Ideas - Turning the Climate Crisis into Motivation, and Hope into Action

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

From horror to hope, two expert speakers discuss the stakes and situation facing us now around climate action. Catherine Abreu is a global climate justice advocate, and director of the International Climate Politics Hub. John Valliant is the author of Fire Weather, a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

Each year at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, a public event unites two speakers to discuss an urgent issue. The Pen Canada Graham Gibson Talk honors the life and work of Graham Gibson, who died in 2019. He was a writer, human rights advocate, and clear-eyed conservationist. You talk about how important habitat conservation is. What are the things that give you hope that we're on the right path? Hope is an attitude. Both optimism and pessimism are merely states of mind, right? There is reasons to hope and reasons for hope, okay? Now, there are innumerable reasons to hope, for one's own sanity, for example, for one's sense of one's responsibility.

Gibson was also a co-founder of Pen Canada, the literary freedom organization that co-sponsors the event, along with the writer Margaret Atwood. Atwood was Graham Gibson's partner of nearly 50 years. She introduced the 2024 event. The fourth annual Pen Canada Graham Gibson Talk, the fourth annual Penn Canada Graham Gibson Talk, Burning Questions, Confronting the Challenges of Our Global Climate Crisis.

It's a very appropriate title for the Graham Gibson Talk, as Graham was a dedicated conservationist. Beginning with his conversion to birdwatching in the 1960s, Graham had been increasingly concerned not only with the threat of mass species extinction, but also with the fate of the entire biosphere. Margaret Atwood herself has written novels that read like ecofiction, as well as essays on the climate crisis. Even so, she's aware that discussing an existential topic like this one is both necessary and heavy. No one wants to contemplate a planet without life,

including that of our own species. It's not restful and can get wearing at the dinner table. Can we maybe talk about something besides burning up and killing everything, I might remark. But as Graham knew, avoiding a subject doesn't make it go away. The climate crisis is something we have to deal with or we're cooked, literally. Our panelists today could not be more qualified to horrify and, we hope, to inspire us. I moderated the 2024 Penn-Gibson Talk featuring journalist John Valiant and climate campaigner Catherine Abreu. You know, it's important that we're honest with ourselves and with each other about the state of the crisis that we're in.

We have spent the last couple of years at approximately 1.5 degrees of warming, which is exceptional. And of course, that is actually the temperature limit that is set out in the Paris Agreement, our global climate treaty. Things are bad. Things are bad. And we also have to be really honest that there is so much we can do to turn things around and to prevent the most devastating and irreversible impacts of climate change. And I'm here to talk about that. Catherine Abreu is an award-winning climate justice advocate and director of the International Climate Politics Hub, which promotes action across borders.

John Valiant is an author. We are living in an age of extinction, and we're also living in an energy transition that is happening at a scale and at a speed that beggars the imagination, that has never happened in human civilization before, never happened on planet Earth before. And so we have these two needles and they're both moving very quickly. And we happen to be living together in that time. And we're all going to see it. You know, I predict by 2030, the world will be noticeably different in a number of different ways, including how we derive our energy. John Valiant's award-winning book is Fire Weather, The Making of a Beast,

about the 2016 wildfire that devastated the landscape and people of Fort McMurray, Alberta. During our discussion on the climate crisis, Catherine Abreu and John Valiant talked about turning climate horror into motivation and hope into action. Our conversation was recorded in front of an audience at Harbourfront Centre Theatre in Toronto. I want to start at a very basic level. And again, back to you, Catherine. We're, of course, going to be talking about the various narratives around climate. And one of the big stories this year, of course, is the fact that this has been literally the hottest year on record, 2024, globally. The hottest year ever measured.

This is more than just climate weirdness, right? Yeah, absolutely. This is the result of human activity, right? It is the result of the production, right? It is the result of the production and the combustion of fossil fuels. The science on that is absolutely clear. And, you know, we often, as climate activists, hear this argument, the world has been through many shifts in temperatures in the past. But really, what we're dealing with here is a scale and a pace of change that is unprecedented. We talk about this being the warmest year on record, but scientists are telling us that

it's the warmest year in probably about 10,000 years. You know, it's bringing us to a place where we're not sure what human civilization looks like in this kind of temperature band, because we've existed, you know, you perhaps heard this analysis before, right? We've existed in this narrow kind of band of temperatures, much like our body is in homeostasis, in a relatively narrow band of temperature, so much so that a temperature increase of one degree means we have a pretty serious infection going on. And we're at a place where we're seeing temperature increases on average of above one degree. So that test for human civilization is a pretty serious one, and it is not at all within the norm.

John, bring us up to speed on the science, that this isn't just weirdness. What do the scientists say? What are they persuaded by? Well, I think they're persuaded by CO2 and 424 parts per million. It's about 50% more than pre-industrial times. And so when you look at that, how that tracks. We've known literally since the 1850s that CO2 retains heat very, very well. And when you track CO2 and you track planetary temperature, they track together. They follow each other. And 2023 was a really interesting and alarming year because a whole bunch of temperature gauges took a jump. So this would be sea surface temperature off the coast of Ireland, sea surface temperature in the Caribbean,

general air temperature, glacier loss, a whole bunch of different metrics of climate distress spiked a little bit in 2023. And so it's nonlinear. And so what that suggests is that there are feedbacks happening now that are amplifying the situation we're in. But, you know, I'm not a scientist. I'm a layperson trying to make sense of something that feels really pressing to me.

And so when I look at the temperature and I put that next to the CO2 graph, and then I think about a fossil fuel powered civilization that's really only about 200 years old. So it's an experiment. And basically, if you look at the data, if you look at the science, if you look at the temperature and the CO2, basically the price of a fossil fuel powered society, it was borrowed against the future. And the CO2 is a way of measuring the debt. And so how you measure the interest on the debt is with the future. And the CO2 is a way of measuring the debt. And so how you measure the interest on the debt is with the heat. And so the debt started to become untenable around 2000.

And as the debt level rises, we get increasingly urgent letters from our bank. And then there comes a point when the bank starts repossessing our stuff. And so when you see climate disasters, that is the bank of nature overdrawn on CO2 coming back and reclaiming, repossessing our houses, our cars, our coastline, our way of life. The bank of nature is communicating with us. She sent the letters and we blew her off. And now she's coming for our stuff. And so this is this moment we're in right now. And the Bank of Nature has been reclaiming a lot this particular year. It has been a banner year for climate hazards and disasters. Was there one event, like one story, Catherine,

that you found particularly haunting? I mean, within the last 12 months, we've seen the level of forest fires across Canada like no generation has ever seen. Every single province in Canada and territory was on fire last year. It's devastating. was on fire last year. It's devastating. Not just the loss of homes and property, the impacts that meant for Canadian businesses, but think about the lives of non-human animals that were lost. I was in Mombasa earlier this year, Kenya, and they were experiencing an extreme heat wave during the time that I was there. It's the hottest I've ever been in my life. I went swimming in the ocean to try to get some relief. And it was a bathtub. It was quite, it was extremely hot.

And there was a smell in the air. And I later learned that week, billions of life forms in the ocean, shellfish, fish, boiled to death. And the smell that we were smelling was that loss of life in the ocean. It was quite devastating to learn. So we're accumulating these stories. And I think it's important to note that it's also been an El Nino year. And so there's been this kind of compounding effect of a regular kind of weather pattern that we've seen. And this is an aspect of climate change that we have to acknowledge as well,

is that it lessens our ability to be resilient when these other compounding factors come into play. John, 2024, was there an event that you could point to that you may not have, you know, even been able to foretell was coming, that you were surprised happened? I think 2023 was more the big one for me. And 2024 has felt more like a follow on, I guess. But what I'm really resonating to, you know, Mombasa is far away for a lot of us. But that same smell, that same experience was had in British Columbia during the heat dome of 2021 and it killed, you know, a half a billion coastal sea creatures

and you could smell just the dead coastline there. A lot of it has recovered since then, but 700 British Columbians killed in that heat dome have not recovered and neither have their families. So that's this kind of lasting legacy. And I think those experiences, those losses, including those from fires, they do undermine our resilience. And you've been through it. You survived. Maybe your house was saved, but you were still displaced. You've been through it. You survived. Maybe your house was saved, but you were still displaced. There were a quarter of a million Canadians on the road in 2023 fleeing wildfire. A quarter of a million Canadians, some of them coming out of Yellowknife, where it's a 1,500-kilometer drive

to the next major city with services. So you could be even at more risk out on the road, especially if you're an elder with health issues. So got a quarter of a million out there living in this real uncertainty. And of course, the big story this year in Canada was the Jasper fire. Yeah. I wonder if you could talk about if there was anything about it that reminded you of Fort McMurray. Boy, everything about it. And I think what we have learned from Fort McMurray

is we're evacuating in a more preemptive fashion. And Canada, when you compare to California, to Spain, to Chile, to Portugal, to Hawaii off the coast, our mortality rates are way less. And we've been incredibly lucky as a country. We've had so many really terrible fires that have been very fast moving. And still, most of us got to hug our kids the next day. I think the fact is that most of us are just living with a profound amount of grief these days because of the impacts of climate change that we're experiencing and also because of the loss of human life that we're experiencing and conflicts around the world. Conflicts that of course have political origins but that are often compounded by environmental factors including climate change. When people

are having a hard time living their subsistence-based existence on farms in parts of the world that are flooding or constantly on fire. They're moving to urban centers, creating heightened pressures in those centers between different groups of people, putting pressure on the political and social systems, and that just further compounds many of the conflicts that we're seeing around the world. And so I think all of this conspires to mean we're all carrying a lot of grief around with us. And we're doing that in a context of a society that often tells us at least in our part of the world, around what to do about climate change is all your individual consumer-based actions. You figure out how to buy an electric car. You figure out how to put solar panels on your roof. If you don't have the money to do that, or if those choices aren't available to you, well, you're part of the problem.

And you might as well just stop talking about climate change, because that's all your fault. And I think a really important thing for us to ask ourselves, as we're often kind of mired in this hopeless, demobilizing narrative, is who benefits when we are sold on that narrative? Who benefits when we are trapped in despair that we can't as individuals solve this huge problem? The incumbents who benefit from this status quo, i.e. the fossil fuel industry, is who benefits from those narratives. And so a big part of my work, and I think the work of those of us who communicate about climate change, is to really try to convey that taking action on climate change is actually about targeting those responsible for the problem. And it's not about us changing our lives by ourselves in isolation. It's about taking

action together to change the world. And I think that is the message that can help respond to that grief and despair and lift us into action. Okay. And we will come back to the... Go ahead. You're allowed. We will come back in detail to the idea of action, because of course that's always the question at the end of a conversation like this. But I do want to pick up on a very important point that you raise about grief. And John, I ask you to pick up on a very important point that you raise about grief. And John, I'd ask you to pick up on that, just how important emotion is and which emotion to help people who aren't connecting with climate stories,

to help them connect with climate stories. Is it grief? Is it fear? Is it anger? In your experience in talking to survivors and others, which emotion? Again, it's that same idea of two things can be true at the same time. And I think in our emotions, we can be angry and sad and scared and also just in shock at the same time. Our brains and nervous systems are really complex entities. And so when the fire is coming and you're not sure where your kids are,

you're just trying to find your kids and figure out where the smoke isn't and go in that direction. And some people, everyone manages their emotions differently. But one of the things that has struck me is how it lingers. And PTSD is a real thing. There may be people in this room who have it. There's all different levels of it. I did most of the interviewing for Fire Weather in 2016 and 2017. The book didn't come out till 2023. So I called a lot of the folks I interviewed up just to let them know, hey, this is actually happening. And that sort of turned into a check-in call. And so this six years have passed. and many of them had PTSD. A whole bunch of them had moved out of Fort McMurray, not just because their house burned, but just

because that place was now so loaded for them that they just didn't want to be there anymore. But they shared with me that when they heard helicopters, when they smelled wood smoke, when they were stuck in traffic, their heart rate would start to go up and sometimes more extreme things would happen. And so we're carrying this stuff in our body for a long time after. How often did you find in talking to these survivors that they eventually connect the tragedy that they lived through with climate change? You know, I think a lot of us hoped, at least on this side of the file, that people who go through these disasters, and they are disasters,

as terrible as they are, folks would sort of come out, OK, I get it now, I get it, I'm a believer. And I don't think that's how most people respond. I think, you know, one analogy would be to school shootings in the United States. How many of those folks come out advocating for gun control? Very, very few. What most people want after a trauma like that is to get their old lives back. They're just trying to get back to normal.

They're trying to recover from whatever injuries there might be, and they're trying to not be scared anymore, and they're trying to figure out a way to be in that place again that isn't traumatizing, that doesn't set it off again. And so that is the really sad fact, that a lot of people, I think, who go through those experiences are almost sidelined in a way, because they're so busy just managing themselves. And then in a place like Alberta, where your future and fortunes of many of the folks working there is dependent on an accommodation with the petroleum industry, you can't badmouth it. And if you question it too closely, if you examine the connections too closely, it creates an intolerable dissonance between the very righteous thing that you were trying to do for your family, for your own self, which is high quality of life. Maybe some things you never had before, being able to go back to wherever you came from.

Maybe it's Corner Brook, Newfoundland with a shiny F-150 and take your mom for a drive and feel good about that. And then to kind of look the gift horse in the mouth, as it were, there's a lot of social pressure not to do that. And then when you have an official policy in the province of climate denial, you're really the odd person out. So it behooves you to stay quiet. So nobody brought up climate. We're talking about a province that not only has policies put in place, although this is the case across the country, it is not exclusive to one province. We live in a country that very much centers the interests of the oil and gas industry. But there are policies to actually ban the production and the building of new renewable energy infrastructure in Alberta, one of the provinces in Canada that has

the highest potential for renewable energy production, and that in fact had a booming local provincial renewable energy industry that is now kind of clamoring at the doors and saying, you want to invest in this place, and there are policies that are actually blocking us from doing that. And that's important for us to talk about because, you know, we do want to acknowledge that those who are working in the fossil fuel sector, I often use this phrase fossil fuel industry. And when I use that phrase, I'm talking about the tippity tippity top of the elites, right? The small fractional handful of people who benefit and rake in all of the elites, right? The small fractional handful of people who benefit and rake in all of the money from that industry. I'm not talking about the people who are there

in that industry to have a good job. And the reality is that we can have good jobs outside of the fossil fuel industry, but the policies have to be in place in order to make that transition to workforces that are operating in a kind of clean economy, right? So I just really wanted to make that point and to also, you know, just acknowledge that I do think that an emotional aspect to the storytelling is so critical. And John, something that I really appreciated in fire weather was you know you actually talking about the relationship over human history that we have to fire it is the case that energy is a very deeply emotional topic for us right it's it's our security it's our well-being it's our. And so when we're talking about transitioning our

energy systems from something we know works, you know, it's been working for us for the last 150, 200 years, fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas, to something new, understandably that creates some anxiety, right? And I think some of what we need to be communicating and they're more actively mobile, walking, biking, perhaps using public transit. What's the first place that comes to mind? I think about places like Uruguay who have been making use of renewable energy. Their energy system is about 91% clean at this point. But I also think about places in Canada where we have amazing renewable energy sources and stories. And in particular, indigenous communities in Canada

are on the front lines of leading the renewable energy revolution in this country. And so there are good stories to be had. And I think telling those stories more is really critical. And also naming the cause of the climate crisis. Every time, we should be saying every time, climate change caused by the production and combustion of fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel caused climate change. Making that connection that the fossil fuel industry wants us to forget between the cause of the climate crisis and the impacts that we are experiencing. And I think those two, adding those two elements to how we talk about this crisis is really what's going to be game changing and the kind of narrative setting tone that we talk about. Climate campaigner Catherine Abreu and author John Valiant

at the 2024 Penn Canada Graham Gibson Talk at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre in Toronto. They're the featured speakers at a public event that I moderated called Burning Questions, Confronting the Challenges of Our Global Climate Crisis. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood,

or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Writer John Valiant and climate campaigner Catherine Abreu are talking about energy narratives, the self-serving stories that can muddy thinking and stall action around climate change. When we left off, they were talking about the political policies and fossil fuel industry strategies that work against the transition to renewable energy. We pick up again with Fire Weather author John Valiant, whose book is about the Fort McMurray wildfire in the heart of oil and gas country. This is the second half of the Penn Canada Graham Gibson Talk, recorded at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre Theatre in September 2024.

There are these surprising victories. When I'm down in the States, I say, well, Alberta is the Texas of Canada. That's sort of the shorthand way to understand it. And for us, Texas is the Alberta of the United States. And I've heard by some journalists who live in Texas right now that it's basically like Hungary under Orban. It's a very repressive place. It wants to control the reproductive systems of half the people in this room at the same time they are leading the continent not just the nation in the uptake of

renewable energy so they are laying on the gigawatts of wind and solar on a scale that has blown california away and so think about that and and and a lot that has blown California away. And so think about that. And a lot of, you know, there were direct flights from Fort McMurray to Houston. I don't know if there still are, but a lot of expertise went from Texas up into Fort McMurray. There's a very strong relationship there. And a lot of Texas renewable investment money wanted to go into Alberta and got shut down by these moratoria. Meanwhile, Texas, which again, this is this, we live in dissonance all the time. We live in a climate-denying, oil-producing, fracking state of Texas. And at the same time, it is leading the continent in renewable energy.

And both are true. But there are these surprising places where quite victorious things happen. And at the same time, in Houston alone, Shell, one of the biggest players who has backtracked on renewable energy promises, who has profited handsomely from the current circumstances, and who has laid off 60,000 workers in Houston alone over the past decade. So those folks need jobs, and a lot of them are building renewable energy right now in Texas. Yeah, I mean, just to say that actually the playbook for the renewable energy ban that played out in Alberta was directly adopted from a similar play that happened in Texas. So in these places where we are seeing these success stories unfold, we are also seeing the incumbents, those who benefit from the status quo, actively

working to stall that progress. Fortunately, in Texas, they were able to kind of stop the progress of the laws that had been recommended against renewable energy. But I think important to also recognize the threads of that kind of influence to stall the progress that we're making to tell us that this transition isn't possible are significant. And so the, you know, the resistance that we have to mount against this overwhelmingly well-resourced story that this is not a possible transition for us to make is tremendous. And when we're telling stories that speak to people's values, that's when we're changing people's minds.

And it's authors, it's creatives, it's storytellers, it's artists who are telling those stories that get to people's hearts and their spirits and that I think can ultimately change things. Could you speak to the importance of images? I'm just thinking of something that I read just yesterday. Neil Ever Osborne, who took these pictures in Antarctica of baby penguins who had fallen into melted water and then were entombed and froze in it again. And those pictures I found haunting and brought climate change right to my desk. How important are images and what images do you think are necessary to persuade the skeptics that this is actually happening? I'll talk about images in a second.

But I first just want to make the point, we often are really preoccupied with persuading the skeptics. And I think at this point, actually, those who don't believe that climate change is happening, it's a very small number of people. And I'm not sure if we're going to be able to do much to convince them otherwise, because the survival tactic that they've chosen

is to deny the reality that they're living through. And in some ways, I have a lot of empathy for that. It doesn't serve us to be overly preoccupied with what I think can sometimes be blown up into a political force that is actually not that large. In fact, most Canadians believe that climate change is happening. They understand that humans are the cause of it. And for most Canadians, including conservatives, my family's a conservative voting family, they care that we do something about it. And so really, a lot of it is like a political question. How are we going to compel our political decision makers to do the right thing? When it comes to imagery, for many years, it was like very much like the megafauna,

like polar bears are representing our experience of climate change. And I think in recent years, we've actually been seeing images of the human experience of climate change. And that's really important for us to be seeing, right? And I also think it's really important for us to be seeing, right? And I also think it's really important for us to be seeing images of humans living in a climate-safe world or doing things that are climate-safe.

So in previous jobs, I've run imagery campaigns just trying to get images of people working in renewable energy and energy efficiency out there so people can start to see, hey, this is what it looks like when I live in a world where people's everyday jobs is to do things that help us live in a clean, healthy world and help our societies function. John, maybe a more specific question for you. Of course, the image of what happened in Fort McMurray and in Jasper, these images, you know, most of us will never forget. And yet there are people who do know that climate change is happening. And yet they have a hard time conceiving of, you know, of the flammability of their own communities. Why is that? I'll answer that and try to in a second. But I really wanted to also respond to the,

this kind of overblown, I think, force of opposition. And the people who are really invested in action, they want to draw your energy, you know, prove it to me. Where's the data? And what about this graph? And they just want to dilute your energy and suck you into this impossible task. And that's where I think we really need to think more like water and rather than like a blunt instrument and just flow around that and keep our eyes on the prize and move forward because that's where a lot of people are going.

Your question was about... People's reluctance to believe that their own... I mean, you wrote a story recently about what happened in Vancouver, at a condo in Vancouver. Yeah, no, that was absolutely shocking. This was just five kilometers from my home. A condo under construction caught on fire. And it burned so intensely that you could see the flames in broad daylight across Georgia

Strait from 40 kilometers away. People on the islands saw this condo burning through the trees, and it sent embers and firebrands as big as your head many, many blocks into Pacific Spirit Park where firefighters were chasing them down. So many houses and fences and yards were catching on fire in the vicinity that the fire department maxed out, gave a fire hose to some high school kids so they could, you know, spray down the block. Meanwhile, another fire started in East Van, totally unrelated, completely maxed out the Vancouver fire department. So if we'd been having a heat dome then, if it had been blowing 10 knots faster of wind, we would all

have read very different headlines. We came that close. And that was after a recent rain. That was not a hot day. And can I read this little thing, this image of... Sure, absolutely. Yes. This is how fast it happens and what it looks like. And it's just unimaginable. And I think no one could imagine, and this is where we need to have compassion for people who called the evacuation late for Fort McMurray, but none of them could imagine a fire violating their hard-won space so totally. And we have to think that, you know, on the morning of May 3, 2016, the fire chief told everybody to go to school, go to work, you know, on the morning of May 3rd, 2016, the fire chief told everybody to, you know,

go to school, go to work, you know, stay tuned, but, you know, have your day. At that time, there was a census nationwide for McMurray. The median household income was $200,000 a year. So it was this wealthy, powerful place that had basically more earth-moving machinery available to it than just about anywhere else in the continent. That was at 11 in the morning, and this is at 11 that night. This is 12 hours later. Although it had been dark since the early afternoon, night had truly fallen now. From the air, the city was shrouded in smoke, mottled with orange, a blemish on the atmosphere as lurid as a bruise. It was impossible to know what was going on down

below, how much of the city was gone, how much was at risk, what would be left in the morning. The city was effectively empty, a first in its 150-year history, and civilian life had ceased. Homes, shops, offices and schools, churches and restaurants, showgirls nightclub, the Heritage Museum, and the Boomtown Casino, in one single frantic afternoon, everyone had dropped what they were doing and made for the door. Left behind were still-life tableaus of lives interrupted, much like those discovered in the abandoned city of Pripyat following the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. In both communities, there were those who understood how truly grave things were, but many others had left under the wishful impression

that they would be gone for only a day or two. Surely firefighters would get the situation in hand by then. All night, trucks and crews roamed the ghostly smoke-bound city, lights flashing but otherwise unannounced, save for the growl and whine of their engines and heavy tires with no traffic and no one left to warn there was no need for sirens anymore besides what was the hurry visibility was at best a block often far less and speeding under those conditions is dangerous night was hard to

distinguish from day and as exhaustion and sleep deprivation took their toll, time and events began to blur inside the disorienting miasm. Meanwhile the fire, this invading energy, had commandeered not just the physical laws of the land but the bylaws of the city. Traffic signals with their bright colors and civic rhythms, stop, go, walk, don't walk, seemed in the stultifying gloom to be relics of another civilization. Nothing moved on the streets now, even the Ravens had fled. The firefighters, police officers, heavy equipment operators, and water truck drivers who remained behind in this murky post-human limbo had seen the movies and they recognized this place.

They called it Zombieland. Thank you for reading that. What an extraordinary image. Since you raised it, a quick question about the book. I mean, the timeliness of Fire Weather has been borne out by the number of awards that your book has been given, and deservedly so. And you went kind of from this non-fiction writer, journalist guy, to like pundit, expert, and even activist, in the words of some people. Where do you sit on that spectrum? Watch what you say about activists.

Yeah, right. No, I feel enormous solidarity, and at the same time, I feel like I occupy a space a little bit outside that. And at the same time, this book took me seven years to write, and I felt like, what the hell are you doing? bourgeois 20th century activity when what we really need are people blockading, you know, and blockading streets that are now blockaded by floods and fires. And so I felt really tormented by that. And I've been felt a little bit better now because I've been basically on tour for the past 14 months talking about fire weather because a lot of people seem to want to talk about it and that climate scientists have been urging us to pay attention to literally for decades and for me and i think for a number of people that the fort mcmurray fire signaled a shift you know i coined a term 21st century fire because fire really does burn differently now. It behaves differently now. And so I dialed into that. Lots of other people did too. Now to be a kind of ambassador for that idea and to go into places and try to hold conversations and also hold the emotion.

You know, there's a sort of therapeutic and mediation element to this. You know, the conversation that I really want to have is how do we show our gratitude for everything petroleum has given us, from the chairs we're sitting on here, you know, to the shoes we're wearing, to the fact that it enabled us to be here together in this very powerful way.

How do we show our gratitude for that and the respect for people who made it happen every day, at the same time honestly acknowledging that it is no longer tenable and that that same appetite, that same industry is now taking away those things from us? So Catherine, you know, I have to put that question to you. As you say, the self-described, I mean, we met in 2015 at the Paris summit when you were in a very different role than what you are now. Are you telling a different story? I mean, does the story change depending on who you're speaking to? How do you answer that question? Does the story change according to who I'm speaking to? Yeah, for sure.

Of course it does. I think figuring out how to communicate effectively with different audiences is a big part of the work that anyone who spends their time talking about something really important in front of people has to undertake. Here's a big change since 2015, since we saw each other last. So in 2015, I went to my first set of UN climate talks, happened to be the set of UN climate talks that landed the Paris Agreement, our international climate treaty. I refer to it as the greatest peace treaty of our generation.

No other international treaty has gone into effect quicker than the Paris Agreement did. It brings every country in the world together to do one thing. That's take action on climate change. It is the thing that now requires every country in the world to have a climate plan. It is a hugely significant document. And it is deeply flawed. And one of its biggest flaws is that it fails to name the cause of the climate crisis. The words coal, oil, and gas, not only do they not appear in the Paris Agreement,

they actually don't appear in the underlying UN framework, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, that gave us the whole system of UN climate talks in the early 1990s. So that whole global system that was set up to bring countries together to talk about climate change was also set up intentionally, I might add, to ignore the cause of the climate crisis. It's as if we came to a global treaty to prevent the rise of lung cancer and it never mentioned cigarettes. So that has changed a lot with huge thanks to a really large civil society campaign

that brought together people from all over the world, from every different sector, and that I had the privilege to help lead in the coordination of to finally last year in the 2023 UN climate talks, get a global commitment to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels into the UN Climate Treaty text. It's hugely game-changing, and it is horrifying to think that it took 30 years to make it happen. It took almost my entire lifetime to make it happen, happen. It took almost my entire lifetime to make it happen, which tells us a whole lot about the power and the influence of the industry that we have to be working to change, right? And this is, to your point, John, absolutely the kind of story that we need to be telling.

It isn't about us demonizing every single person who works in the incumbent energy sector. But it's important, perhaps, if I can prompt you here on just how powerful those communications efforts are, so much so that a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Science last year cited documents that revealed just how far back industry tactics were in operation. And they were talking about Exxon. Could you just give us a quick overview of just how powerful those efforts were? In fact, in recent years, Exxon and other major oil and gas CEOs

have been called to testify in front of the US Congress on this very issue of the decades-long campaign that they funded very well and planned out meticulously to deny the climate science that directly links climate change to the production and combustion of fossil fuels that their own scientists were doing, right? Like, this is the most outrageous part of it. It was these fossil fuel companies who were on the cutting edge of climate science in the 1940s and the 1950s and the 1960s. And once they figured out what that might mean for their industry, they poured billions of dollars and incredibly sophisticated lobbying tactics to just drive that information under the ground. And now they're using the exact same playbook to make us substitute the solutions that we know will work to transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy

systems that are using energy much more efficiently. They're getting us to replace what we know will work with their solutions that just perpetuate the status quo, right? They're saying, hey, ignore the power of the sun, which drives all life on earth. And carbon capture. Instead, let's use this carbon capture technology that we love because it means we just get to produce fossil fuels. It's like a mentholated cigarette. Exactly, right? Yeah, it just tastes to produce fossil fuels. It's like a mentholated cigarette. Exactly, right?

Yeah, it just tastes a little bit better. And the fact is all carbon capture, you know, carbon capture technology has been around for about 40 years. The only successful thing that it's been able to do is increase the effective production of oil and gas and capture political attention, right? That's about the only thing that it's captured. I think we're in this place now where we really need to be confronting head on the hold that the fossil fuel narrative has on our imaginations. And breaking that down really takes some time. And it also takes, I think, speaking directly to the human psyche and telling these stories of change and possibility to each other. Margaret Atwood's introduction, the way in which Graham Gibson insisted on having these conversations at the dinner table, we do have to insist on talking to each other about this. Because it's only when we normalize that that we open up the door for us to be having these conversations with

the people we really have to be having them with, who are our government decision makers. That's an excellent segue to the last bit of our conversation, which is about government. You've all noticed, of course, there are elections everywhere. It's an election-heavy period, and there are campaigns everywhere, and there's so little talk of climate change. Catherine, can you imagine an election campaign where climate change actually is a foundational issue, or is that just a pipe dream?

Oh, I would argue that we've had elections in Canada already where where climate change was a foundational issue, that's been the case, I would say, for the last few elections, in fact. And it still is, even if it's in this weird, negative way of the Conservatives running their entire campaign on killing climate policy entirely. Their carbon pricing fixation is ultimately about killing all climate policy. their carbon pricing fixation is ultimately about killing all climate policy. I think, number one, important for us to acknowledge that the level of polarization that we see on climate is actually a particularly bad problem in Canada and the United States. We do not see the same level of polarization in other parts of the world. It's easy for us to have a little bit of a tunnel vision here sometimes and think it's true everywhere else.

But in fact, in most places around the world, even right-wing conservative parties believe in climate change and have climate plans. Shocking as that may be. The UK. The UK is a great example. But we're talking about the right-wing shift that we're seeing in the EU.

The EU commission just named their commissioners. Climate change remains a central feature, even with some figures entering into the equation that you might not expect that from. And so why is that a particular issue in this part of the world? Well, I think it has a lot to do with, as you were saying, the level of purchase that the industry has on political decision making. Yeah. Pun intended. And it also, I think, has to do with political identity. I mentioned earlier that I have conservative voting family members who don't necessarily expect, they don't necessarily demand that their politicians have something meaningful to say on climate change. And so what I say is, while climate change might be a political issue, it is not a partisan issue. And it is really up to us to communicate to politicians

of every stripe that you better have something meaningful to say on this. And increasingly, that you better have something meaningful to say on this. And increasingly, climate action is about industrial policy as well, right? This is about not only doing what we need to do in order to maintain healthy societies and communities, it's also doing what we need to do in order to be able to succeed in the economy that is emerging around clean energy. And so we're going to be left out of that. And Canada is increasingly being left out of that. And Canada is increasingly

being left out of that. And we're just starting to catch up. And suddenly we're having a political conversation that will take us back decades. Everyone has to take action on this, because everyone is going to experience the impacts of it, no matter what party you vote for. Thank you. We only have a couple more minutes left, and I want to finish with a lightning round. It literally is just an answer of a sentence or two. You've answered all of this in some level, but let's do it anyway.

Catherine, starting with you. One thing that the media should do to fill a need in covering the climate emergency? Call climate disasters what they are and name the cause, which is fossil fuels john one thing that governments should do around climate starting today acknowledge that we are in a climate emergency and with that language or or equivalent language and articulate their priorities in terms of decarbonizing. Catherine, one thing individuals can do around climate change. Talk to your decision makers about climate change and the plans that you expect them to have,

including plans on how to deal with the most polluting sector in this country, 31% of our emissions, the oil and gas sector, which is subject to the fewest climate policies in Canada. Last thing is one concrete thing that gives you climate hope. The mayor of Paris and how she is transforming that city in real time into a pedestrian cycle and a mass transit city. And that's one of the signal cities in the world one of the also one of the most polluted most traffic choked and literally in in one or two terms in like the last since the

last time we went there it's it is changing and so at the urban level at the mayoral level i think there's incredible leverage to be had for positive change last word to you catherine you know the thing that gives me hope is the incredible community that I get to do this work with every day. There are climate activists in every walk of life. You can be a climate activist as an author, as a politician, as an advocate, as a gardener, as a librarian.

You can be a climate activist wherever you work. And it is the coming together of these communities to take action that really inspires me and gives me hope. Catherine, John, thank you so much. Thank you for the inspiration. So wonderful to talk to you. You've been listening to Burning Questions, confronting the challenges of our global climate crisis with Catherine Abreu and John Valiant. They were the featured speakers at the 2024 Penn Canada Graham Gibson Talk,

recorded at the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront in Toronto. Special thanks to Penn Canada and to Margaret Atwood, as well as Josh Nelman, Ansley Newland, and Patti Saad. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey.

Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Danielle Duval is our technical producer. The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. Ideas executive producer is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. The truth is the battle for 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the 2020s under the watch of leaders today. Antonio Guterres warns that world leaders must act within 18 months to save humanity's chances of a livable future.

Let's have a listen to what he said. And all depends on the decisions those leaders take or fail to take, especially in the next 18 months. It's climate crunch time.