Front Burner - B.C., climate change and what's coming for Canada
Episode Date: November 30, 2021British Columbia is still struggling with the fallout from record-breaking rains that caused floods and mudslides that killed six people and displaced thousands more. This, after the fatal heat dome o...f the summer, and the third worst fire season on record. While experts say it’s impossible to determine whether this year’s extreme weather resulted directly from climate change, they will say climate change made these events worse. Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and B.C. Premier John Horgan agreed to strike a joint provincial-federal committee to address disaster response and climate resilience. Today, environmental journalist Arno Kopecky on how B.C. is experiencing so many of the big climate change issues of our time.
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Hi, I'm Angela Starrett.
It seems to me that there was a time in the pretty recent past that we talked about climate change as something that was coming.
Something that we would feel the effects of one day, maybe soon.
But here in British Columbia, we're feeling it right now.
You've heard about our floods, our fires, and the fallout.
Damaged roads, displaced people, dead people.
Experts will tell you it's impossible to know whether the catastrophic heat and record-breaking rain
resulted directly from climate change.
But they will say this, climate change made it worse.
And it's this, well, worseness that is a harbinger of what's to come for everyone
as the planet continues to warm beyond the 1.1 degrees Celsius we've already hit.
So today I want to talk about BC as a canary in the coal
mine. What it looks like in a province now experiencing so many things we were warned
could come with climate change. And what we can all learn from what's happening here.
Arno Kopetsky is an environmental journalist and an author based here in BC.
Hi, Arno.
Hi, Angela. So you've called BC the quote-unquote, the call coming from inside the house when it comes to climate change in Canada.
What do you mean by that?
Absolutely. I was thinking of that quintessential horror flick moment when the murderer or the
villain or the monster, he's calling you to taunt you and you're looking out the window because you
think he's lurking outside somewhere. And then the audience realizes, no, that the monster's inside,
he's calling from the basement, he's in the house. And that feels like what's happening here with climate change and Canada, where I think as Canadians, we've often tended to view climate change as something that is distant in time and space.
So, you know, Inuit communities and polar bears are going to suffer.
And maybe by 2050, it'll come to affect us in the cities.
But British Columbia has just very graphically demonstrated that it is in our house. It is here right now.
And it's coming for all of us.
It sounds kind of grim, but that's how I see it.
People are experiencing climate change now as well in other parts of the country, but it does feel like so many of the climate change issues of our time are, you know, really encapsulated here in BC these days.
You know, I think the most obvious example is just the extreme weather we've been experiencing in this province.
And I'm wondering if you could describe for people what these last few weeks have been like here in BC. Sure. So, you know, it's been a very wet fall and that's not unusual. It's
a rainforest. We're all used to rain here. I like it when it rains, especially after a hot, dry
summer. But then it just kept raining. And then, you know, Sunday, the day after the Glasgow
Climate Pact was signed. So we were kind of thinking about climate change. Then we got this atmospheric river come into the southern coast of BC. And then I remember,
you know, Sunday night, the first couple things came in, we heard that drivers had been stranded
on the Coquihalla by mudslides. And the Coquihalla is that major connector highway that everybody in
Vancouver knows and is a little bit scared of.
And then Monday morning, I remember this was what sort of did it for me. I live in Vancouver, so I should say that I've been perfectly safe and fortunate in that regard. But Monday morning,
I went to wake up my daughter, who's six years old, for school. And usually that's a struggle.
But this Monday, in question, she was lying wide awake staring at the ceiling.
And before I could say anything, she just said, Dada, it's raining too hard.
I can't sleep.
And that was pretty unusual.
And then I started looking at the reports on my phone and all the channels.
And then it just became one thing after another.
Boom, boom, boom.
This highway has been destroyed.
Merritt, the city of 7 7 000 people is on evacuation alert oh it's on now they're they're being evacuated
oh the highway coming out of lytton now you know photos came out of there it looked like
some mythical beast had bitten the highway in half the sumas lake started to become a lake again
instead of the farmland that it had been for the last hundred years.
And then by the end of Monday night, Vancouver was completely cut off by road and rail from the rest of the country.
And we have spent the last two weeks sort of comprehending the magnitude of what happened.
As I speak, it's raining really hard in Victoria.
And a couple of highways had opened up again, but they just closed again over the
weekend with this next atmospheric river. And in Vancouver and Victoria, there's been gasoline
rationing happening. And so it's pretty wild out here, you know, and it's also a bit surreal
because in Vancouver, most of Vancouver, aside from that gasoline rationing, it feels pretty normal. And yet just 45 minutes east of us, Abbotsford, farmers have lost their entire farms, have been washed away, animals and all.
It's a state of chaos.
It's funny that you said wild and surreal because that's what was going through my mind.
what was going through my mind, the words that were going through my mind when you were talking, especially when you see those pictures of the entire highway just ripped apart. It's so wild.
And I mean, of course, this comes now just a few short months after the summer's heat,
you know, the heat dome that we experienced and the fire, which was also pretty extreme, right?
Totally. Yeah. I mean, I was visiting my parents
in Edmonton in August. Then I flew home back to Vancouver. And I really remember flying over
what turned out to be the Kamloops fire region. I looked at the little graphic on the plane seat
that shows you where your plane is. And we were right over Kelowna. And I looked out the window
and it was cloudy was cloudy but these
pyrocumulonimbus clouds were bursting through the clouds below us and each one of them was you know
this this this basically a mushroom cloud from huge fires and my daughter was in my lap and I
you know we looked out the window and she said dada it's so beautiful it was again this surreal
you know we're flying over this intense fire escape below us and then
you know as we landed we got home safe and everything and i checked in and that was the
day that the coca-cola closed because of flame it would have been engulfed in flame that very day
and so that was august two months before that the heat dome covered most of BC and Lytton became synonymous with climate change, setting first a heat record of nearly 50 degrees, the hottest anywhere in Canada had ever been in our recorded history.
And then the next day, it just practically spontaneously combusted.
And that was at the end of June.
And that was the start of fire season, which then became the third worst fire season in BC's history from one
stretch of the province to the other. And, you know, the worst fire seasons in BC were in 2017
and 2018. So in the last five years, we've had three of the worst fire seasons in history. And
so, yeah, these back to back to back provincial emergencies, it's just, it's just relentless.
I want to talk about those, I guess, compounding effects in just a second. But before, I want to just talk a little bit more about how these events are connected to climate change. I guess, compounding effects in just a second. But before I want to just talk a little bit more
about how these events are connected to climate change, I mean, heavy rains, flooding, forest
fires, these aren't new phenomena in the province. So how is the extreme weather,
this extreme weather that BC has been experiencing this year connected to climate change exactly?
Yeah, you're right. You know,
I wrote a piece for the Globe and Mail about the floods. And right after it, I got a few people
emailing me saying, well, come on, my family's been living in Abbotsford for four generations.
Here's a picture from 1949. Look, it's exactly the same flood as what's just now. This is nothing new.
But what I would say is, with all due respect, but when your family farm flooded in 49, did it also flood in Victoria and over in Yoho National Park?
Because this time around, there were 20 rainfall records set from one side of the province to the other.
So it's both in terms of intensity and geographical scope of these climate events.
You know, it was the same with the fires,
more of the province was covered in flame than almost ever before. And that heat dome back in
June, set I think, around 60 temperature records were set all over the province. So of course,
there have been natural disasters throughout the history of life on Earth, but it is the intensity and the frequency of them that is new and genuinely unprecedented, a word we hear too much of these days.
anticipated impacts of climate change we'll have heard about is the way the effects will start to build on each other. Can you tell me a little bit about how we're seeing that happen in BC right now?
Yeah, I think the most obvious one is how heat can lead to fire. And that was Lytton for you.
I think maybe less obvious is how forest fires and BC is a bit unique in this because we have
these forested mountains. When they catch fire and burn down, that turns what would have been a sponge,
this forested mountainscape that has roots and branches and leaves
to absorb a lot of this water.
It becomes blackened, hard soil.
You know, the word for it is hydrophobic.
And so essentially it just turns into a water slide
and the rainfall just
zooms down the mountain and straight to the bottom of a watershed and fills up the rivers.
Also makes the mountainside more prone to sliding because the root systems aren't holding it
together anymore. And so then basically, that is a way of saying that these huge fires make
the landscape more prone to floods and mudslides and mountain slides.
I guess it's sort of like a climate cascade effect.
Yes.
And it feels like the stress is compounding in that sort of cascading way too.
You know, people's homes are under threat from fire one season and then floods the next.
You know, we've heard about, you know, climate refugees being something that will come from
climate change and something that we're seeing a bit now in BC as well.
How do you see that starting to play out here, that compounding stress?
Yeah, again, you know, I think Canadians, when we think of climate refugees, we typically
think of people in other parts of the world, whether it's Bangladesh or these low-lying Pacific islands.
No, this is in the house now.
These 14,000 people were evacuated two weeks ago here in BC because of the floods.
Thousands of people were evacuated over the summer because of fires.
of fires. So just imagine living in these communities where, you know, where you live next to a forest, and any given summer, this could affect you. So I think those are, and of course,
it's First Nations communities are the most affected by this. You know, there are more
First Nations communities living in or near or around the forest with that sort of urban forest interface.
So they are profoundly affected.
But it is not just limited to any one demographic or group.
I mean, even privileged me who lives in Vancouver,
my house isn't going to burn down because of a forest fire anytime soon.
But I think the fabric of BC's culture is one that many of us have lived in several towns.
And we have friends and relations in many communities from whether it's the Kootenays or the Okanagan or the Sunshine Coast or Vancouver Island.
And each of those visits is a way of, you know, revisiting not just friends, but also landscapes and rebuilding connection with rivers
and forests. I mean, that's what drew me to this really a stunning, beautiful, dynamic province.
But now at any given time of year, you don't know if you're going to be driving into a fire
or a flood. You know, when you can't travel around the province that you love to see your friends and community,
I don't want to compare it to the impact of losing your house or your farm or death.
But it's also not nothing.
I think it just elevates this level of anxiety that is spreading around the province of not knowing what's going to happen next. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.
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On top of the stress and the anxiety and the dislocation, people have also died in the heat this summer and in the mudslides this fall.
yeah well I think 600 people or so died in the heat wave this summer so that was enormous I mean that is I don't know what to say about that my my friend is a firefighter here in Vancouver and he
described when the heat dome hit every single fire truck and ambulance was out on call and there was
250 more calls that were waiting to be responded to. As a fireman, he wasn't responding to fires in the city.
He was responding to mostly elderly people who were in decrepit homes and that didn't
have air conditioning.
And they were basically dying of heat stroke.
And nobody knew how to prepare for that.
And so everybody's just sort of grappling with that right now.
It's the same with the floods.
You know, six people died in mudslides. Again, I don't want to keep referencing my friends, but I'll just
share one more story. A friend of mine was driving from Vancouver to Vernon in the Okanagan on the
Sunday night that the rains started to happen. And they were sort of convoying. Someone else was
driving 20 minutes behind them. The person driving 20 minutes behind them got trapped by a mudslide and was fine, but couldn't make it through.
My friend did make it through.
And so they realized that they were literally minutes away from getting taken out by a mudslide.
And that's how close it was.
And he said he described this harrowing drive of cars on the side of the road with their
tires just lacerated by all the debris.
And then they realized that moments behind them, the entire mountain had given out and
crushed the road.
And it's a bit miraculous that more people weren't killed or badly injured in these mudslides.
But as these events pile up and become more and more frequent and severe,
unfortunately, you can be sure that more and more people will be getting hurt.
And the same with fires.
Yeah.
And I mean, that stress and the deaths,
that's also being experienced by wildlife as well.
One BC scientist estimated that this summer's heat dome
killed one billion marine animals,
mussels essentially cooked in their shells.
The flooding that we've seen
in the last few weeks
has happened during salmon spawning season.
And I read an account
from a guy in Abbotsford
who said he saw a salmon
just swimming up his waterlogged street.
Is the loss of biodiversity another compounding effect of climate change here?
Absolutely.
You know, I was talking to a conservation scientist a couple months ago before these floods,
and I asked her what she thought was the greatest threat to biodiversity in Canada.
One of those questions that you think you know the answer to,
because I always associated it as being habitat loss. And she said, actually, no, that used to be the case.
But now it's climate change. And climate change is the thing that is destroying biodiversity more
than anything. And so you mentioned salmon, the Fraser River runs through Vancouver. It used to be one of the most prolific sockeye salmon rivers on earth.
14 to 15 million sockeye used to return every year to spawn.
We're watching it die, basically.
This last couple of years, there's been a few hundred thousand sockeye salmon that made it back.
And this flood happened just after they've laid all their eggs in the gravel beds.
And now this huge flood comes along and just blasts out these gravel beds. And so that's
going to have a really deleterious effect on salmon populations. If you look at forests,
as winters get warmer, they become more hospitable to invasive species of pests like the pine beetle that has
just ravaged BC's pine. At BC in Alberta, they've lost so much of their pine. And so we often think
of forests as being our friend and that's going to, we can use forests to save us from climate
change. But in fact, I think a better way to think of it is that
we actually have to protect our forests from climate change, that they are extremely vulnerable
to climate change now. And we're seeing our forests really imploded and get decimated by
various impacts of climate change. And as the forest dies, well, there's the habitat loss that
then impacts all the different species that rely on forests as their home and shelter and food.
Yeah, and I want to get into that, talking about how forestry has also impacted this.
So there's these other relevant contributing factors in terms of these compounding climate change effects we're talking about here.
How has industrial policy come into play here in BC?
Yeah, forestry, industrial forestry is a huge part of the story for sure. You know, we've basically turned most of BC into a
tree farm, and they actually call them tree farm licenses is how logging companies describe the
lots that they have. And in so doing, A, just if you clear cut a mountainside, then it does the same thing that a fire would do where it loosens the soil and makes it susceptible to sliding and also takes away the sponge water absorptive capacities of that mountainside.
And so it makes it much more vulnerable to flooding.
And Merritt was sort of the clearest example of that.
The entire watershed around Merritt was clear cut over the last 20 years,
partly because of a pine beetle infestation.
And so that denuded landscape became this water slide for all of these heavy rains
then to converge and collect in the rivers and just catastrophically flood Merritt.
And so our industrial forest policy, even though it is a little bit better than it was
in the 80s, when clear cuts
were just massive. You know, clear cuts are smaller, but we have still been aggressively
logging throughout the province, including, of course, old growth along the coast. And, you know,
you can't replace an original primary forest with all of its diversity with a tree farm where there's
one or two species of tree, they're all the same age, they're densely packed. Those tree farms, even once they grow, and then you've got a root system
back holding the earth together, they're very susceptible to invasive species and to fire. So
industrial forestry has really been a contributing factor that has made not just our forests,
but our infrastructure and all of BC more vulnerable to the impact of heavy rains and heat waves that then spark fires. Yeah, and when you're talking about the tree farms and the old growth logging,
you know, that too in a way feels like it's part and parcel of the climate change issues of our time.
You know, the way that industrial resource extraction is intertwined with this.
And of course, we're seeing these big conflicts around that here too, not just with logging in Ferry Creek.
Which holds some of the last old growth trees on Vancouver Island.
Since losing a court battle, old growth logging opponents have been doing their best to stop the chainsaws,
creating complex obstacles for the RCMP to remove. Since losing a court battle, old-growth logging opponents have been doing their best to stop the chainsaws,
creating complex obstacles for the RCMP to remove, even cementing themselves. Also, as the province flooded, the RCMP was in Wet'suwet'en territory,
arresting Indigenous people who opposed the coastal gas link pipeline.
And you realize you are making it worse. Your people are in need down south.
We got a surprise for you.
It just kind of feels like another way that B.C. is almost, you know, emblematic of this climate change moment we're in.
We really are.
Those images out of Wet'suwet'en territory would be harrowing at any time.
Yeah, those images out of Wet'suwet'en territory would be harrowing at any time.
But for land defenders to be getting arrested, trying to stop a natural gas pipeline in the immediate aftermath of this harrowing climate disaster, it's just it's beyond irony.
It's really, really painful.
You know, there's so many ways to look at it. One of the ways that I think of it is climate change is actually itself a symptom of industrial policy. And, you know, it's a symptom of fossil fuel extraction and burning. But that industrial policy goes well beyond fossil fuels. And even if we decarbonized today, we would still be consuming the Earth's resources at a really unsustainable rate.
we would still be consuming the earth's resources at a really unsustainable rate.
And so it quickly gets a lot bigger than just fossil fuels. It goes into, you know, how has civilization created all of this material well-being that is a part of this story as well?
We live pretty good lives here in BC, many of us.
And that is, you know, an outcome of our industrial policy.
In BC especially, we've got so much.
There's so much mining and forestry and fishing.
You can just see that our leadership here is sort of trapped in a bind of,
and I don't want to let them off the hook,
but I think it's sort of a lack of imagination of,
well, we've always made money this way,
and we need money now more than ever after two years of pandemic debt.
And what are the things that make us this money?
Well, it's been oil and gas and logging, oil growth and all these things.
And at the very moment that we need money more than ever, people like me come along and say, well, we have to stop doing all the things that make us money.
I think there are solutions to this, but I do think it calls into question, you know,
our entire economic model.
And that's a big conversation.
So, I mean, I want to talk about one more of these climate change warnings now coming to life, and that's the impact on infrastructure.
How expensive is this all going to be? How are we seeing that come up in B.C BC now? Yeah, the closest thing I've heard to an actual figure that came from, I think,
the Minister of Public, I can't even remember who it was, I'm sorry, but he said it's going
to cost an awful lot. We've got that fiscal capacity, but it is going to cost a lot.
That's the closest thing I've heard. Just to put it mildly. Yeah, it's something like that. So,
you know, the mayor of Abbotsford said Abbotsford alone would be a billion dollars.
So that's one figure and that's one town.
It's going to be astronomical.
I would imagine in the tens of billions, I don't see how it can't be.
I mean, we're talking about if you just look at the images of the damage that's been done to multiple highways, including Highway 1 and the Coquihalla.
These aren't just mudslides that a
few shovels and tractors will clear away the mud and it's open again. These have been snapped in
half by rivers that have been rerouted. They can't just rebuild them. They have to rebuild them in
such a way that they can withstand future shocks. One of the things that I've found interesting and
have learned is how engineering has to change some one of its fundamental premises that when you
build a highway or a bridge or a railway you look at what is the worst thing that's happened in the
last hundred years or the last 200 years and you build that highway to be able to withstand that
event but the last hundred years are no longer a guide to the next hundred years and so now they
have to start looking at climate models that are predicting much,
much worse disasters than have ever happened before. And not just happening in isolation,
but happening one after the other back to back. So I can't tell you how much it's going to cost
to build BC's infrastructure. But I can tell you that all of Canada needs to start asking these
questions and asking, well, where are we going to keep building in floodplains?
It's really an all of society response as we look to how can we adapt to the climate change impacts that are here right now and will be here for the foreseeable future.
And hopefully we can use that as a sufficient urgency to decarbonize our society and prevent it from getting much worse than it already is and will be.
And I think you've touched on this throughout this conversation, but what do you think the rest of the country can learn from what's happening here in BC?
I guess there's a pragmatic answer to that question, which is on one level, just adaptation and mitigation. We have to look at how can we sort of shockproof our infrastructure, our cities, our farms. So that's adaptation. And then mitigation is, okay, well, how can we now drastically decarbonize because this is 1.1 degrees and what's it going to be like if we get up to 2.4 degrees, which is where the current trajectory has us going.
So that's the practical answer. But if you're only thinking of this in practical terms, I think you're missing the point to an extent. And I think these kinds of events,
I hope that they spur some far-reaching reflection on how we live and what we value
and what our relationships are like to each other as
humans and to the landscapes that we inhabit and the food that we eat. Do we want to be relying on
these supply chains that can be very efficient but have zero resiliency built into them? Do we
want to support farmers who have a relationship with the land that they're farming? Do we want to be really focused on making as much money
and consuming as much as we can?
Or can we sort of rejig some of our value sets
and lean into community
because we're going to really need each other?
I mean, here in BC, these thousands of people
have had their lives destroyed.
Farms have been washed away. Farms have been washed away.
Their homes have been washed away.
Maybe their relatives have died.
They're going to need us.
We're going to need each other.
And so, you know, I just think it's, you know,
for a hundred years and more now,
our society has been thriving to some extent
on this industrial model.
Obviously, many people have not been thriving under it and
many people have been victimized by colonization. And I think that the impacts of that are coming
very clear to a huge demographic that thought everything was just fine all along.
And so I think some of these, I hope that what's happening right now, the scale of it and the shock of it will spur some deeper questions than just, well, how can we build bigger dikes and better roads?
Arno, thank you so much for this. I really appreciate your time today.
Angela, thank you. It's so nice to speak with you.
So nice to speak with you.
Before we let you go, a little news about this new COVID-19 variant of concern, Omicron.
On Monday, the province of Quebec confirmed its first case of Omicron from a traveler who came from Nigeria.
This is after the first Canadian cases were announced in Ontario on Sunday.
The director general of the World Health Organization has said,
this variant shows just how important it is for countries around the world to respond to this virus together,
instead of competing for resources and shutting each other out.
We've got a whole episode about this coming your way later this week.
And that's it for today.
If you like this podcast, please give us a rating and review on your podcast app.
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I'm Angela Starrett filling in for Jamie Poisson, and I'll be back tomorrow.
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