The world’s leaders meet this week in Paris to wrangle with climate change at COP21 (the 21st global climate conference). That they have failed, at every opportunity (meetings 1 through 20), to agree to anything meaningful, beyond recognition that 2 degrees of warming is the upper limit that civilization can bare, does not give one hope. However, the lead-up to Paris this year has been much more productive and there is more pressure than ever to come out of negotiations with something tangible. Perhaps there is hope. The IPPC’s latest report made it abundantly clear that climate change is real and that humans are the cause. We have entered what some geoscientists call the ‘anthropocene’, a geologic epoch characterized by human impact; human activity is changing the planet at a fundamental level.
Coming to grip with a term like ‘anthropocene’ is to understand that climate change is the defining issue of this century. Not only is it an issue of ‘the environment’, but climate change now intermingles with issues of the economy, politics and culture. For instance, climate changed has been partly responsible for the extreme drought, and coincident food price spike, that lead millions of people to leave the Syrian countryside, providing the tinder-box context in cities such as Aleppo, Homs and Damascus from which the current crisis has emerged. Of course there are other, more direct, geopolitical causes of the Syrian crisis (the brutality of the al-Assad regime and the failure of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 for example), but yet, climate change is an influencer. In the antropocene, climate change runs through everything. Cape Bretoners, like many Canadians, are now organizing to accept and welcome some part of the 25,000+ Syrian refugees expected to come to our shores. Many of these started as climate refugees fleeing drought but have passed through the wretched mill of civil war and now flee violence more directly.
On the global scale, Cape Breton is small and peripheral. We can, perhaps, be forgiven for feeling that these global issues happen elsewhere. With climate change, however, though the issue is global, its touch is felt everywhere. As an island, we are perhaps more susceptible to impacts of climate change. Extreme weather and sea level rise are just some of the impacts we should expect.
More immediately we need to understand how Cape Breton can and will fit into a world where climate change is being addressed. Cape Breton’s past and present is carbon heavy. Coal and steel fuelled the industrialization of the island. In many ways those industries built our communities; we are indebted to digging coal out of the ground. Today, in the shadow of those industries, as the island tries to imagine its new future, we continue to be embedded in carbon-intensive work. With the failure of top-down economic development models to produce substantial activity on the island, Cape Breton labour took it upon themselves to find their own solution to unemployment. They found it in the Alberta oil sands and other energy projects across the country. These mobile workers who dig oil out of the ground are now responsible for a substantial portion of the Cape Breton economy.
As we have continued to be reliant on fossil-fuels for our economic wellbeing, we are now, once again, at risk of shifting global forces. In the lead up to COP21 in Paris President Obama rejected the KeystoneXL pipeline and Alberta’s premiere, Rachel Notley, announced a carbon tax and an oil sands emissions cap. Both policies will impact future oil sands growth. Any new federal policies to come out of Paris can only increase the pressures on the oil sands at a time when they are already operating with pretty skinny margins due to low oil prices. Cape Breton’s mobile labour force are at risk as these policies work their way through the oil sands. Indeed, it has been the rotational workforce in Alberta that has born the brunt of the current down turn.
At a provincial level, Cape Breton is also at risk. Cape Breton is home to 3 of the 4 coal-fired power generation plants owned by Nova Scotia Power. Though employing fewer people than the oil sands, these generating stations provide good high-paying jobs. If Nova Scotia was to phase-out coal power generation, as several other provinces, including Alberta, have announced, these jobs too would be put at risk. As hydro-energy from the Muskrat Falls project comes to Nova Scotia, some of the coal-generators at Lingan are already scheduled for closure.
Without a doubt, the world will have to move to a low carbon future. As Cape Breton contemplates its social and economic future, it needs to keep this in mind. Our future will also be low-carbon, whether we plan for it or not. Cape Breton labour in the oil sands may have provided a short term stopgap to our economic woes, but it is not sustainable. Not for the planet, not for our community.
Community/Economy 