Emergency anniversary
We’ve now passed the third anniversary of Hamilton council declaring a climate emergency, but despite repeated promises, the city’s plan to tackle this crisis still has not appeared. The urgency of immediate action was re-emphasized by the “now or never” warnings from the UN report just released by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that includes specific advice for cities.
Hamilton’s Community Energy and Emissions Plan (CEEP) has been overdue for more than a year with the end of last month being the most recent promised and then missed delivery date. And when it arrives it will just be a draft plan, subject to consultation with residents and “stakeholders”. It is supposed to “include every aspect of city-wide energy use and GHG emissions, from homes to transportation to industry to waste” and is deemed by city staff to be “a critical component of the city’s emergency response.”
The city’s three-person climate office is in the public health department, so progress on the draft emissions plan has been repeatedly delayed by re-deployment to COVID-19 duties. In the meantime the climate crisis has continued to worsen, and international pressure for municipal action builds.
“Cities and other urban areas also offer significant opportunities for emissions reductions,” says the April 4 media release from the IPCC. “These can be achieved through lower energy consumption (such as by creating compact, walkable cities), electrification of transport in combination with low-emission energy sources, and enhanced carbon uptake and storage using nature.”
Their report warned that “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible” to avoid uncontrollable temperature increases. The UN secretary-general was blunt: “Some government and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic.”
A review in the prestigious Nature journal advised that “the most urgent thing we can do to help nature fight climate change is protect the natural habitats and to restore those already cleared or degraded.” In the face of multiple warehouse proposals in stream headwaters near the airport, Save Our Streams Hamilton is demanding a city moratorium on new development until a thorough climate review.
Most North American coverage of the report has focused on the technological possibilities for much more rapid emission reductions, but the IPCC report also provided details on the sources of the carbon emissions that have created the climate crisis, underlining once again that North America and Europe and other industrialized countries have been responsible for the vast majority.
“Social movements in the Global South have long argued that we should understand climate breakdown as a process of atmospheric colonisation,” noted a commentary in Al Jazeera. “Just as powerful countries enriched themselves by appropriating land, labour and resources from the South during the colonial period, so too they have appropriated the atmospheric commons, with devastating consequences for all of life on Earth.”
Despite being less than half a percent of the global population, Canada ranks among the top ten cumulative sources of emissions. And that’s without including our role as the fourth largest source of oil exports. Those are set to increase after this week’s federal decision to approve deep-water extraction off Newfoundland. The new federal subsidies for “carbon capture, storage and utilization” may have similar effects by trying to make tar sands oil allegedly a “greener” source.
