Huge Fire are becoming the new normal and our response? Build more Pipelines!

Huge Fire are becoming the new normal and our response? Build more Pipelines!

Have you or your family/friends been affected by fires or smoke from fires hundreds of km away? I have and I bet you or your friends have too. In case you have not heard fires and smoke from those fires that travels thousands of km is becoming the “new normal”. As I write fires in France have created over 200,000 refugees and for the first time in Europe Pyrocumulonimbus clouds were created. Pyrocumulonimbus clouds are a new phenomena – first reported during the Australian bushfires in late 2019/early 2020, and a number have more recently been observed in BC & Siberia with the Arctic heatwave. They seem to be a by-product of our climate emergency. These intense wildfires reach temperatures above 800°C and can essentially create their own weather systems. Meanwhile in Canada smoke from our fires has blown over the border into the USA. In response, rather than sending help, US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose new tariffs on Canada after hundreds of wildfires have left much of the northern US covered by a blanket of smoke. So now not only are fires destroying entire forests, killing the wild animals that live there, burning down building, creating climate refugees, damaging the lungs of many from the fine smoke particles but fires/smoke are influences geopolitics and trade.

So what is our response in Canada? Let’s become an energy super power! Let develop more energy! Let’s dig more minerals! Let’s grow, grow, grow! The solution to all our problems in more, more, more! If it wasn’t so silly and ridiculous I would cry – but as it’s all so absurd that I choose to laugh.

Pipeline announcements seem to be in abundance at the moment, with ambitions to see more Alberta crude flowing both east and west. Ontario Premier Doug Ford joined his Alberta counterpart at the Calgary Stampede on Monday to unveil the proposed route for a pipeline (new window) to carry 500,000 barrels of Alberta crude to refineries in southwestern Ontario. That was just days after Smith was standing alongside Prime Minister Mark Carney, also in Calgary, to announce a planned route for another oil pipeline (new window) from the Alberta oilsands to transport more than a million barrels a day to British Columbia’s South Coast.

We are now clearly the boiling Frog who is boiling itself: we are certainly not the smartest frog in the universe. As you know term “boiling frog syndrome” is a metaphor [frogs are actually not this stupid] used to describe the failure to act against a problematic situation which will increase in severity until reaching catastrophic proportions. It thereby encapsulates the barely noticeable impact of slow environmental degradation that has been described & explained by Daniel Pauly as shifting baselines.

The theory can be explained by using the graph above. Imagine you are an adult in the year 2000 and see 4000 of some animal. You will compare that observation with your “perceived baseline” – which is usually created when we are young. In the graph that would been just under 15,000. So we think: “wow! The animals have decreased in number by 11,000… when the reality is that the population has decreased from 95,000!

 Thus the situation is much more dire than we imagine because we are comparing what we see to a false baseline.

Here is a concrete examples of the shifting baseline phenomena. My daughter moved to the Okanagan valley almost 10 years when summer smoke and destructive fires, while they happened, we “once in a while” events and not assumed to happen every summer. Well, now people there, including her, assume there will be nasty smoke and somewhere nearby a destructive fire every summer. Nobody likes this new reality, but nobody is moving either. There are of course a few really smart people are quietly deciding not to buy home in the beautiful forests or anywhere out of town where your home is eventually going to burn down. This quiet acceptance is “acceptable” because peoples’ baseline is that fires and smoke are “normal” and all we need to do is adapt by staying indoors with expensive HEPA air filters when events occur. Of course in the short term this is all very well and good. If we then used this breathing space to eliminate our addiction to growth and energy/materials that are toxic and destroying our planet that would be AOK…. But just like air conditioners which can keep us in our cool cocoon and avoid thinking about the fact that summers are now unlivable adapting can also mean avoidance and denial and accepting a “new normal” which is anything but normal and most certainly not acceptable. In other words “adaption” usually does is have us avoid dealing with the underlying, deep and difficult changes we need to make to completely change who we live. In other words we are the frog boiling itself and not jumping out of the heating pot.

So what can we do? Change. Thrive on change. Embrace change. Ditch business as usual. Stop thinking growth will solve our problems and never, never vote for those who are working hard to grow baby grow, because clearly that medicine, which once did improve people’s quality of life, is now killing us. The good news in all this is simple: once we change I am convinced our quality of life can improve dramatically. That’s my choice. It’s your future to choose.