Boston Consulting Group said AI could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 5-10% by 2023. Meanwhile, the UN announced a deal with Microsoft to use AI to track countries' carbon-reduction promises.
Is the risk worth the reward? “Whether you like it or not,” says Shari Friedman, managing director for climate and sustainability at Eurasia Group, “AI is here to stay, so the job of humans will be to use it for the best purpose possible and maximize clean energy on the back end.”
Who should pay to fix our warming planet?
Global leaders are gathering in Dubai for COP28, the 28th annual United Nations climate summit, starting tomorrow through Dec. 12. But before the meeting even begins, I can already tell you one thing: Just like every COP that came before it, COP28 will fail to resolve the central debate on “solving” climate change.
At the heart of this failure lies a trillion-dollar roadblock: disagreement between developed and developing countries over who’s to blame for the problem – and who should foot the bill to fix it. The US and Europe blame Chinese and Indian coal plants and call for their immediate phase-down. China and developing countries blame the West’s historical emissions and insist on compensation for their mitigation and adaptation efforts. Africans and Indians assert their right to develop their economies as Westerners did. Vulnerable nations demand reparations to cope with the harmful consequences of the global warming that’s already baked in. Neither side wants to make concessions.
While they bicker, the planet is cooking. Cumulative emissions since 1850 – when humans started burning fossil fuels at scale – have already caused global temperatures to increase by about 1.2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial levels. Scientists believe we have nearly reached the point where limiting the planet’s temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (and therefore the most extreme consequences of climate change) becomes physically – not just politically or economically – impossible. 2023 will be the hottest year on record, and climate-related extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and heat waves are becoming more frequent and deadlier.
The good news is that we’re already moving in the right direction thanks to technological advancement, demographic changes, and market and geopolitical incentives. Looking out two or three generations from now, the global energy complex will be almost entirely post-carbon: renewable, cheap, decentralized, and abundant.
The bad news is that decarbonization is not happening fast enough to get there sooner. And unless developed and developing nations can bridge the climate finance gap, the path to global warming below 2 degrees Celsius – let alone 1.5 degrees, the current goal – will remain out of grasp. This puts the debate over equity and burden-sharing squarely at the heart of the planet’s ability to curb climate change.
So, who’s right? Who’s wrong? And what will it take to break the stalemate?
Climate justice by the numbers
Carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere. Unlike shorter-lived greenhouse gases such as methane, CO2 doesn’t go away – at least not on a human timescale. This means that all the carbon that we’ve pumped into the air in the past is still heating the planet today and will continue to do so in the future. And because CO2 is a “well-mixed” gas, it doesn’t matter where or by whom it is emitted. Whether caused by an LA traffic jam in 1999 or a Mongolian coal plant last Tuesday, it’s all the same to the atmosphere – and it’s all still up there.
In total, we have released roughly 2,500 gigatons of CO2 (GtCO2) into the atmosphere, mostly in the last 40 years. The United States is responsible for about 25% of cumulative emissions, while Europe (the 27 members of the European Union plus the United Kingdom) contributed 22%. China comes in third with nearly 15% of historical emissions. Many of today’s largest emitters such as India and Brazil have not contributed significantly to global cumulative emissions, with 3% and 1%, respectively. The whole African continent is responsible for less than 3% of historical emissions.
Adjusting for population size, the US has burned almost eight times more carbon per capita than China and over 25 times more than India. This makes it clear that Americans (and, to a lesser extent, other Westerners) are disproportionately responsible for causing climate change.
But while the US is historically responsible for more global warming than any other country, it is no longer the world’s largest polluter. China surpassed it in 2006, and its annual emissions are now more than double America’s and over one-quarter of the global total. India will pass the EU in the short term and the US in the medium term. And even as emissions in the industrialized world have been declining for over a decade, they are still growing in developing countries, which account for two-thirds of global emissions.
Yes, the average American still burns more than twice as much carbon as the average Chinese and 10 times as much as the average Indian. That’s pretty unfair. Not only did rich countries get rich by burning fossil fuels – we are also able to maintain living standards other countries can’t even dream of by continuing to burn much more than them. But just as the atmosphere doesn’t care about where or when carbon gets burned, it also doesn’t care about fairness.
‘Fair’ is off the table
In order to have an even chance of staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, scientists estimate that cumulative CO2 emissions cannot exceed 2,900 GtCO2. That’s our carbon budget. The problem is we’ve already used up most of it, meaning global emissions would have to go down by 43% by 2030 to stay on budget – a nearly 10% reduction every year from now until then (for reference, the COVID-19 pandemic caused only a 6% reduction in global emissions in 2020).
Putting aside the question of whether this is even physically possible, who should bear the brunt of this burden?
The obvious answer is developed countries. Most developing countries are well within their fair share of the carbon budget relative to their population size. Conversely, the US and other wealthy nations have long since exceeded their fair share, such that even if they reach net zero by 2050 (a big if), their emissions will still overshoot their fair share by three or four times. In fact, Americans used up their fair share of the carbon budget in 1944 (!). Whatever little budget space remains belongs entirely to developing nations.
Beyond the fact that they’ve been living on borrowed emissions since D-Day, there’s another compelling reason why rich countries should be expected to do more than poorer nations to curb climate change: They can. Developed nations are, well, developed, so they have more than enough resources to meet their citizens’ needs already (even if these are unevenly distributed). That means that they can afford to engage in aggressive decarbonization without compromising their economic development. By contrast, for developing countries, paying for decarbonization out-of-pocket at the needed pace would require condemning much of their population to poverty.
Expecting wealthy nations to take on more than poor ones is not just about retribution, then. It’s also about not depriving billions of people of the right to develop – a right that industrialized countries exercise to this day. Had rich countries not emitted (so much) more than their share, developing nations would have plenty of room left to develop like industrialized nations did.
What it’ll take
Unless scientists figure out a way to suck carbon out of the air at scale, the only way that the world can ever reach net zero is if all countries – poor and rich alike – reach net zero. Forget right and wrong – that’s simple math.
So, to answer the earlier question: Should developing nations pay for the sins of much wealthier countries? Absolutely not. Must they? Barring a breakthrough in negative emissions technologies, unfortunately yes. They cannot pursue the fossil-fueled path to development rich countries enjoyed and keep the planet from warming much further.
But for developing nations to ever agree to get on board with the program, industrialized countries will first have to credibly commit to doing four things in return. First, accelerate their own decarbonization to maximize the carbon budget available to the rest of the world. Second, invest whatever it takes to develop and deploy technologies that exponentially reduce the cost of decarbonization abroad. Third, aggressively fund the large upfront costs of decarbonization and adaptation in developing countries. And fourth, compensate vulnerable nations for the losses and damages they’re already experiencing due to climate change they didn’t cause.
Mustering the political will to make these things happen in wealthy nations is a huge challenge. We have consistently failed to meet our 2009 promise to shuttle $100 billion a year in climate finance to the developing world by 2020, a puny amount compared to the estimated $1 trillion price tag to decarbonize emerging economies. We are also still off-track to meet our own decarbonization goals. If we want developing countries to pony up, there can be no more empty promises and unmet pledges.
Unless we’re willing to put our money where our mouths are, we’re going to see not 1.5 C warming, not even 2 C, but rather closer to the 2.7 C the planet is currently on pace for – not an existential scenario for life on Earth, but certainly a life-changing one for billions of people around the world and especially in the Global South. We need to do better.
A person walks past a "#COP28" sign in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Controversies at COP28 and the future of climate change
Global climate talks are kicking off at COP28 on Thursday amid revelations that its host, the United Arab Emirates, is using the event to lobby for fossil fuel production. On the one hand, no one is surprised. Climate activists were already outraged and suspicious that one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers was hosting a meeting meant to move the world away from their production. On the other, as scientists uncover that climate change is progressing faster than expected, are the few global institutions meant to be speeding up our transition to carbon neutrality actually working against it?
For answers, we looked to Eurasia Group Vice Chairman Gerald Butts, who was a part of Canada’s delegation when the Paris Agreement was adopted at COP21 in 2015.
What was the Paris Agreement, and what has been your experience of COP meetings in the past?
Gerald Butts: The Paris Agreement was really about countries agreeing to take their own path to a common outcome. Every COP since then has been an attempt to fill in the blanks of how different countries are going to get to [carbon neutral] and serves as a reporting and accountability mechanism of how much progress each country has made.
I think that from a big-picture dynamic, the really hard issues still haven't been settled. Like, what is the role of oil and gas in a net zero world and in a decarbonized energy system? Like, who is going to pay for all of the negative consequences? Or, who is going to pay for poorer countries to be able to absorb the most negative consequences of climate change?
Those three big issues that haven't been sorted. And they're kind of coming to a head for obvious reasons because a country whose economy is dominated by oil and gas is hosting COP for the first time.
Speaking of which, what do you think of the recent revelations that the UAE is using the event to prompt fossil fuel negotiations?
I think actually the story is kind of a Rorschach test. The people who had always been suspicious of the UAE's motives for wanting to host COP will point to it and say, “Aha, that's what we were suspicious of!” And on the other hand, the UAE will say, “Well, we're an oil and gas producer, of course, we're going to try and sign oil and gas contracts.”
And that just kind of makes the point of the ... dare I say it, GULF between one side and the other. The UAE doesn't see anything wrong with what it's doing. While advocates for more rapid decarbonization see everything wrong with what the UAE is doing.
And we're kind of coming to a head here. The International Energy Agency released a really important report last week on the role that oil and gas can play in the transition. And it rightly rendered a judgment that oil and gas has been an impediment to decarbonization rather than a facilitator of it. And we're long past the day where you can say one thing and do another.
And whether from that report or in your own opinion, do you see a role for oil and gas in the decarbonization transition?
I see a theoretical one for sure. I mean, I think that an enormous amount of capital from the existing energy system has been absorbed by existing providers of energy and that if they were to deploy that capital to expedite decarbonization, that would be positive. In a nutshell, that's what the IEA's 150-page report says, if I can summarize it. But when you look at the balance sheets of these companies, what they're actually deploying capital to do, it's not that, it's to develop oil and gas.
Keeping on this subject, do you think revelations like these [about the UAE] hurt the momentum of the climate change movement? You said we're at a breaking point at this controversial COP28. What do you think the effects are going to be?
I always think it's a good thing when hard questions get clearly put on the table. And that's what's happening here. I think it'll feel like a setback in the short term, but it's actually a good thing that we're talking about real things at COP.
I think the next big COP will be, not next year, but the year after that, when Brazil will be hosting. Constructing a positive path between this COP and the Brazil COP30 will be a really important thing for the future of COP.
Some say that progressive candidates haven't proven they can win by pushing an aggressive climate change agenda. Do you think this is a problem? How could climate change become a more winning campaign platform for progressive candidates?
Butts: Well, I wouldn't agree with that assessment, actually. I think there are lots of examples of successful candidates who ran on aggressive climate agendas — Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron.
I think the challenge is this inflationary environment is really bad for incumbents. It's coincidental that a lot of those incumbents tend to be pro-climate forward, so to speak. But inflation doesn't discriminate against governments of any ideological stripe. It's just really bad if you're in power when it happens.
You’ve said that you remain optimistic about climate because the youth around the globe will vote or push their leaders to act in their best interests. I wonder if we will be given enough time to do that when you read about climate change progressing faster than anyone thought.
I think that's still true, actually. I think the people that are being hurt most by the inflation environment are homeowners, right? There are people who have mortgages. Sadly for your generation, you haven't been able to break into that market en masse yet. Which may turn out to be in the short term, a good thing, right, that you're not going to be trying to scramble to find 30 to 40% more of your monthly budget to pay your mortgage.
But I think in the short term, it's going to be hard because people are going to be focused on, short term, keeping their heads above water. Not long-term about keeping everybody's heads above water.
What do you think of President Joe Biden skipping this year's COP to focus on the Middle East and the upcoming election?
I think it's a bit of a sign that he thinks that this COP is not something he wants his brand associated with. I think that says a lot about the dynamic that we talked about 10 minutes ago. The United States this year will break a record for oil and gas production, but at the same time, they've got the most aggressive climate legislation in the history of the United States and one of the most aggressive anywhere in the world.
So they're trying to ride two horses. It's a domestic example of the global problem that the time for riding two horses is coming to an end.
I think if this COP was in Brazil, he'd be there.
Tug of war rope between US & Canada over green subsidies and tech workers.
Hard Numbers: Canada snaps up US tech workers, greenhouse gasses surpass grim mark, green hydrogen comes to Quebec, shrimp paste alarm
6,000: Nicely played, Canada. Back in July, as US tech giants were laying off tens of thousands of employees, Canada seized the moment, changing its immigration rules to permit US H-1B visa holders to get work visas in Canada. So far this year, more than 6,000 holders of the US visa have relocated north of the border.
50: Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide — the most pernicious of the greenhouse gasses — have exceeded their pre-industrial levels by 50% for the first time, according to a new study by the World Meteorological Organization. As we told you last week, Canada and the US are among the top offenders when it comes to slacking on commitments to reduce the production of fossil fuels, a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
4 billion: On the plus side, the clean energy rivalry between the US and Canada continues to heat up, as Belgium’s Tree Energy Solutions has committed to building a $4 billion synthetic natural gas plant in Quebec. Canada finds itself in stiff competition with the massive subsidies that the Biden administration has offered to the industry in the US, with Canadian lawmakers warning of a “subsidy war.” As long as the Earth’s atmosphere is the big winner of that conflict, we say … let the battles begin.
37: What do brush mowers, baby pillows, shrimp paste, and dozens of early 2010s BMWs and Mini Coopers have in common? They are all among at least 37 different products that were recalled for safety reasons in Canada over the past week. The shrimp paste has mystery ingredients, the baby pillows can suffocate babies, and the cars catch on fire. It’s a wild time to be alive — stay safe out there, folks!
After a summer from hell, will voters embrace climate action?
Pierre Poilievre, leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, is having a pretty good summer. He’s holding well-attended “Axe the tax” rallies across the country, promising to get rid of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his unpopular carbon tax, which is hitting drivers at the pumps.
This week, though, Poilievre had to postpone rallies in British Columbia and the Yukon because of wildfires that have forced tens of thousands to flee their homes and burned 15 million hectares of bush, leaving an area the size of Illinois in ashes. Since the carbon tax was designed to reduce the emissions that contributed to these catastrophic fires, it was bitterly ironic that Poilievre’s campaign against the tax was interrupted by the fires, but he is not changing course.
In both Canada and the United States, this has been a hellish summer, with so much climate-related extreme weather that it is hard to keep track. The summer started with wildfires and floods in typically temperate Nova Scotia. Heat records have fallen in Arizona. Ocean water the temperature of a hot tub has killed coral in the turquoise waters of the Florida Keys. A deadly fire laid waste to tropical Maui. A hurricane hit L.A.
Have voters been listening?
For decades, climate scientists have been warning these disasters would come if we don’t reduce the emissions that are warming the planet. Now that the disasters have started, will people recognize the urgency of the problem?
“That is the multi-trillion dollar question,” says Shari Friedman, Eurasia Group’s managing director for climate and sustainability, who has been working on climate since the 1990s.
“When I started on climate change, the assumption was that people weren't believing this, but that when people saw the effects, they would start to see it .. Now, I think the question is a little bit different because we're seeing the effects – it's pretty clear. And the question now is, what is going to change these trajectories?”
Climate scientists have done heroic work on a massive scale to understand and describe the processes that are causing extreme weather. But this has failed to convince voters to do what is necessary to bring down the emissions that are causing ecosystems to dissipate heat in ways that threaten human existence.
People are not wising up. The Pew Research Center, which tracks attitudes toward climate around the world, has observed a decline in the number of Americans who consider it a major threat, from 59% in 2018 to 54% in 2022.
The role of disinformation
Canadian pollster Frank Graves, of EKOS Research Associates, observed the same decline in Canada over the last three years, which he attributes to online disinformation. To many people, he says, climate change “is fake news. This is made up. This is a plot by the woke left to collect their useless carbon tax.”
In his most recent poll of Canadians, this month, while wildfires were top of mind, Graves observed that a growing number of people — mostly conservatives — blame arson, not extreme weather, for the blazes. (This is a pattern of misinformation found wherever there are wildfires.) Voters who believe fires are caused by arson, not a warming globe, will not support policies to reduce emissions.
“The patterns of who gets this disinformation are very, very similar in Canada and the United States,” Graves says, “because they are emanating from the same sources. And those sources are now telling people climate change is a hoax, and these forest fires are either just bad luck or, more pointedly, they are being produced by arsonists, saboteurs, activists.”
The issue, in both countries, is divided along partisan lines, with conservatives less willing than liberals to accept the views of climate scientists.
Riley Dunlap, emeritus professor at Oklahoma State University, has been studying American attitudes about environmentalism since the first Earth Day in 1970. He watched as the issue, which used to be of concern across partisan lines, became polarized in the 2000s. Now, he notes, opposing climate policy is an identity issue for Republicans – it’s up there with “God, guns, gays, and abortion.”
He has watched with dismay as opinions got harder, with Trump followers going against anything liberals support. Some 40% of Americans do not believe humans are causing climate change.
Researchers at American universities have found that attitudes about personal experiences of extreme events appear “socially constructed and interpreted through ideological lenses, rather than driven by individuals’ objective experiences of changes in weather and climate.”
Researchers found that hot, dry days — as opposed to sudden, extreme weather events — seem to convince some people that climate change is real.
“So far, actual experience doesn't seem to have had a significant effect,” Dunlap said. “But I'm open to the possibility that personal experiences and media coverage could be really shaking people up.”
If you thought this summer was bad …
Gerald Butts, vice chairman of Eurasia Group, who helped Trudeau implement Canada’s carbon tax, points out that researchers will have more opportunities to carefully study the effect of extreme weather on public opinion.
“This is the hottest summer of your life, but it's going to be one of the coolest of the rest of your life. Sure it's weird that the remnants of a hurricane are flooding the California desert while the northern part of the continent is burning. But we're going to see versions of that in every northern hemisphere summer for the rest of our lives.
“I think the deeper question is — because human beings are nothing if not adaptable — and part of that adaptation mechanism is, how do we tune out the things we don't want to see or hear? I mean, as these things get weirder and weirder, what is the new normal for what people can absorb, or will absorb, and react to?”