OTTAWA – For planet lovers it was heart-warming sight. On the eve of the international COP21 climate summit in Paris – even while aspirations for a binding climate treaty were already fizzling – Canada’s environmental movement hit the streets brimming with something it hadn’t felt much of in a decade: optimism.
On Parliament Hill Sunday, November 29, a festive crowd of 25,000 had mostly ditched the oozing pipeline banners and stark images of climate marches past and instead held up white bristol boards spelling out “100% possible,” as in a 100 per cent renewable energy economy by 2050. Behind all the buoyant placards were the shifting strategies of a movement figuring out how to rebrand itself in the post-Harper era, faced with a government that’s no longer outright hostile to its cause.
“Our movement has spent 10 years being professional critics, being angry and trying to engage more and more people in that task,” climate activist and author Tzeporah Berman says ahead of the march. “People in the environmental community have forgotten how to process happy.” But the movement, she adds, was “tired of always being against things.”
The challenge, as Occupy Wall Street organizer Micah White wrote recently, is how to “move to protest methods designed to spark epiphanies, or awakenings, in people outside their social circles. That means creating a contagious mood that spreads across borders, identities and milieus.”
An old-fashioned, family-friendly march like the one on Parliament Hill may not be what White had in mind, but the notion that a truly clean economy is entirely plausible may be just the epiphany Canada needs. Our national self-image need not be as bound up in fossil fuel extraction as we’ve been told.
Between the storm clouds dogging bitumen extraction, the global surge in renewables, a new PM promising big climate policy shifts post-Paris, and Alberta’s shiny new climate plan that prices carbon and caps tar sands growth, there’s room for a new narrative and a deeper cultural shift.
As Berman said, “The tar sands have been the big, evil boogeyman for a decade. How do we shift to being supportive of a progressive administration and at the same time still holding them accountable?”
It’s a good question. Debate around what that will look like is just starting to percolate. At a Road To Paris event organized by York U last week, the Broadbent Institute’s Rick Smith suggested that Alberta’s new cap on tar sands emissions may mean “a different ball game in terms of a forgiveness narrative, in terms of how we transition off this product. Bearing in mind that we are going to be using oil for decades to come, I think as environmentalists, weirdly, we may be at a place where we acknowledge the need for another pipeline,” he argued. Smith was quick to add, “I don’t know where that will go, I don’t know how that gets done. I agree that Energy East will be a very tough sell.”
A few heads were shaking in the room, but Smith isn’t the only enviro in town mulling the idea of support for perhaps one pipeline. Greenpeace Canada director Joanna Kerr acknowledged that the activist community is trying to be constructive in its approach to climate-friendly politicians and to give them a little breathing room.
Still, Kerr said the movement’s not going to stop campaigning against pipelines just because Alberta’s curbing its emissions.
“For many people, pipelines and oil trains aren’t about climate change they’re about water and community safety.” Those battles helped build the movement’s base and will help keep it mobilized well into the future. “We still have a huge responsibility to hold their feet to the fire.”
So far, environmentalists are cautiously applauding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s early commitments in Paris. But besides offering some important cash pledges for clean tech and poorer countries, Canada’s domestic climate contribution is so far mostly MIA.
Enviros are already prepping their supporters for inevitable disappointments coming out of Paris, focusing on ratcheting up post-COP21 commitments. In a mass email to supporters Monday, November 30, Greenpeace Canada’s Patrick Bonin offers that “whatever happens in these negotiations, it’s what follows in the months and years after that matters most.”
Environmental Defence’s Tim Gray notes that mounting pressure for climate action and renewables isn’t just coming from Canada’s environmental base. The effects of climate change are flooding, parching and smoking out Canadians in the communities where we live, and he suggests “that’s changed the public attitude around the need to get on with the job of making a transition to a clean economy.”
The latest polling definitely reveals as much, with most Canadians agreeing that climate change is a significant threat to the economy. They support climate targets, even if they significantly affect jobs in Alberta’s oil patch. Those citizens just need to keep reminding their politicians of that. “Clearly, governments respond when the citizenry creates the parade and they can get in front of it,” Gray says.
Ontario Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Glen Murray agrees. “The stuff that government’s going to enable in a democratic society only works if there’s an activist constituency that’s big, powerful and transformative.”
In other words, don’t put your placards down just yet.
adriav@nowtoronto.com | @ecoholicnation