Here in Canada we are now past the tipping point. Even if we eliminate emissions from all other sources, wildfires alone put us well over our emission targets. A positive feedback loop in which this year's emissions get added to the accumulated emissions from previous years/decades/centuries, ensure that next year's temperatures will be even higher, drying out even more forests and tundra, melting even more permafrost, turning it all into kindling for next year's fires, thereby ensuring that they will be more numerous and ferocious than this year's fires. And so on.
None of this will be immediately apparent to most people because powerful interests don't want it to be. We are constantly being fed a steady diet of claptrap to bamboozle us and to lull us into an unwarranted sense of complacency. First and foremost, emissions from wildfires are not included in the tally of Canada's emissions because they are considered carbon neutral--the vegetation will grow back and reabsorb any GHG emissions released by a fire; and secondly, because wildfires are not considered to be anthropomorphic (caused by humans). But discounting them does not make these emissions go away, just as exporting fossil fuels doesn't mean that they don't get burnt elsewhere and contribute to global warming. A realistic prognosis for the planet must include all GHG emissions, whether someone accepts responsibility for them or not. GHG emissions are a global problem, and as such national solutions are limited.
Some wildfires are not anthropomorphic. Wildfires predate the industrial revolution and the burning of fossil fuels. But the increased intensity, frequency, size and number of wildfires is indeed anthropomorphic--exacerbated by global warming. The importance of this cannot be exaggerated; the emissions from wildfires in Canada have now eclipsed emissions from all other sources. Our once enviable carbon sinks have become liabilities--primary sources of GHG emissions. Discounting and excluding wildfire emissions from the total tally gives a very deceptive and dangerously misleading indication of where we're really at.
We hear a great deal about emission reduction plans: Solar energy, wind energy, new nuclear plants, car battery plants for EVs, carbon capture technologies, etc. Despite all these, even excluding wildfire emissions and exported fossil fuels from the mix, our total GHG emissions have continued to rise. Nothing that has been done to date has lowered our GHG emissions. On the contrary. Adding wildfire emissions to the mix more than doubles Canada's total emissions. No proffered solution can reduce emissions by the amount required.
Just a cursory examination of the most popular climate solutions reveals that all of them are intended, not only to reduce emissions, but also to make business as usual possible; the new "green" economy is intended to allow for continued capitalist expansion and perpetual economic growth. Replacing "zero" emission targets with "net zero" targets allows fossil fuel exporting countries to keep on exporting as long as they have enough carbon credits to do so. Under "net zero" there is no requirement to leave fossil fuels in the ground as long as you have enough carbon credits to offset any emissions in the process of extracting them. Carbon credits are acquired by sequestering carbon, either by planting and/or purchasing swamps and forests, or by installing carbon capture technology to capture emissions at the source--at a coal-fired power plant for instance. The responsibility for any CO2 emissions that occur after export falls to whichever country burns them. Of course this does nothing to reduce global emissions, but it does effectively protect fossil fuel exporters from liability while continuing to extract and export fossil fuels. Even banks can reach net zero while financing the fossil fuel industry as long as they have enough carbon credits to offset emissions that occur in their offices. Even the mineral extraction industry is re-branding itself as "green", not because of lowering its CO2 emissions, but because minerals for EV batteries, solar panels and windmills are needed in the new "green" economy. None of this has reduced the total global emissions, or even that of a particular country, but nonetheless seems to be convincing a lot of people that real effective work on reducing emissions is being done in a timely manner. Not so!
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| DeepGreen mining seafloor |
Now, even ignoring all other sources of GHG emissions, wildfires by themselves are enough to ensure a climate holocaust. Given the positive feedback loop described above, we can only expect the damage caused by wildfires to continue to grow exponentially, regardless of what we do. Only an actual reduction in global temperatures could interrupt our invincible defeat. Perhaps if we had decoupled climate action from economic growth ten, twenty or thirty years ago we could have reduced emissions enough prevent the positive feedback loop now fuelling wildfires. We didn't.
--by Stewart Vriesinga
