Opinion: The climate crisis keeps affecting our lives
Let’s face up to reality sooner rather than later; fossil fuels are reaching their sunset years.
It seems Premier Danielle Smith and her cabinet ministers would rather chew glass than say the words “climate change” in the same sentence as “wildfires,” “drought” or “oil and gas.”
Yet, climate scientists have made these connections abundantly clear, and Albertans are experiencing the effects.
The Alberta government’s Climate Indicators web page uses tame statements such as “warming trends in average annual temperatures” and “decreases in precipitation.” Such remarks fail to capture experiences of Alberta kids in overheated schools, or Calgary homes now requiring air conditioners rather than relying on cool night temperatures.
Extreme weather events this year, such as intense rain and flooding in June that stranded 1,500 campers in Kananaskis, or the 70 C contrast between the country’s coldest and warmest temperatures in January, are absent in these descriptors.
In summers past, wildfire smoke was never so present in Alberta’s summer skies, and air quality concerns rarely plagued our minds or lungs. Today, they are linked to an estimated 2,500 premature deaths in Canada every year. We have always had cold winters and warm summers, but our ecosystems have difficulty dealing with the irregular and intense temperature fluctuations over mere days, even though Calgarians embrace patio weather in January.
The reluctance to face reality is not only at our provincial level of governance. In May of this year, Calgary city council rescinded the Climate Emergency Declaration passed by a previous council. About 650 municipalities in Canada and thousands worldwide have passed similar declarations.
What reassuring developments prompted our council to rescind the declaration? We find no comfort or optimism in our smoky skies, nor in extended periods of 30 C temperatures. These trends are not slowing or improving. When our children in kindergarten this year reach university, they will look back on 2026 as one of the coolest summers they have ever known.
This trajectory is not unchangeable. The costs of renewable energy, battery storage and electrified options from EVs to heat pumps have fallen so far that they now allow billions of people to make the shift.
India’s capital city of Delhi, for instance, with 23 million people, is ending registration for new internal combustion motorcycles, scooters and rickshaws. This transition in Delhi, driven by cost and air quality concerns, is occurring simultaneously with a global crisis in energy security.
Six months ago, more than 40 per cent of Asia’s oil was passing daily through the Strait of Hormuz, but the current U.S. war with Iran has strangled that flow. The region that was expected to spur the next expansion of fossil fuel demand is now the one with the strongest reason to abandon it.
This new view of energy security is not restricted to Asia. EV sales across Europe have jumped since war began, and solar power is booming in Africa. In June, the Financial Times reported a global survey of 2,000 corporate executives in which 91 per cent agreed that switching from fossil fuels to electricity would improve their companies’ energy security.
In the face of these rapid changes, we must ask whether this really is the time to double down on oil and gas exports with new pipelines.
Pipelines cannot be built with the snap of a finger. When a new pipeline comes online in a few years, the cost of renewables and batteries will have fallen further, their reliability and supply chains will have strengthened, and the challenge will be greater to convince other countries to choose costly energy imports over clean, local energy options.
Let’s face reality sooner rather than later; fossil fuels are reaching their sunset years.
The sooner we accept and embrace that shift, the more stable the climate and more sustainable the economy that our children will experience.
Sophie Keenan is a member of Climate Justice Collective, and has a master’s degree in political science from McGill University.
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