The following is a re-print of the November 2024 edition of Shift Storm, the CCPA’s monthly newsletter which focuses on the intersection of work and climate change. Click here to subscribe to Shift Storm and get the latest updates straight to your inbox as soon as they come out.
Donald Trump’s re-election is decisively bad news for the climate. His pro-oil, anti-environmental agenda has been set for Day 1. And every one of his cabinet appointees has denied or misrepresented climate change in troubling ways.
Given the U.S.’s outsized role in the global energy system, it will undoubtedly be a difficult four years for climate action writ large.
The impacts for Canada are less certain.
On the face of it, a pro-oil president should be good news for the Canadian fossil fuel industry. But Trump’s twin commitments to boost domestic oil production and reduce imports of all kinds may have the surprising effect—intended or otherwise—of curtailing production from the oil sands.
The first problem for Canadian producers is that they have nowhere else to go. More than 80 per cent of Canadian crude oil is exported and 97 per cent of those exports go south of the border. A 25 per cent tariff, as Trump has threatened, would immediately make swaths of the oil sands uncompetitive.
The second problem is that global demand for oil is slowing down. As the latest World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency (IEA) points out, overall oil demand is likely to peak in the 2030s while demand in advanced economies is already declining.
In the context of resurgent U.S. petrofascism, Canadian oil sands producers will face increased competition for a shrinking global pie. And once the dominoes start to fall and projects start shutting down—a scenario Matt Hulse and I explore in Heads in the Sands—the industry may never recover.
Count me among the skeptics who don’t think Trump will actually follow through on the tariff threat, at least for the oil industry. It would simply be too damaging to U.S. oil refiners and it would increase gasoline prices for U.S. consumers—two constituencies he’s eager to please.
But the other problem—falling global demand over the long-term—is not going away. As both the Pembina Institute and Canadian Climate Institute emphasize in their respective responses to the IEA report, the transition to a cleaner economy has now transcended environmental concerns and is being driven primarily by economics. Fossil fuels are simply less competitive than cheap renewables and that spells long-term disaster for economies that cannot extricate themselves from coal, oil and gas production.
Instead of bending the knee to Trump’s bully tactics, this latest external threat to the Canadian fossil industry should serve as a wake-up call for Canadian governments.
It’s time to make a plan for the end of the oil sands, whether that comes courtesy of Trump’s mercurial protectionism or, more likely and unavoidably, at the hands of the global clean economy.
It’s a theme this newsletter will undoubtedly revisit over the coming months and years. Those of us concerned about climate, workers and green industrial policy cannot, sadly, afford to ignore the maelstrom to our south.
But for now, at least, let’s focus elsewhere. There is a surfeit of news and research to unpack from Canada and around the world this month, so let’s get into it.
Storm surge: this month’s key reads
Rich countries punt to the private sector at COP29
The world’s biggest climate conference concluded with an agreement to triple global climate finance to US$300 billion per year by 2035. Unfortunately, this “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) falls well short of the US$1.3 trillion that developing countries were calling for.
Rich countries, such as Canada, have promised to scrounge up another trillion dollars per year in climate finance, but that additional money will come from “a wide variety of sources” led by the private sector.
Trusting the private sector to come up with $1 trillion per year also happened to be the recommendation of the UNFCCC’s Independent High Level Expert Group (IHLEG) on Climate Finance, which published Raising ambition and accelerating delivery of climate finance in the midst of COP29.
However, in case it’s not obvious, there is a big difference between development aid and multinational corporate investments. While state-to-state funding is not without its challenges, especially when it comes in the form of loans rather than grants, hoping investors from the Global North will seek out profit-making climate opportunities in poor countries is unlikely to raise enough capital or meet the real needs of these countries.
As a reminder, climate finance—which refers to money transferred from developed to developing countries to help mitigate and adapt to climate change—is not mere charity. It is in everyone’s interest for all countries to lessen their dependence on coal, oil and other polluting fuels. Every ton of CO2 reduced abroad helps us equally at home.
It is also often cheaper to do so. For the cost of a single electric vehicle for a North American family, for example, you could move whole communities in some parts of the world from wood to electric stoves—a far greater climate benefit. The marginal impacts of climate finance are huge, not to mention our historical responsibility to provide it.
For more on COP29, CarbonBrief has pulled together a comprehensive summary of the key outcomes while Bruce Campbell has weighed in on the CCPA blog.
Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate
Indigenous climate leaders call for fossil fuel divestment push. Indigenous Climate Action has released a new report, Healing the Land, that advances an Indigenous rights-based divestment strategy. This approach differs from other divestment campaigns because it is grounded in Indigenous title and sovereignty, which provide unique and powerful avenues for pressuring public institutions and private investors.
Indigenous energy leaders call for fossil fuel subsidy shift. The Wah-ila-toos Indigenous Council, housed within Natural Resources Canada, has released Kinship and Prosperity. Among other recommendations, it calls on governments to redirect fossil fuel subsidies toward community-led clean energy projects. There are lots of useful nuts-and-bolts policy ideas in the report.
Alberta workers call for re-regulation of the power sector. In 2001, Alberta opened the door to privatization of the power sector. Albertans have paid a $24 billion premium in electricity prices since then, according to Power in the Public Interest, a new report from the Alberta Federation of Labour. Deregulation has also led to lower rates of unionization and fewer workers in the sector compared to other provinces. The AFL calls for the creation of a new Crown corporation to democratize and stabilize the notoriously volatile provincial utility system.
Audit finds federal climate policies are rolling out too slowly. The federal government is not on track to meet its 2030 climate target even though the latest federal climate strategy is theoretically sufficient. The main problem, according to a new report from the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, is that many key policies aren’t being implemented fast enough. That includes the important but controversial oil and gas sector emissions cap. While draft regulations for the cap were finally released this month, they include concerning loopholes that undermine the potential of the regulations to drive absolute emissions reductions.
High-speed rail may finally be on the docket. After decades of advocacy from labour and environmental groups, the federal government may finally be pulling the trigger on a high-speed rail line in the Quebec-Toronto corridor. We will presumably get some details in the fall economic statement, so stay tuned for analysis.
Advocates try to shape forthcoming UK industrial strategy. The UK’s new Labour government will present a “modern industrial strategy” in the spring. In anticipation, a report published by the London School of Economics, The green industrial policy matrix, offers a deep assessment of the UK’s competitive advantages in specific technologies for the clean economy. It’s a helpful exercise that I’d love to see done in the Canadian context. The University of Nottingham has published a separate report, Delivering a just energy transition, that foregrounds the essential coordinating role played by the public sector in any industrial strategy.
Chinese green industrial transformation offers lessons and warnings. Big Data China, a collaboration between U.S. NGOs and academics, published Wins and Losses, which draws practical lessons from China’s mixed experiences with green industrial strategy. One of the big takeaways for countries like Canada is that industrial policies are most effective where they target technologies that are not already widespread. Trying to pivot into an industry that is already competitive, such as solar manufacturing, is less likely to deliver results.
Global clean energy jobs outpacing fossil fuel jobs. Another new report from the International Energy Agency, World Energy Employment 2024, finds that green manufacturing, renewable energy and other clean sectors are creating more jobs than coal, oil and gas on a global scale. Fossil jobs are generally holding steady, but the long-term outlook for workers in the sector is negative. I had the chance to be a reviewer on the paper, and one of the findings that stood out to me was the unequal global pace of transition. Developing countries are adopting clean energy slower, and therefore creating fewer green jobs, than richer countries (see urgent need for climate finance, above).
Global climate policies still coming up short. Two new reports, the UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report and the OECD’s Climate Action Monitor, conclude that global emissions are not falling fast enough to meet international targets. Despite all the momentum in the clean economy, most countries have not made serious enough efforts to curb fossil fuel pollution from the energy and transportation sectors.
The private sector cannot be trusted to lead on emissions reductions. I harp on private sector climate “leadership” a lot, and two new reports illustrate why. In Integrity Matters, the UN’s High Level Expert Group on the Net Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Actors finds that the voluntary climate commitments made by non-state actors are systematically misaligned with their investment plans. In Absolute Impact, the NGO Carbon Tracker finds that not a single one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies have Paris-aligned emissions targets. The issue isn’t that private sector climate plans don’t matter—on the contrary, they are wildly important. The issue is that, in the absence of state direction and regulation, voluntary commitments will never be transformational enough given the urgency of the climate crisis.
Green hydrogen fueling global mining injustice. A coalition of Dutch and African ENGOs has published Hyped hydrogen – Hidden harm, which throws cold water on growing enthusiasm for this clean fuel. In theory, hydrogen produced using renewable electricity is non-emitting. But, as the report argues, the way the hydrogen supply chain is being built out is replicating damaging patterns of resource-intensive colonial extractivism. Demand for key green hydrogen inputs, such as platinum, is driving exploitative mining in different parts of Africa with little concern for local sustainable development.
Inequality itself leads to higher emissions. Our esoteric academic research of the month is a Canadian study published in Energy Research & Social Science, “Inequality is driving the climate crisis,” which finds that income concentration leads to higher absolute emissions independent of a region’s total wealth. It reminds me of the book The Spirit Level, which famously found that inequality leads to various health and social problems independent of the absolute level of wealth in society.
The Green New Deal is a better way forward. A new book from U.S. labour activist Jeremy Brecher, The Green New Deal from Below, seeks to revive the grassroots Green New Deal dialogue that has been both maligned and co-opted in recent years. I don’t have my hands on the book yet, but it looks like a comprehensive and hopeful case for better, cleaner communities in the U.S. and beyond.
Green jobs conference comes to Gatineau. The Université du Québec en Outaouais is hosting a bilingual conference on the “Past, Present, and Future of Green Jobs” on December 6 and 7. You can register here for an in-person or online spot.
