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Aly Hyder Ali says YES

Program Manager, Oil and Gas, at Environmental Defence

Canada is running out of time to meet its climate goals, and the biggest obstacle standing in the way is unchecked pollution from the oil and gas industry. Despite being responsible for nearly a third of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), the oil and gas industry has made little effort to meaningfully reduce its carbon footprint. While other sectors have reduced theirs, oil and gas emissions have risen by roughly 80 per cent since 1990. The solution is clear: Canada needs a strong, enforceable emissions cap on the oil and gas industry—one that ensures real reductions, not more delay.

The global energy transition is accelerating. According to the International Energy Agency, demand for oil and gas will peak this decade, then decline. Other countries are ramping up investments in renewables, electric vehicles and clean technology. If Canada continues to lean on an emissions-intensive, high-cost, fossil-based economy, we’ll be left behind. An emissions cap would send a clear message that we’re serious about transitioning to a clean, future-ready economy. It would drive innovation, create opportunities in renewable energy and reduce the risk of stranded assets.

But this isn’t just about future markets; it’s about protecting Canadians right now. Pollution from fossil fuels is linked to thousands of deaths each year and contributes to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Communities near oil and gas facilities face higher risks of exposure to toxic pollutants. Wildfires, droughts and floods—driven by rising temperatures—have become a costly reality across Canada. Cutting oil and gas emissions is a direct investment in public health and safety.

Then there’s the climate responsibility. Canada can’t meet its GHG emissions reduction targets without addressing its largest source of pollution: the oil and gas industry. Voluntary measures from the sector have been largely non-existent. Companies have spent millions of dollars to talk a good game, but data tells us a different story. Investments in decarbonization remain a fraction of what’s needed, while capital spending continues to expand fossil fuel operations. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies in Canada are actively lobbying against climate regulations, all while recording massive profits.

A cap isn’t about punishing the oil and gas industry. It’s about fairness and responsibility and building the kind of nation we want to be. We need to invest in a healthier, sustainable future, not cling to outdated, polluting systems that benefit the few at the cost of the many. Every sector must do its part. Canadian households are already adapting to reduce their carbon footprint. It’s time Canada’s biggest polluters followed suit to help build a stronger, cleaner and more equitable country.

We can’t afford more delays. This is a pivotal moment for climate leadership and for real nation-building. For the health of our economy, our environment and future generations, it is time to make the emissions cap a reality.

heather exner-pirot says no

Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Director of Natural Resources, Energy and Environment

Greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change, and it’s in our self-interest to reduce them. By doing so we would also improve air and water quality. I’m for reducing emissions. But the question is whether Canada should cap oil and gas emissions. I say no, and the main reason is that oil and gas isn’t under Canada’s jurisdiction; it’s under Alberta’s.

Section 92A(1) of the Constitution Act affirms that provinces have the “exclusive” ability to make laws for the “development, conservation and management” of non-renewable natural resources. This was tested with the Supreme Court’s October 2023 ruling in Reference re: Impact Assessment Act. The majority identified that the federal government’s broad scope of “effects within federal jurisdiction” under the IAA would allow them to deny projects solely based on their GHG emissions. They determined that this eroded the balance inherent in the Canadian federal state and was unconstitutional.

Indeed, Alberta has already exercised its jurisdiction on this issue and does have a cap on its oil sands emissions. It passed legislation in 2017, under the Notley government, and limits total oil sands emissions to 100 megatonnes (MT) annually. Currently the oil sands emit about 80.1 MT, and there is no foreseeable future where they would exceed that cap. Emissions intensity—the amount of CO₂e per barrel produced—has declined in the oil sands for six straight years.

So, Canada has no jurisdiction to cap oil and gas emissions, and Alberta has already capped its oil sands emissions. This should be the end of the debate. It’s not, however, because the federal government has expressed its intention to impose an emissions cap on Canadian oil and gas and has proposed draft regulations to that effect. These would be a disaster on every front: economically, politically, legally and technically.

It would be hard to imagine a more expensive or divisive policy. The regulations are a relic of Trudeau-era ideology rejected in the 2025 election. They wouldn’t just cut emissions but would cut production too: of oil sands oil, conventional oil, natural gas and liquids such as propane. They would result in less investment, fewer jobs, a diminishment of royalties and corporate taxes, no new LNG terminals, no new pipelines, no Atlantic offshore development and no new export markets. Just the threat of them has already harmed the economy.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer determined that the cost of the emissions cap to Canada’s GDP would be $20.5-billion by 2032 and that the cap would cut 7.1 megatonnes of GHGs. That’s an implied carbon price of $2,887 per tonne. Prime minister Mark Carney “axed” the consumer carbon tax of $80 per tonne. If our goal is to cut emissions, it could be done more cheaply by means other than an oil and gas emissions cap.

Canadians want to build infrastructure, grow the economy and diversify trade. No policy threatens this more than the proposed emissions cap does. It needs to be quashed, for good.

Aly Hyder Ali responds to Heather Exner-Pirot

Heather Exner-Pirot argues that Canada should not cap oil and gas emissions, citing constitutional overreach, economic harm and lack of necessity. But closer scrutiny shows these claims don’t hold. The oil and gas sector is Canada’s largest source of climate pollution, its voluntary emissions reduction methods have failed, and a federal cap is both legally justified and economically necessary.

Exner-Pirot references provincial powers under Section 92A of the Constitution and the 2023 Impact Assessment case. But this misrepresents the scope of federal powers. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that the federal government has authority over matters of “national concern.” GHG emissions are transboundary pollutants, which means that what Alberta emits affects Quebec, Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. The 2021 Supreme Court reference case on carbon pricing explicitly upheld Ottawa’s right to regulate GHG emissions, calling this a national concern. A federal cap on oil and gas emissions targets pollution, not resource extraction, making it constitutional.

Yes, the oil and gas industry has made some progress in reducing emissions intensity. But total oil and gas emissions continue to be Canada’s largest source of climate pollution. Since 2005 oil and gas emissions have increased significantly, even as other sectors have shrunk theirs.

Exner-Pirot also foresees job losses and GDP decline under an oil and gas emissions cap. But global markets are already shifting: the International Energy Agency projects global demand for fossil fuels will peak this decade. Supporting fossil fuel expansion is bad for the environment and economically irresponsible. Conversely, clean energy investments are surging worldwide.

She also highlights the cost per tonne of reductions but ignores the massive economic and health damages tied to climate inaction. Climate disasters are increasingly expensive: 2024 was the costliest year for severe-weather-related insurance losses in Canadian history, at over $8-billion. And this is only expected to get worse, as 2025 is already our second-worst wildfire season ever. Furthermore, the Canadian Climate Institute estimates that climate impacts will reduce Canada’s GDP by $25-billion starting this year. The damage will only spread if we ignore climate change.

Oil and gas is Canada’s largest source of climate pollution, and voluntary emissions reduction methods have failed.

The health costs too are staggering. Air pollution from fossil fuels causes an estimated 34,000 premature deaths annually in Canada, with direct economic and societal consequences. Additionally, a recent study published in the journal Science shows that air pollution from the Athabasca oil sands may be up to 6,300 per cent higher than industry-reported figures. This pollution would rival all other human-made sources in Canada combined, and it raises dire health concerns for nearby communities.

The harms of oil and gas emissions aren’t evenly distributed. Air pollution disproportionally affects communities—particularly Indigenous, racialized and low-income—that are closest to industrial sites or lack resources to protect themselves. Indigenous communities near the oil sands face higher rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses linked to industrial emissions.

A cap is not an extra burden. It’s risk mitigation and protection for public health and the economy.

Exner-Pirot says an oil and gas emissions cap would be divisive. But depending solely on households and small businesses to shoulder Canada’s emissions-mitigation burden while oil and gas companies continue to pump out vast amounts of pollution with no accountability is inequitable. Rather than divisive, an oil and gas emissions cap would share responsibility fairly. It would ensure that industry’s operations align with national and international climate goals. If industry were to support a cap, they would show they’re serious about reducing emissions. This would send clear signals to investors, workers and communities that a smooth, fair transition is possible—rather than a chaotic collapse.

Exner-Pirot calls a cap unconstitutional, economically damaging and unnecessary. But constitutionality is established by a Supreme Court ruling. An early transition is far more economically prudent than clinging to fossil-fuel dependence, as renewables offer stronger long-term returns and avoid risk of stranding assets. Emissions data contradict the promise of voluntary emissions reduction from the oil and gas industry. And the health and environmental costs of delay are crippling, with climate disasters and pollution already exacting a heavy toll.

Canada promised in 2021 to cap oil and gas emissions. Fulfilling that commitment is not about ideology but about survival. Implementing an enforceable federal cap is about safeguarding our climate, economy and communities. It is time to deliver on that promise.

Heather Exner-Pirot responds to Aly Hyder Ali

What’s the case for capping oil and gas emissions According to Aly Hyder Ali, it boils down to some tried and true environmentalist warnings: we can’t meet our Paris Agreement commitments without a cap; companies won’t reduce emissions without a cap; and we’ll be left behind in the energy transition if we don’t do it.

I’ll grant him that our efforts to meet the Paris goal are all but certain to fail. That doesn’t preoccupy me much. For those people who still prioritize that goal, however, I reiterate it could be achieved at less cost to the Canadian economy than through imposing an emissions cap.

Hyder Ali argues that “the oil and gas industry has made little effort to meaningfully reduce its carbon footprint” and that “emissions have risen by roughly 80 per cent since 1990.” The first point is demonstrably false, and the second is a red herring.

Emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector peaked in 2015, even though we’ve added over a million and a half barrels of production since then. How was this accomplished Through industry’s sincere efforts to reduce its carbon footprint, including through methane capture, electrification and efficiency measures.

Emissions intensity per barrel in Canada has decreased by over one-third since 2000. This kind of achievement takes significant human, physical and financial capital, and yet it is totally dismissed.

It’s unfair for Hyder Ali to point to 1990 as a benchmark year. Emissions rose sharply between then and the early 2010s because a couple hundred billion dollars of investment in the oil sands came to fruition and production grew dramatically. But ever since 2015—the year of the Paris Agreement—we have seen a decoupling between production growth and emissions. We know that the oil sands can meaningfully reduce GHGs.

Not only does the federal government not have the jurisdiction to enforce a cap, it doesn’t have the mandate.

The argument that Canada will be “left behind” unless we turn to greener alternatives is rarely substantiated. The main markets for our oil, led by the US, do not pay a premium for lower-carbon products. And our LNG is already some of the least GHG-intense in the world.

We can plainly see Europe’s economic trajectory as it has tried to decarbonize its energy and offshore its industrial activity. This isn’t a path to emulate. Today most of the world isn’t ramping up its energy transition but rather plateauing—or, in the case of the USA, retreating. Bans on offshore drilling and fracking in New Zealand and Mexico have been reversed. Canada would be an outlier if it didn’t recalibrate some of its own expensive climate measures.

At any rate, there’s no reason to believe that a supportive environment for oil and gas production detracts from investments in renewables, electric vehicles and clean tech. Quite the opposite: the revenues generated from a healthy oil and gas sector allow governments and corporations to invest in such technology. Starving the industry of capital and growth with a cap would inevitably result in it spending less on decarbonization, not more.

But my main criticism of Hyder Ali’s argument and those like it is they remain in the abstract, indifferent to the trade-offs involved. These are emotional and ideological appeals. They fail on the details. They’re impracticable. When the federal government proposed draft regulations and modelled the costs of an emissions cap, it was a hot mess. The assumptions made no sense, unintended consequences weren’t accounted for, the costing wasn’t logical and there were inherent contradictions.

How would a cap work with Alberta’s existing industrial carbon pricing and emissions trading system and comparable frameworks in BC, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland How can the energy sector meet ambitious targets without limiting production How can operators plan without knowing their exact compliance obligations We don’t know.

The proposed cap is emblematic of a policy approach that has put Canada’s unrealistic Paris commitment at the top of a hierarchy, with every other policy issue subordinate. This isn’t what Canadians want. We’re preoccupied with housing, the high cost of living, Trump’s threat to our economy. Prime minister Mark Carney ran on a promise to make Canada an energy superpower with the strongest economy in the G7. Paris and the 2030 commitment weren’t even mentioned in his platform. Nor was an emissions cap. Not only does his government not have the jurisdiction to enforce an emissions cap, it doesn’t have the mandate.

We all want a healthy environment alongside a strong economy. We all want world-class environmental, social and governance standards. But it’s manifestly not in our interest to regulate our oil and gas to the point where production is so uncompetitive that other jurisdictions, likely higher-emitting ones, take up our market share. That’s the choice: produce oil and gas in Canada or let someone else—likely not a democracy or an ally—produce it instead. Hyder Ali is arguing for the latter.

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The images were downright jaw-dropping. Giant prints—some wider than many living room walls—featured sculpted, polished and glimmering blue glacier ice, some resembling splendid precious gems. Others showed no ice at all. Dry rock, bare, sharp ridgelines, rubbly moraine slopes, naked cliff bands. Dark, dirty, dry and withered ice. Dying ice. On one hand, the ultimate eye candy for a glacier lover; on the other, a bitter aftertaste of reality.

MELTDOWN was conceived by Jim Elzinga. A groundbreaking Rockies-based alpinist since the 1970s, Elzinga led the 1986 team that supported Canmore’s Sharon Wood to become the first North American woman to summit Mount Everest, climbing a never-repeated route. Elzinga followed up with a 25-year international career as an organizational development consultant.

Now, with his hardest climbs behind him, the glacier-draped peaks and ice cliffs he ascended are diminishing too.

The loss of these inspired him to found Guardians of the Ice, a non-profit focused on the steadily shrinking Columbia Icefield as indicator of the worldwide climate crisis. Spanning approximately 200 km² atop the Continental Divide where Jasper and Banff parks meet, that icefield is a significant bellwether of Earth’s warming climate.

“One of the many reasons I want still photography to be part of the Guardians project is the ability to make large high-quality prints that immerse the viewer, like an IMAX film,” Elzinga said. “I feel this is the best way to create an emotional connection with the viewer and provide an experience as if they’re actually in the mountains. Our purpose is to effectively engage the public to build support for a low-carbon future.”

Using a high-resolution Phase One medium format camera, Elzinga partnered with friend and cinematographer Roger Vernon. To create each image required three people—one to hold the camera, another to recalibrate the settings on a laptop, and a third to pilot the helicopter.

Leanne Allison, Jim Elzinga, Roger Vernon and Tiffany Shaw. Whyte Museum

That January 2025 night at the Whyte, however, was more than a photo exhibit. It was also the official launch for the Canadian branch of the 2025 United Nations International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. The IYGP was proposed in 2022 by Tajikistan, whose 13,000 glaciers supply the mountain headwaters for Central Asia and some two billion people downstream.

The IYGP Canada co-chair is long-time Canmore resident Bob Sandford, senior government relations liaison on Global Climate Emergency Response at the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Most of the world’s glaciated countries are participating, and with Switzerland’s glaciers having lost 10 per cent of their volume in two years alone—2022 and 2023—that country and France have announced major commitments. “But even countries without glaciers, like Holland, are participating in the full realization of how much glacial ice contributes to the thermoregulation of the entire global climate system,” Sandford said.

The purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system.

Western Canada’s mountains (combined with the US northwest) comprise one of 19 regions around the world represented in the IYGP, alongside New Zealand, Greenland, Antarctica and the southern Andes. The Year’s purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system and water cycle, as well as the far-reaching impacts of rapid glacier melt.

A full quarter of Earth’s remaining ice is found in Canada, with some 18,000 glaciers in the mountain west. Alberta’s Rockies hold more than 1,100, including the best-known and most accessible glaciers in the country. This makes Alberta the natural centre for the Canadian IYGP initiative. “The latest scientific research regarding the state and fate of our glaciers originates here,” Sandford said. “As Parks Canada rolls out its 2025 UN Glacier Year program, Canadians all across the country will learn what the Dutch already know: that even if there isn’t one nearby, glaciers contribute enormously to the stability of the global climate.”

Canada’s IYGP objectives include promoting Canadian snow and ice research to improve scientific understanding of climate change impacts and recognizing snow and glacier ice as more than just water resources, with an emphasis on artistic and Indigenous perspectives.

“Terminus.” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

MELTDOWN’s image titles speak volumes: “Terminus,” “The Black Hole,” “Battered Hero.” The latter depicts Mount Athabasca, a peak that’s been trod by countless crampons since J. Norman Collie and Herman Woolley were most likely the first to stand on its summit in 1898. Reaching the mountain back then took 19 arduous days on horseback from Lake Louise; nowadays it’s a two-hour drive. From that summit, they viewed the massive Columbia Icefield, noting that its meltwater flows to three oceans—the Arctic via the Sunwapta, Athabasca and Mackenzie rivers; the Atlantic via the North Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan and Nelson rivers; and the Pacific via the Columbia River.

More ice melted from the glacier in 2023 than in any of the 10 previous years.

Compared to historical photos in the Whyte’s bookshop showing Athabasca’s slopes blanketed in plush white snow and ice during Collie’s time, the MELTDOWN image shows dingy ice clinging to rocky slopes like a threadbare sheet.

Climbers and tourists remain drawn to these peaks. The Columbia Icefield Centre (CIC), located where the Athabasca Glacier terminated a century ago, now hosts nearly a million visitors annually, with more than 400,000 riding specialized snowcoaches onto the glacier. Hundreds more join walking tours, whose guides safely lead them to peer into crevasses and experience coursing meltwater streams close enough to get splashed. MELTDOWN images are now on display at the CIC’s Glacier Gallery having left the Whyte.

Jasper is one of seven national parks—along with BC’s Glacier National Park—where hundreds of glaciers are carefully monitored by Parks Canada. Geological Survey of Canada and Parks Canada researchers recorded more ice melt from the Athabasca Glacier in 2023 than in any of the 10 previous years. In Glacier, as of 2018, 129 glaciers remained, down from 337 in 1978. The next survey is planned for 2026. Scientists estimate that if all the glaciers in Glacier National Park melt, the area’s creeks and streams would carry one-third less water. Many could disappear completely.

“By partnering in the IYGP, Parks Canada can encourage hundreds of thousands of Canadians to reflect on the importance of glaciers and the role of protected areas,” said Louis-René Sénéchal, a Parks Canada manager. “We want to inspire them to do something about climate change and share with them the knowledge to make a difference.”

If all the glaciers in Glacier National Park melt, local creeks and streams could carry one-third less water.

The 2023 NFB film Losing Blue was playing continuously behind a privacy screen at the Whyte. Visually exquisite, poetic and soul-stirring, the 16-minute film by Canmore’s Leanne Allison (whose previous award-winning films include Being Caribou and Finding Farley) posed the question “What does it mean to lose a colour?” The narrator references how the world’s glacier-fed lakes are losing their beguiling turquoise hues as glacial content declines. Drone imagery brings viewers seemingly close enough to touch the glaciers, soaring mere centimetres above an ice cave—which I recognized as Peyto Glacier’s toe, which has since melted and flowed onward to Hudson Bay.

“The ancient bond between glaciers and lakes is ending—the bond that gives the lakes their otherworldly blue,” states the narrator.

A smaller gallery presented an exhibition of images by Canmore’s Glen Crawford titled Etched in Ice. The photos shared perspectives captured by drone at his backcountry lodge in the Rockies north of Golden, BC. Intimate and abstract, their subtlety balanced the raw power of the MELTDOWN images. Dull-grey ice, bisected by a long, skinny strand of whitish snow dribbling into a dingy-green meltwater pool. Pebbles and dirt filling the creases of dark, scrawny ice. Ice resembling hammered metal, scratched and beaten.

“I’ve been very fortunate to live in the Bow Valley and explore the nearby mountain wilderness for 50 years. Glaciers are an integral part of this landscape,” Crawford told me. “They’re also key in helping understand how climate change has an effect worldwide. With potentially 15,000 years of climate record stored in glaciers, they’re a natural archive that is now endangered. I hope the UN IYGP promotes awareness, discussion and motivation that help enact change.”

That hope is shared by other IYGP partners, including Tim Patterson, an IYGP Canada ambassador. A member of the Lower Nicola Indian Band of the Interior Salish-speaking peoples of BC, Patterson is a hiking guide who owns and operates Zuc’min Guiding—the name means “red ochre,” with which Indigenous people painted their faces before entering the mountains.

By sharing Indigenous perspectives with his clients—including during walks on the Athabasca Glacier—Patterson aims to foster Indigenous perspectives and knowledge of Canada’s glaciers, water, ice and snow among international travellers and Canadians alike.

While many of the IYGP Canada team members are Albertans, Québécoise ambassador Caroline Côté shares perspectives as a polar expedition guide. Long before her first Arctic expedition, she was awed by remnants of an ancient glacier, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of Canada 20,000 years ago.

“Glaciers are at the centre of my life,” she said. “But I also believe that they are, and must be recognized as, the centre of every Canadian’s life. If you head east of Baie-Comeau, you can still see traces of the last glaciation. What struck me the most was the sheer power of ice, its ability to move mountains and carve valleys, leaving its mark on the rock. Our world, as we know it, was shaped by glaciers thousands of years ago.”

“Battered Hero” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

Early in her career, Côté dreamed of exploring Antarctica, a dream she felt fortunate to fulfill. But she later realized Canada was home to more than 20,000 glaciers, and she needn’t travel so far. “To protect glaciers, my goal in the coming years is to reduce my travel and make more conscious choices.”

During the formal launch of the main UN IYGP in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 21, Canmore resident John Pomeroy, director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology and its Canmore-based Coldwater Laboratory, spoke in his role as IYGP advisory board co-chair. He laid it bare. “Global concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen from 315 to 425 parts per million, and as a result winter temperatures in northern Canada have risen over 6ºC during my lifetime. Counterfactual industries and regimes around the world would deny these measurements, but they can’t deny their culpability in the destruction of glaciers that’s occurring before our eyes. Glaciers don’t care if we believe in science; they just melt in the heat for all to see. The International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation provides a mechanism to kick-start renewed efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the science and adaptation necessary to prepare for a warmer, less icy world. There is still time to turn this around.”

This statement brought me to a MELTDOWN image titled “After the Heat Dome.” Dark, severe, rough broken rock dominate the frame, with a thin layer of glacier ice resting on the highest ridgetop, its days obviously numbered.

A 2015 study established that western Canada could lose 60 to 80 per cent of its glacier ice by 2100, and the bulk of the melting would happen between 2020 and 2040. Since then I’ve had one question. What would the melting look like?

For decades, I’ve skied across glaciers and icefields in winter and hiked among them with my camera in summer. The 2021 heat dome that engulfed Alberta and BC was a regional gamechanger, breaking temperature records and being cited as a leading cause of some 600 deaths. It accelerated the deaths of our glaciers too.

On June 30, 2021, Jasper reached 40.8ºC, its hottest temperature ever recorded. The resulting flooding caused by rapidly melting snow and ice resulted in catastrophic damage to trails and bridges in the area; the Berg Lake trail in Mount Robson Provincial Park is still under repair. Heat-absorbing soot from wildfires—including the 2024 Jasper fire—coats glacier surfaces and accelerates melting. Globally, 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded—after 2023, which had set the previous record—all directly caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

In a handful of years, glacier loss has become visible to the naked eye.

Western Canada’s glaciers had been gracing paintings since before the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885. In decades since, photographers, filmmakers and writers have shown us this icy landscape. Adventurers have skied across glaciers for days, weeks, sleeping in tents or snow caves. Guides earn their living on glaciers. We create memories on them.

As they melt, we can honour glaciers by sharing these stories and artworks.

“In this coming year, we will celebrate Canadian researchers and institutions studying snow and ice, and honour writers, poets, artists and photographers working to help us understand what the loss of glacier ice means,” Sandford said. “The UN Glacier Year allows us to halt backsliding in terms of climate action by learning more about what we face, and provides an opportunity to shine on the world stage as an example of everything we stand for.

“After the Heat Dome” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

“We want to be able to tell the world that we as Canadians listened for an entire year to what the disappearing ice was trying to tell us.”

At the Whyte Museum that night, I listened as Alberta-based Métis artist Tiffany Shaw explained how she created her glass sculptures from casts taken from the Athabasca Glacier. “I think these will last longer than the glacier,” she said, “which is really sad.”

Lynn Martel is writer in residence for IYGP Canada, an accredited hiking guide, and the author of three books about local mountain culture, including Stories of Ice (RMB, 2020).

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Read more from the archive “Goodbye to Peyto Glacier” September 2022.

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These last few summers, though, we haven’t been breathing easy. We’ve had summer after summer filled with smoke, even in cities far from the wildfires themselves. A haze that burns our eyes and throats and turns our sun a post-apocalyptic red. Days when people had to repurpose COVID masks, just to walk their dog or run errands. Days when outdoor events were cancelled because the air-quality warnings were too dire.

I had generally thought of those smoky days and nights as an irritation. Our summers are so precious and so fleeting. I begrudged a minute of them lost to smoke. And then I felt guilty. So many Albertans have had their homes destroyed or their lives upended by wildfire in recent years. Slave Lake and Waterton, Fort McMurray and Drayton Valley, Jasper and Little Red River: tens of thousands forced to evacuate, made refugees in their own country. Who was I to whine about a little smoke when others were dealing with disaster?

Many of us assume wildfire smoke is natural and somehow benign. We need to become more “smoke smart.”

Turns out, all that smoke may be far more than an annoyance.

Sarah Henderson is the scientific director for Environmental Health Services with the BC Centre for Disease Control, as well as the scientific director of the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health. A professor of epidemiology at UBC, she testified last November before the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry about her research into the health effects of wildfire smoke.

Her testimony took our breath away.

Henderson analyzed the effects of smoke exposure due to the massive 2017 BC wildfires, which blanketed much of western Canada in smoke. No one died directly from those fires, but Henderson estimates that as many as 2,700 excess deaths in Canada during and after the 2017 fire season could be attributable to that smoke exposure, particularly deaths of people with conditions such as asthma or COPD. But that was just the opening of her testimony.

“So far, when we look at wildfire smoke, we know it’s associated with severe birth outcomes, like preterm birth, low birth weight and stillbirth, and there’s mounting evidence for pregnancy loss in very early pregnancy,” she told us. “We know that the children who were exposed to smoke in the womb have more respiratory infections in early life and are more prone to developing asthma and other chronic diseases.”

Nor it is just babies who are vulnerable. “One of the important things to know is some of those very small particles are small enough to translocate across the lung into the bloodstream, and then cross the blood brain barrier,” Henderson testified. “Smoke can have a direct impact on the brain. We know that children do not perform as well in school on smoky days. We know there is an attention deficit on smoky days. We know these early life exposures do seem to be associated with the development of conditions such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder.”

Is living with our sporadic episodes of intense air pollution as dangerous to health as living in a chronically polluted city such as New Delhi or Beijing “Wildfire smoke might have less impact, because there are these periods of reprieve between exposures,” Henderson told the committee. “On the other hand, the exposures are far more extreme in many cases, and they are far more complex.”

I think many people—myself among them—have generally assumed wildfire smoke is natural and hence somehow benign. We’ve become habituated to it, resigned to it as part of our summer weather. We might believe that closing our doors and windows will keep us safe, or safe enough. But Sarah Henderson says Canadians must become more “smoke smart.”

That might mean creating special smoke alerts for expectant mothers, teaching people how to use masks properly to protect themselves, creating cool, clean-air shelters in our cities, even changing the National Building Code of Canada to ensure new homes are more smoke-resistant.

As another Alberta summer begins, and we hold our breath, waiting to see what this wildfire season will bring, I keep remembering Henderson’s final warning to our committee: “You can’t stop breathing. So you need to be thinking at all times about ways to reduce your exposure wherever you are breathing.”

A sober thought as we all strive to keep our families safe from consequences of climate change we never quite imagined.

Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.

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Read more from the archive “Alberta Is Burning” April 2024.

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My own story includes countless summer days camping/hotelling and winter days skiing. In fact, I was in Jasper paddling my feet in Jasper Lake alongside hundreds of others the day before the town was evacuated. We had no inkling of the disaster to come. Officials believed the main fire erupted from lightning strikes the following day, and, in the words of Jasper mayor Richard Ireland, moved with such speed and ferocity it “humbled the humans on the ground” trying to stop the flames.

The only thing that moved as fast was the finger pointing in the days after. The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees said the provincial government had “refused to heed warnings from front-line wildland firefighting staff and bears responsibility for the disaster.” The right-wing sovereigntist group Free Alberta Strategy blamed federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault, saying that “while Ottawa fixates on climate change rhetoric, their neglect of forest fire prevention has left Alberta’s landscapes vulnerable to devastation.”

The day Jasper’s monster fire was born, July 22, 2024, was later determined to be earth’s hottest day on record.

Premier Danielle Smith, ever one to attack the federal government, suggested that jurisdictional barriers impeded the province’s ability to help fight the fire on federal lands. “We can’t just send equipment into federal airspace without coordination,” said Smith, who asked for a unified wildfire command with the federal government.

That’s a great idea. It won’t stop future megafires. It will make fighting them more coordinated. But, according to experts and both the Alberta and federal governments, the Jasper fire was so ferocious and fast, with a wall of flame 100 metres high and generating its own weather system of lightning strikes, no amount of coordination could have stopped it.

Critics blamed Parks Canada for not doing enough over the years to clear out swaths of deadwood created by pine beetles (with the scope of their infestation itself a result of a warming climate). While deadwood creates its own fire hazard, it’s something of a red herring when it comes to the Jasper fire, according to wildfire expert Mike Flannigan with Thompson Rivers University. He pointed out the pine-beetle deadwood had been on the ground for years, and this material “supports intense surface fire but generally doesn’t support crown fires.”

The Jasper fire was a crown fire, where flames race through the treetops and fire-fuelled winds expel burning embers several kilometres ahead, easily crossing fire breaks. It’s the kind of fire that hit Slave Lake in 2011 and Fort McMurray in 2016. “We can’t stop these fires,” said Flannigan, who has been warning us for years about impending wildfires. But even he was shocked by the immensity of Alberta’s 2023 wildfire season, which saw 2.2 million hectares burn, 10 times the yearly average.

Flannigan said better coordination between various levels of government is key to fighting fires, and that we’ll learn valuable lessons from the Jasper one. But in the end the main culprit is something of a taboo topic for the Alberta government.

“We are seeing more disasters because of climate change,” said Flannigan. “We’re seeing more extreme fires.”

Premier Smith, a loud and proud booster of the fossil fuels that are driving global warming, avoids even acknowledging climate change, preferring to spuriously blame our devastating wildfires on arson, careless humans, El Niño and, generically, Mother Nature.

Another scientific canary in the climate change coal mine is Andreas Hamann, a professor in the University of Alberta’s department of renewable resources, who studies how a warming planet affects forests. He says well-meaning plans such as the federal government’s commitment to plant two billion trees over 10 years to renew devastated forests are “pointless, unless species and planting stock are selected to survive anticipated climate conditions for the next 50–100 years. Otherwise they will get decimated by pests and diseases and go up in flames if climate change is not carefully accounted for.”

The day Jasper’s monster fire was born, July 22, 2024, was coincidentally later determined by NASA to be earth’s hottest on record.

But dealing with climate change is a tough sell politically in Alberta and Canada, and mitigation efforts are an easy target to attack for pro-fossil-fuel ideologues. In fact “climate change” has become a trigger phrase for deniers, who lump it in with what they dismiss as leftist “woke” language and who dismiss scientists as “alarmists.”

Climate change has become another weapon in our culture wars. The victims are countless millions of people around the world devastated by a changing climate. They include the residents of Slave Lake and Fort McMurray and, in the summer of 2024, the people of Jasper.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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The post “More Extreme Fires” appeared first on Alberta Views.

Chris Turner says Yes

The author of How to Be a Climate Optimist, winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize

I consider myself a climate optimist, even as an era of deepening climate disasters descends upon us. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season established a grim benchmark for the scope of the challenges humanity will face for the foreseeable future.

The engine of my optimism lies well outside the frame of news coverage of these disasters. But that doesn’t detract from its importance. That engine operates on the solution side of the equation, and it grows more powerful daily. I’ve been reporting on the global energy transition for 20 years and now routinely see numbers and details thought impossible only a decade ago. The one currently boggling my mind is 392 gigawatts—a rigorous estimate of how much new solar power was added to the world’s electricity grids in 2023 alone. This is virtually identical to the generating capacity of the world’s entire nuclear fleet. It’s also about four times as much solar as was installed on earth 10 years ago. That’s one year. Solar power alone.

And it’s very much not alone. The numbers are similarly staggering for wind power, electric vehicles, hyper-efficient heat pumps, energy storage—a comprehensive toolkit for climate action. All of it has quickly vaulted from margin to mainstream, defying even the rosiest estimates. And the 10 years just past show every sign of being mere prelude to the 10 years of transformative growth ahead, as prices continue to plummet and adoption curves for clean technology breach tipping points in one country after another (Bloomberg News counted at least 87 such countries as of October 2022).

The picture the International Energy Agency paints is an optimist’s dream. Electric vehicle use is expected to grow tenfold by 2030. Renewable energy will contribute at least 80 per cent of all new electricity generation worldwide from now until then as solar becomes the cheapest source of power virtually everywhere on earth. Electric heating and cooling (generated mostly by heat pumps) will overtake gas- and oil-fired boilers in market share. And fossil fuel use—first coal, then oil, then gas—will peak in overall demand before the decade is done.

Add that all up and it amounts to a clear victory. It likely won’t keep warming below 1.5°C, but credible analysis indicates the trajectory of current policies and pledges would land in the 2.1°C–2.4°C range by 2100. And there is every reason to assume ambitions will mount steadily as the energy transition toolkit becomes cheaper, more flexible and more familiar.

Let’s say modestly, then, that odds are at least even that the energy transition continues to accelerate over the next decade. That would surely generate the wherewithal to keep warming below 2°C (which until the 2015 Paris talks was seen as an ambitious goal). When I began searching for climate solutions 20 years ago, business-as-usual had a fossil-fuelled rocket strapped to its back pointed at 4°C or 5°C of warming—apocalyptic territory. That’s off the table now. The first generation of the energy transition has given us ample cause for optimism.

Andrew Nikiforuk Says No 

The author of Tar Sands, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award

Civilization has for 150 years burned cheap, portable fossil fuels to pave paradise and erect a complex network of concrete cities decorated by many parking lots. In the process we have eradicated wildlife, replumbed rivers, overpopulated the earth and changed the climate with the emissions from billions of our energy slaves, such as diesel trucks.

Many greens now propose to fill these parking lots with battery-operated vehicles and other digital gadgets highly dependent on energy-intensive mining. Climate optimists plan to either bury CO₂ emissions under parking lots or suck them out of the air with dubious, unproven and unbuilt technologies such as carbon capture or direct air machines.

But these techno solutions represent dead ends. Climate change, which is accelerating, is not a technical problem that can be solved solely by new technologies; it is social problem rooted in ruinous energy consumption patterns that will require behaviour changes. The “clean tech” transition won’t make a real dent in emissions until humans change our focus and embrace an energy descent by shrinking our energy footprint. That means fewer technologies, cars, people and parking lots.

In this age of the absurd, let me be clear. I’m not saying renewables aren’t needed, but rather that the material, money and time needed to replace 46,423 power stations run by oil, coal, gas and nuclear energy with 586,000 power stations run by wind, solar and hydrogen isn’t feasible and won’t reduce emissions. Furthermore, I recognize climate change as just one symptom of what ecologist Bill Rees calls “overshoot.” Too many people are spending finite volumes of energy to replace natural systems on the planet with materially intense artificial ones run by energy-intensive robots. Electrifying the Titanic will not remove the many icebergs in our path. The scale of mining, for example, needed to support an energy transition boggles the mind. We can’t build more solar panels, windmills or electric cars without extracting more copper, lithium, iron ore and aluminum along with rare-earth metals. That means transforming the carbon-rich peatlands in Ontario’s Ring of Fire into $67-billion-worth of metals and radioactive waste.

Many techno-optimists ignore the costs of mining and argue we’ll cut emissions through more-efficient technologies. Economist William Jevons documented the flaw in this thinking in the 19th century. He observed that as the efficiency of steam engines improved, industries simply employed more of them to produce new goods for more consumers. Efficient tech leads to more energy consumption, not less. Jevons’s Paradox partly explains why the world is producing more fossil fuels than ever. Global coal demand reached record levels in 2023.

The much vaunted low-carbon economy promises a chaotic extension of the status quo. British philosopher John Gray recently characterized the problem aptly: “Net zero will be remembered like having cancer and using candle therapy.”

Chris Turner responds to Andrew Nikiforuk

In Andrew Nikiforuk’s argument against climate optimism, he cites three experts (besides himself): a philosopher, an ecologist and a 19th-century economist. This might be a fine start for the faculty of a liberal arts college, but I’m not much convinced it’s the braintrust needed to produce durable climate solutions.

I have nothing but respect for the liberal arts—I’m a lifelong practitioner—but philosophers and ecologists are nowhere near the top of my list when I’m looking for an installer for my new high-efficiency heat pump. And I certainly wouldn’t trust any of them to manufacture one, let alone the millions now being churned out to reduce emissions from heating and cooling buildings worldwide.

To be clear (and a little less facetious): the task of taming the climate crisis is primarily one of building new clean energy systems for a technologically advanced, mostly industrialized planet of eight billion souls. And I remain a climate optimist even when the esteemed John Gray compares that work to candle therapy, because, to use the lingo of his native Britain, John Gray evidently knows bugger-all about the global energy transition.

There are several big hairy statistics in Nikiforuk’s argument, but in the absence of citations I can’t speak to their accuracy other than to suggest they don’t pass the eye test. If Nikiforuk has an authoritative source on why it will take 586,000 wind, solar and hydrogen power stations to phase out fossil fuels, he ought to share it right away with the International Energy Agency, Bloomberg New Energy Finance and other professional trackers of the energy transition—who have already revised their estimates for new solar installations upward for 2023 several times to track China’s mounting ambitions. The figure also seems to deny the existence of geothermal, biomass and any number of other new technologies still in (increasingly rapid) development.

There is nowhere near enough room for us all to take up local, artisanal, pre-industrial subsistence farming.

I have to assume the point of citing this strangely precise figure—586,000, no more, no less—is not to offer recourse to facts but to point in alarm at a big scary number. See also Nikiforuk’s reference to exactly $67-billion in minerals and metals to be dug out of northern Ontario, which displays a level of certainty and foresight not even the Ring of Fire’s most enthusiastic boosters generally trade in. Researchers just discovered enough lithium for more than 300 million electric vehicle batteries under the Salton Sea in California, and Toyota has bet its electric vehicle fleet on a solid-state battery made from sodium instead—does that affect this $67-billion bonanza Never mind. It’s a large number, and it is allegedly borne to your front door on a great geyser of radioactive waste. And so you should not want it.

Beyond the specious numbers, I take exception to Nikiforuk’s use of the word “feasible.” In his estimation, the energy transition now well underway, the machinery of which I have personally observed on four continents, is not feasible. Whereas “behaviour changes” are feasible, even though the exact kinds remain unspecified, and he presents no evidence whatsoever of the political, social or economic mechanisms that might, in the space of a decade or two, unite all humanity in adopting such behaviour changes, presumably more or less all at once.

Perhaps this will be the year strict vegetarianism is adopted by everyone on earth. In the meantime, I’ll continue to rely on the concrete evidence of the energy transition itself as my compass of progress on the climate front. Which, to cite one fact regarding feasibility, has already shifted the behaviour of investors, developers and governments to the point where renewable energy is the source of the majority of the world’s new electricity generation as we speak.

Ultimately, Nikiforuk’s is not an argument about solving the climate crisis so much as an argument against industrial capitalism. Fair, I suppose. But I’ve found no evidence, in 20 years of searching, that there’s a way to solve this crisis at anything less than industrial scale—there are eight billion of us and nowhere near enough room for us all to take up local, artisanal, pre-industrial subsistence farming or the like. Nor have I discovered any mechanism more efficient at shifting the gears on the great industrial apparatus of the global economy in the direction of lower emissions than market capitalism, ideally but not always under the guidance of a liberal democracy. (Notwithstanding China’s role in building much of the transition’s essential equipment.)

How exactly would humans alter our many irredeemable behaviours in time What system of organization would emerge to guide eight billion of us in more enlightened patterns of behaviour Nikiforuk offers no answer. In my 20 years of reporting, meanwhile, the energy transition has offered me a clear answer. An optimistic answer. One that grows more feasible by the day.

Andrew Nikiforuk responds to Chris Turner

I appreciate Chris Turner’s enthusiasm and optimism about the future, but I don’t share it. My reading of events, history and numbers suggest the green transition is a grand illusion. Nor is it green. Over time, it will not become cheaper, flexible or more familiar as Turner claims. Nor will it stop the runaway train known as climate change. Instead, the transition will become more chaotic due to material limits, growth of the technosphere, unmanageable complexity, geopolitical chaos, environmental degradation and political instability.

First off, reality should temper Turner’s enthusiasm. Climate change is accelerating, and thousands of scientists have warned that life on the planet is under siege. Wrote data scientist Christopher Wolf in the journal Biosciences in 2023: “Without actions that address the root problem of humanity taking more from the Earth than it can safely give, we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater.”

Meanwhile the non-fossil-fuel system Turner envisions hasn’t even been built yet. In 2022 electric vehicles represented only 2 per cent of cars on the road. In 2022 renewable energy (excluding hydropower) accounted for only about 7.5 per cent of global energy consumption. In other words, the metals and materials needed to build the solar panels, windmills, power lines, electric cars and batteries envisaged by Turner haven’t been mined or processed yet. And they’ll come with extreme environmental costs. There is no such thing as a clean revolution.

Second, transitions don’t subtract energy; they tend to add new kinds of energy. When the industrial world started burning coal, it didn’t stop cutting down forests. When it switched to oil, it didn’t abandon coal. And so on. Despite the recent growth of industrial solar and wind facilities, civilization’s dependence on fossil fuels has not diminished one iota. This is due to increases in population and per capita consumption. Renewables, for example, only met 42 per cent of increased energy demand in 2019.

So the world is not using renewables to retire fossil fuels but simply to spend more energy.

The materials needed for solar, wind, electric cars and batteries come with extreme environmental costs.

US sociologist Richard York, writing in Energy Research & Social Science in 2019, warned that there will not be any meaningful subtraction of fossil fuel demand until civilization faces the challenge of economic growth. “The rapid and continuing growth of total energy consumption—which is connected with continuing economic growth—makes it so that removing an energy source like fossil fuels is very difficult, even when the production of other energy sources is growing.”

My third point concerns material limits. The so-called green transition shifts the problems of extraction from oil to minerals. Renewables can’t operate without rare metals. Battery-operated vehicles require six times more minerals than a conventional vehicle. Mining is a rapacious and dirty industry. Lithium mining destroys water; child slaves mine cobalt in the Congo; rare-earth minerals have left behind a trail of poisonous radioactive waste in China. Canada is now proposing to mine the hell out of the carbon-rich Hudson Bay lowlands in the Ring of Fire to put more battery-operated vehicles on the road. Destroying vital carbon sinks to save the planet doesn’t sound like a moral solution.

Turner’s enthusiasm also ignores the demands of the technosphere. Civilization has used fossil fuels to build a semi-autonomous offshoot of the biosphere composed of steel, bricks, plastic, glass and cement, managed by digital machines. This ever-growing system has an insatiable appetite for dense, fossil-fuel energy. It gobbles oil and materials to expand while spewing streams of waste including CO₂. Plastics alone now outweigh all wild animals. The growth of the technosphere explains why more electricity from renewables will not help. Whatever the future of particular renewable energy sources, writes the engineer Peter Haff, “the driving forces are already in place for transition to rates of energy consumption that are larger than, and perhaps much larger than, the current power level of fossil-fuel use.” Artificial intelligence, for example, is expected by 2027 to consume as much electricity as Sweden.

Lastly, the scale of the problem has been sorely underestimated. Total electrical power in the world is roughly 27,000 terawatt-hours (TWh). According to geologist Simon Michaux, the extra capacity needed to phase out fossil fuels is roughly 37,000 TWh. The green transition “proposes to construct an electrical system much larger than the existing grid, using energy that is more expensive and not as effective as what we have now.”

In sum we need a different plan that changes human behaviours, relies less on energy-intensive technologies, relocalizes life and accepts limits to economic growth.

The post Should We Be Optimistic About Our Climate Future? appeared first on Alberta Views.

As someone who spent her childhood in the forest, “I experienced wildfires,” says Cardinal Christianson, who is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta and now works as an Indigenous fire specialist with Parks Canada. “But I never remember what we’re seeing today.”

Last May when wildfires sparked and raged out of control across Alberta, prompting numerous evacuations, Cardinal Christianson found herself on deployment to the Paskwa base near Fox Lake as an Indigenous liaison on a provincial incident command team. Fox Lake is one of three communities on Little Red River Cree Nation, just over an hour’s drive east of High Level. The Paskwa Fire, which was first detected on May 2, prompted the community’s evacuation on May 3.

“The fire completely destroyed the community,” says Crystal McAteer, mayor of High Level, to which many of Fox Lake’s 3,700-residents fled. Out-of-control wildfires on the opposite side of High Level likewise threatened the communities of Chateh and Rainbow Lake, resulting in even more people ordered to evacuate to High Level.

More than 100 homes and 200 structures in Fox Lake were burned by the Paskwa Fire. The land that people depend on for survival, including hunting and gathering, was blackened.

For Indigenous communities, which are disproportionately impacted by wildfire, comprising 42 per cent of evacuation events in Canada, the losses are catastrophic. Even if your house is still standing, “you’ve lost everything that connects you to the landscape,” says Cardinal Christianson. “It can take generations for those forests to grow back.”

The 2023 wildfire season prompted the evacuation of 48 communities and 38,000 people in Alberta. Several communities were evacuated more than once. Choking smoke spread across the province, leading to numerous air-quality warnings and to Edmonton activating its first-ever “extreme weather” response. A record-breaking 2,214,958 hectares burned and several communities were destroyed, including East Prairie Metis Settlement, northwest of Edmonton, which lost 40 homes to a fire on May 5.

But experts have long been anticipating a season like this one. The situation in Alberta last May was “like a freight train coming,” says Mike Flannigan, whose research on wildfire ecology spans 40 years. “The weather forecasters were saying, ‘Look out, a classic situation is coming, batten down the hatches.’ ”

The most destructive and costly wildfires in Alberta’s recent history have ignited and spread in early May, including fires that devastated Slave Lake in 2011 and Fort McMurray in 2016, and threatened High Level in 2019. The risk for wildfires during the “spring window,” a period after the snow melts and before green-up when there’s a lot of dead organic material, occurs well across Canada, but Alberta is the busiest province come May, says Flannigan.

“There’s more people working and recreating in the forest during this time,” he says. “The weather conditions—hot, dry and windy—are very conducive to fire spread.”

What did shock Flannigan in 2023 was the way extreme fire weather persisted through the length of the summer into fall. Blocking ridges—atmospheric patterns that occur when centres of high pressure or low pressure set up over a region and prevent other weather systems from moving through—occurred over large expanses of the country. Hot, dry weather catalyzed fire spread.

“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh it’s our forest management practices or land-use practices that are causing the change in our fire activity,” says Flannigan. “Sorry, but those are really bit players. It’s climate change, climate change, climate change.”

On September 23 the Basset Fire, southwest of High Level—which had ignited in early June—was reawakened by extreme winds. It exploded out of control and destroyed the power supply to Chateh, Rainbow Lake and Zama City. The Dene Tha’ First Nation issued an evacuation order for Chateh, and with the main highway cut off, residents travelled for six hours on a bush road to reach safety. “They arrived at five o’clock in the morning and were just beat,” says McAteer. “This had been their third time [being evacuated] to High Level in a year.”

The Basset Fire’s excursion (when a fire jumps beyond a contained perimeter) on September 23 contributed to a record-breaking day in Canada, says Flannigan, with more area scorched—700,000 hectares—than on any other day in modern record.

Across the country, 18.5 million hectares burned during the 2023 season, obliterating the previous record of seven million in 1995. But according to Flannigan, what’s most eye opening is the impact, including the loss of structures, wildlife and firefighters’ lives, the effects of smoke inhalation, and the evacuation of more than 200,000 Canadians.

What’s certain, he says, is that the wildfire situation here is only going to get worse. “It’s only going to get crazier. Expect more fire and smoke in our future. Expect more community impacts. These fires will continue, and maybe increase in frequency and intensity.”

The uncertainty remains: What are we going to do about it?

Carrol Johnston stands where her house used to be before it burned in a wildfire, May 5, in East Prairie Métis Settlement

In 2021 Alberta cut 247 positions, 57 in wildfire management. “We started 2023 with a big deficit of people power.”

Alberta Wildfire entered the 2023 fire season short-staffed, says Mike Dempsey, vice-president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE). This was because of provincial government cuts to permanent and seasonal staff positions. “In 2021 Agriculture and Forestry cut 247 positions, and 57 of those were in wildfire management,” says Dempsey. “We started this season with a big deficit of people power.”

Alberta’s legislated fire season starts March 1 and ends October 31. Despite this, in 2022 the provincial government shortened seasonal contracts of wildland firefighters—including radio dispatchers, lookout observers, camp bosses and those who work in logistical roles—by three to four weeks. This meant, says Dempsey, that many firefighting members were still in training when the 2023 wildfires broke out.

Alberta Wildfire is also facing serious retention issues with firefighters, many of whom have left the agency to pursue firefighting careers with the British Columbia Wildfire Service, which offers extended hiring seasons and healthcare benefits. The firefighting “brain drain” to other provinces or wildfire agencies has caused seasonal staff to shrink by 30 per cent, says Dempsey. “The pool for this kind of knowledge on the front line of a wildfire is small,” he says. “There’s competition across the country for high-quality firefighters. You can’t just hire people off the street to go into these extreme fire situations.”

After leaving itself short-handed, the Alberta government resorted to importing 4,000 firefighters from other provinces and countries, including the US, Mexico and Australia. In early May, with 88 wildfires burning across the province, Alberta called in the Canadian military—although, says Dempsey, the premier delayed five days before requesting support from the federal government.

Mayor McAteer, who remembers how the Chuckegg Creek Fire came dangerously close to High Level in 2019, says she saw the impacts of government cuts on wildfire response in 2023. “By the end of August the pay periods for seasonal firefighters were done,” she says. “They broke apart the camp and took the [water] bombers and helicopters, even though a wildfire was coming at us.”

In mid-September, when the Bassett Fire exploded, McAteer says she had to phone the Minister of Forestry and Parks, Todd Loewen, to request resources. “Our communities are in danger,” she told him.

When major wildfires threaten communities in Alberta, the government deploys an “incident command team” made up of highly trained and experienced permanent staff to manage wildfires. Previously the province had four of these teams. In 2023 they were cut down to two. This meant permanent staff were working double time, upwards of seven deployments. Says Dempsey: “Fatigue and burnout start to happen.”

The Alberta government needs to invest more in its wildfire management program to recruit and retain firefighters. “You can’t do more with less, so we need to spend more money on this,” Flannigan says. He argues spending now will save more money later, not just from having to constantly recruit and train firefighters but from having to import firefighters from across the world and pay staff overtime.

This doesn’t necessarily mean putting money into aircraft or sustained action efforts. According to Flannigan, we simply need “boots on the ground to put the fire out.” “You can kill any wildfire small,” he says. “We need extra resources in initial attack.”

He points to the public misconception that aircraft dropping loads of clay retardant is an effective means of extinguishing a wildfire. “If the fire is really small, it may be helping,” he says. “But if a wildfire is large, it’s like spitting on a campfire.”

A fire near Drayton Valley, May 10

The most significant cause of big wildfires is lightning. Of the 2,211,900 hectares that burned in Alberta in 2023, 1,750,867 burned because of lightning. Still, the number of human-caused wildfires is a concern. In 2023 the province responded to 659 human-caused wildfires. (The cause of 48 fires remains under investigation.) “We can do better,” says Flannigan. “People-caused fires are preventable.” The province needs to implement fire bans and forest closures before critical burning days, he says, particularly in early May after the snow melts but before the forest leafs out, or when periods of extreme fire weather—heat and drought—are forecasted. “Forest closures are very unpopular with the public and industry,” Flannigan adds, “but extremely effective at preventing wildfires.”

These closures are exactly what they sound like: halting industrial activity such as logging or oil extraction and prohibiting recreational activities such as hiking, camping or driving ATVs. The province of Nova Scotia implemented a forest closure last May after its wildfire situation escalated and had consumed 200 homes.

The wildfire scientist is also urging the government of Alberta to implement mandatory “fire smarting” around homes. Fire-smarting refers to vegetation management to reduce the fuels that can easily catch flame. Fire is “opportunistic,” says Flannigan. It’s always looking for a place to burn and spread. Out-of-control wildfires can cast burning embers—bits of needles and twigs—and ignite additional “spot fires.” In 2011, spot fires were starting in Slave Lake despite the wildfire front being more than two kilometres from town.

“When the rain of burning embers hits a home that didn’t ‘fire smart,’ it catches fire and spreads structure to structure,” Flannigan says. “It’s like a breach in a dam. Once it goes, it’s gone.” He advocates that people in Alberta’s fire-prone communities be required to remove flammable fuels within 1.5 m of their homes. California—another jurisdiction all too familiar with wildfire—already requires the removal of flammable material within five feet, or the equivalent of 1.5 m.

But this isn’t all that’s needed, argues Werner Kurz, a senior research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service of Natural Resources Canada. He says Alberta and other provinces need to readdress their forest management practices to prevent fires.

For decades, Alberta has predominantly managed the boreal forest for timber production, harvesting and replanting plots with coniferous species only, including pine and spruce. These trees are highly flammable and contribute to the rapid spread of fires, says Kurz, whereas broadleaf species such as aspen typically slow down or stop the flames: “Aspen, birch and maple, any of the trees that have leaves rather than needles, hold a lot of moisture.”

The forestry industry, however, has historically suppressed the growth of aspens through broad application of herbicides or through mechanical clearing (cutting down saplings). Kurz says provinces must take a design approach and determine “ignition points” on the landscape—places where fires tend to start, due to people or lightning—and plant tree species accordingly. “It wouldn’t be a checkerboard,” says Kurz. “It would be a design where we could, say, have a strip of broadleaf species that would reduce the fire risk and become a natural firebreak.”

Alberta needs to readdress the spatial arrangement of our forests and encourage more open forest, with conifers interspersed with broadleaf species. Says Kurz: “It’s about making it more difficult for fires to spread from one fuel to the next.”

It’s far less costly to prevent forest fires than to extinguish them.

As climate change creates more wildfires, more smoke and more community evacuations, our communities need to be ready and our government needs to provide them support. “Every community should have an emergency management plan that focuses on prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery,” says Flannigan. It’s far less costly to invest in preventing wildfires from exploding out of control than it is to extinguish them or rebuild infrastructure afterwards, he says, with “every dollar spent saving us $5 to $15 down the road.”

One of the most critical aspects of preparedness, says Flannigan, is being able to efficiently and safely evacuate people from their homes and communities. People need to consider escape routes, including roads in and out of neighbourhoods or communities, and green spaces, including golf courses and football fields that can serve as fire breaks.

He references a situation that occurred in Kamloops, BC, in 2021 when a wildfire threatened a neighbourhood with hundreds of homes but only one access road. “It was a complete bottleneck—a disaster waiting to happen,” he says. “Fortunately, a rainstorm came along. They were exceedingly lucky. It could have been much worse.”

In July 2023 Ron Bellerose, chair of the East Prairie Metis Settlement, spoke out about the community’s decade-long struggles to obtain provincial support to build a second road out of the community. “There’s only one escape route in East Prairie, and that’s the scary part,” he told CBC News.

When wildfires enter a community, one of the first things to be impacted is power, followed by water pressure. In addition to escape routes, residents could benefit from an investment in wildfire evacuation centres, says Flannigan, where people can seek safe refuge while accessing essential services. High Level is proposing to build such a centre with the capacity to house upwards of 2,000 people. Mayor McAteer says the town signed a friendship agreement with the Dene Tha’ First Nation to move forward with the idea, which was generated following the Chuckegg Creek wildfire in 2019.

“We recognize that more and more people are coming here,” says McAteer. “It’s easier to have people in one facility, where they can get the same information and they’re looked after.” The centre would provide food, water and medical and interpretive services to evacuees, many from nearby Indigenous communities.

And while High Level serves a regional population of 30,000, it also provides services to communities in the Northwest Territories. “NWT evacuees came through town this past summer,” says McAteer, referring to the wildfires that evacuated multiple communities, including the city of Yellowknife. “Many of them travelled for 17 hours through wildfires. They were so traumatized.”

Some of the NWT evacuees stayed in High Level and slept in the town’s arena. Others camped out in local farmers’ fields and pastures. The town and the Dene Tha’ First Nation are lobbying for provincial and federal support to build the centre, says McAteer, although it’s been a struggle to rally the funds—upwards of $40-million. But McAteer points out that over the long term it’s cheaper to build an evacuation centre to house people locally than to pay for food and housing for evacuees in larger cities, including Peace River, Grande Prairie and Edmonton. “We can do it right here for less,” she says.

Edmonton, May 20; the city issued numerous air-quality warnings in 2023

In light of the disproportionate impact of wildfire on First Nations communities in the province, Amy Cardinal Christianson wants to see more Indigenous people involved in higher-level decision making. She’s advocating for a fire guardian program, which would employ Indigenous peoples on their traditional territories, year-round, monitoring and responding to wildfire in culturally relevant ways.

She says the legacy of wildfire suppression in Alberta has contributed to the crisis we’re seeing today. By attempting to extinguish all fire on the landscape, we’ve in turn created highly flammable stands of forest. Combined with the effects of climate change, fires explode into infernos.

“For me, the answer isn’t only investing in larger firefighting forces, because [suppression] perpetuates the problem we’re already seeing from the colonial regulation of fire,” Cardinal Christianson says. “A Fire Guardian movement is about building a better relationship with fire. Having fire on the ground when it’s safer, and doing mitigation work around communities and by communities that directly benefit from it.”

Cardinal Christianson wants people to understand that her fires are not the same as prescribed burns. The practice depends on close observation of the land and weather, as opposed to Western concepts such as the Fire Weather Index, used by agencies across Canada. “An elder once told me that he knew when it was time to burn based on the plumpness of spruce needles,” says Cardinal Christianson. “Now Western scientists have a term for that; they call it the ‘foliar moisture content.’ ”

She’s advocating for year-round investment to support Indigenous-led fire stewardship in Alberta. “When there’s an extreme fire event, the floodgates open in terms of funding. It’s unlimited how much money you can throw at a fire,” says Cardinal Christianson. “But there’s never the kind of funding during the off-season for communities to mitigate fire risk or to carry out fire practices.”

She points to the success of Indigenous Fire Guardian programs in other countries, including Australia and the US, which are seeing the positive results of supporting communities year-round to monitor and mitigate for wildfires on their traditional lands.

Cardinal Christianson and her colleagues are trying to educate people about the importance of Indigenous-led cultural burning on the landscape, a technology that was never lost, despite the fact that it was banned in the early 1900s in Alberta.

This past fall when the conditions were cool and damp, she and her family implemented a small burn on her property in northern Alberta. “My kids were playing in a leaf pile right next to where we were putting fire on the ground,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be a scary thing—fire can be good.”

Trina Moyles’s Lookout: Love, Solitude and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest (Penguin, 2021) is about
her time working at a fire tower in northern Alberta.

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GHGSat’s maiden satellite was wildly successful. Claire still orbits the Earth 15 times a day, every day, taking measurements from industrial sites all over the world: oil wells in Texas, oil sands in Canada, power plants in Europe, coal mines in China, even rice paddies in Vietnam. “Today’s launch is a milestone for Canadian space technology and for human environmental responsibility,” said Stéphane Germain, president of GHGSat. “Until now, measuring GHG emissions from industrial facilities has often been difficult and costly. Claire has the potential to offer consistent, objective greenhouse gas emissions measurements for everyone in the world.”

Thanks to Claire’s impressive rookie season, big money started rolling in to GHGSat. By 2021 the company had raised tens of millions of dollars from various private investors, among them four of the biggest oil sands companies—Imperial Oil, Shell, CNRL and Suncor—and the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA). It also received public money from Emissions Reduction Alberta and the governments of Alberta and Canada, the latter of which acknowledged in late 2021 its “long-standing collaboration” with GHGSat. All of this enabled the launch of two more satellites, “Iris” and “Hugo,” both with an order of magnitude better performance than their older sibling Claire.

Perhaps the perfect proof of concept was when Claire detected massive methane plumes from oil and gas production and transmission infrastructure in Turkmenistan from 2017 to 2019, which eventually led to a five megatonne per year leak being capped. Even more impressive, Iris noticed the smallest methane cloud ever detected, a planned, controlled leak of just 260 kilograms of CH₄ per hour (equivalent to the emissions from a large landfill) in Alberta in late September 2020.

According to Germain, the 2021 investment of $20-million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada, the department’s third investment, will enable GHGSat to complete its vision of a constellation of at least 10 high-resolution methane-detecting satellites. Three of those—“Luca,” “Penny” and “Diako”—were sent into orbit in August 2022, doubling GHGSat’s monitoring capabilities. Five more will join them this year. Soon, no methane molecule will be able to hide from the inquisitive sensors of GHGSat’s decuplet of microsatellites.

That day can’t come soon enough. Like everywhere else that has sprawling networks of aging oil and gas infrastructure, Alberta has a significant and largely invisible methane measurement and management problem—though you’d never know it from the glowing reviews from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) or the UCP government’s energy “war room.” These and other oil and gas propagandists happily regurgitate the highly suspicious and unconfirmable claim by Alberta Environment and Parks that the province’s oil and gas industry is on track to meet its 45 per cent methane reduction target by 2025, even as oil production has increased by 58 per cent and gas production by 21 per cent over the last decade.

Although the federal and Alberta governments rarely agree on anything, the federal Ministry of Environment and Climate Change’s (ECC) December 2021 “Review of Canada’s Methane Regulations for the Upstream Oil and Gas Sector” went out of its way to assert that Canada (including Alberta, the largest source of oil and gas methane emissions) is “on track to meet its 2025 target for methane reductions from the upstream oil and gas sector.” Never mind that the report is a little unsure of whether the target is 40 or 45 per cent of 2012 emissions, and that Alberta’s target relies on a 2014 baseline rather than 2012, and that Alberta doesn’t include methane emissions from oil sands mining and upgrading (but the feds do), and that, in the end, what the federal review actually concludes is that “the federal and provincial methane regulations alone are modelled to achieve methane emission reductions of 39 per cent by 2025.” Which essentially leaves a negative margin of error and the need for a hope and a prayer a) that the models are spot on, and b) that when the process is repeated in 2025, God will be with you.

There is one saving grace. Whoever wrote the ECC report, released two days before Christmas to meet the looming December 31, 2022, deadline, had the dignity to admit, on the second-last page, that “the Government recognizes atmospheric measurements of methane have indicated that the official national inventory underestimates emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector.” This sentiment is also found in the federal government’s 2022 National Inventory Report of Greenhouse Gases, which includes quantified estimates of “uncertainty” in the calculation of the numbers. This last factor can be as large as, for example, –48 per cent to +71.5 per cent for emissions from Canada’s abandoned oil and gas wells.

These caveats, as we shall see, are an important acknowledgement that despite all the time and money and political capital that goes into producing these (almost assuredly inaccurate) numbers, a host of expert opinion and reams of scientific papers beg to differ. They’re also evidence that the federal Liberal government, for all its egregious flaws, might just have the humility necessary to get the numbers right in a process that will help determine not only the fate of the planet but the future of Alberta’s economy. Sadly, humility is a character trait in short supply among the apparatchiks in Alberta’s UCP government.

Methane has been an essential enabler of modern existence since the late 18th century, when it began to illuminate streets and homes in Britain. With four hydrogen atoms bound to a single carbon one, methane (CH₄) is the simplest hydrocarbon and the principal component (70–90 per cent) of natural gas, which today is used around the world as a fuel for everything from barbecues to powerplants. This facilitates the release of a staggering amount of methane, 350 megatonnes minimum, around the globe every year.

Unfortunately methane comes with a good deal of planet-altering baggage. The problem with CH₄ is that it’s very good at absorbing energy, which makes it a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the course of its lifetime, and 80 times stronger in the first two decades. The concentration of methane in Earth’s atmosphere has increased 2.5 times since the Industrial Revolution—and tripled in the last century—and it accounts for roughly 30 per cent of the rise in global temperatures since the 1800s, reaching an unprecedented high of well past 1,900 parts per billion in 2022, the year Luca, Penny and Diako took to the skies. This is the highest level in at least the last 800,000 years. All of this means that the best and perhaps only way to slow climate warming is to dramatically reduce methane emissions.

Canada, as the fourth-largest producer of oil and gas in the world, has its work cut out for it. Data for 2021 from the European Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research indicates that Canada has been the worst G7 country for lowering greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, the starting point for targets under the Paris climate agreement. While Canada has decreased carbon emissions by 3 per cent, it is the only G7 nation that increased methane emissions between 2005 and 2021, by 2.7 per cent, a troubling piece of evidence that our methane-accounting methods may not be exactly what they seem.

Of the four main sources of methane in Canada, three are human-caused: fossil fuel extraction and production, agriculture (mostly livestock manure) and solid-waste disposal, which is to say landfills. The fourth is wetlands, at just 8 per cent. Where once methane was emitted only by Nature, it is now largely a by-product of our suicidal addiction to fossil fuels.

Alberta is the Canadian epicentre of methane emissions. As of 2020, Canada’s official inventory of GHG emissions lists our province, with 13 per cent of Canada’s population, as the source of 40 per cent of the whole country’s methane, 60 per cent of it care of the oil and gas sector. As if that weren’t bad enough, Alberta hosts seven of Canada’s 11 biggest methane “hotspots,” a group of facilities that, as of 2018, each spewed at least 0.22 Mt CO₂eq annually all by themselves (roughly the same warming potential as the CO₂ emitted by 50,000 passenger cars a year).

Alberta has a significant and largely invisible methane measurement and management problem.

Most methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure, in Alberta and elsewhere, are from the venting and flaring of natural gas and from “fugitive emissions” that leak surreptitiously from pipelines, compressors and wells in the “conventional” oil and gas industry. This is why most of the new regulations have been focused here. The good news, however, is that a strong business case can be made for the oil and gas industry to invest in mitigation, regulations or not, because methane is a valuable commodity. The International Energy Agency, no enemy of the oil and gas industry, concluded that reducing methane emissions from the industry is not only possible with existing technology but up to half of these reductions could be achieved at no additional cost to industry, because the value of the captured methane would be more than the cost of the necessary retrofits.

This is perhaps why federal environment minister Stephen Guilbeault in early 2022 upgraded Canada’s methane reduction goal, joining the Global Methane Pledge and announcing that the oil and gas sector would have to reduce emissions by at least 75 per cent from 2012 levels by 2030, a mere seven years away. He also announced an ambitious framework for new regulations. Wrote Jan Gorski, director of the Pembina Institute’s oil and gas program, after the announcement: “We should all be excited about methane, given that it presents us with a win-win-win for the government, industry and Canadians. On our path to net-zero by 2050, this is a rare opportunity that we should grasp with both hands.”

The bad news, however, is that despite all the numbers and estimates from Canada’s latest annual National Inventory Report and other sources, we don’t have a good idea of how much of this potent greenhouse gas we’re wafting into the atmosphere, never mind which facilities or corporations or governments are responsible for how much of what kind of climate-warming pollution.

Which is why I wanted to talk to Stéphane Germain, the president, CEO and founder of GHGSat. His company has received many millions of dollars of public money from Canadian governments and boasts that its orbiting satellites have been monitoring the Alberta oil and gas sector for years. In 2020 alone, the GHGSat constellation “made over 550,000 facility measurements and identified nearly 8 Mt of methane emissions worldwide.” More importantly, Germain has committed to making his company’s data “widely available to accelerate global transparency in greenhouse gas emissions.”

But as the weeks went by, my numerous phone calls and emails and direct messages (and prayers) remained unanswered. So too were my many requests for information or comments on GHGSat’s work in Alberta to: the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), Imperial Oil, Minister Stephen Guilbeault and his press secretary, Kaitlin Power, and the media contact at the federal Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. You’d think they’d want to talk. After all, Germain and Guilbeault had announced on November 2, 2021, at COP26, that they were providing the International Methane Emissions Observatory, for the first time ever, with a high-resolution methane emission satellite dataset made by GHGSat.

Only the Pathways Alliance, the latest collaboration of the biggest oil sands companies, which is prone to making wild promises it likely won’t be able to keep, got back to me. Adviser Jerrica Goodwin sent along an apology and a statement from Pathways Alliance’s VP of technology development, Wes Jickling. Apart from confirming what I already knew, the note cursorily explained why any data the Alliance does have from the GHGSat satellites is not ready to be made public. (“More testing and data analysis is needed.”)

Industry and government have been happily boasting in public for many years about GHGSat’s “remarkable” work and what its satellites have found, complete with full-colour pictures of emissions plumes from almost every other oil-producing part of the world. But neither GHGSat nor the governments and industries it serves have provided any meaningful information (or images) related to Alberta’s methane problem. Despite the investments the federal government has poured into GHGSat, it’s clear that the “global transparency” contemplated by the company’s CEO and founder has yet to come to the unconventional oil capital of Canada.

This “control the message” strategy of regulating pollution, pioneered in Alberta by former premier Ralph Klein and his communications cabal, is eerily familiar. For decades government and industry, aided and abetted by consultants of various sorts, have told us that the extravagant destruction in the Alberta oil sands region was not contaminating the land, the air and the water. Turns out that even as the tailings ponds leak persistently into surface and groundwater, the monitoring system deployed by the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program, once dubbed “world class,” could hardly have been designed to be more useless—except as secret licence to continue to pollute. “If the oil sands were as free of pollution as the greenwashers claim,” scientist David Schindler presciently declaimed at the time, “it would be equivalent to an immaculate conception.”

A 2020 study found that methane emissions in Alberta and Saskatchewan were nearly twice those being reported.

Alberta claims in its “2021 Methane Emissions Management from the Upstream Oil and Gas Sector in Alberta” report, that its oil and gas industry only emitted 15 megatonnes of CO₂ equivalent that year, 37 per cent lower than the federal government’s most recent estimate. It also claims that methane emissions had declined 44 per cent from 2014 levels. All of this somehow occurred even before the Alberta government had instituted regulations to “address the primary sources of methane emissions from Alberta’s upstream oil and gas industry.”

There has been some success. After people in the Peace Region complained (and complained and complained) about noxious fumes from sour gas, the province in 2014 finally imposed strict rules limiting methane emissions from heavy oil production, including mandatory monthly leak-detection surveys and a ban on routine venting at high-risk sources. The result Virtually all methane emissions were eliminated from the targeted sources.

Still, Alberta’s rosy analysis at the provincial level is likely incorrect, because it relies on a complicated bottom-up (a.k.a. component- or inventory-based) approach that has been roundly criticized. Numerous peer-reviewed studies use better, measurement-based approaches to obtain more-accurate emissions data, and they’ve found that current bottom-up estimates of methane emissions all over the world are universally low. In 2022 the IEA found that actual global methane emissions from the energy sector are 70 per cent higher than reported in official data. A 2020 study by scientists from the climate research division of Environment and Climate Change Canada found that methane emissions from the upstream oil and gas industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan were nearly twice those published in the federal government’s National Inventory Report.

A 2022 study by US-based Environmental Defense Fund suggests only about 28 per cent of Alberta’s upstream oil and gas methane emissions are based on reported data, and that the more comprehensive reporting initiated in 2020 “could represent a significant fraction of the apparent emission reductions since 2012.” This finding, the authors conclude, “poses a significant problem for the validation of the stated 40–45 per cent reduction from 2012 levels.” A more recent study found that heavy oil facilities in Saskatchewan were emitting methane at nearly four times the amount reported to the federal government, illustrating “the importance of independent monitoring, reporting and verification to ensure accuracy in reporting and regulatory compliance.”

There’s also the embarrassing fact that despite being ignored by the Alberta government (and even the Pembina Institute) and discounted by the feds, we’ve long known that the oil sands are far from insignificant when it comes to methane. Five of Canada’s methane hotspots are oil sands projects, which together emit 1.75 Mt CO₂eq of methane annually—equal to about 10 per cent of Alberta’s total oil and gas industry methane emissions. This same study estimated methane emissions from just four oil sands mines (Suncor’s, CNRL’s Horizon, and Syncrude’s Mildred Lake and Aurora facilities) account for 1.5 Mt CO₂eq every year.

Another study published five years ago, which used aircraft fitted with sensors to measure summer methane rates from Alberta’s oil sands region, found that the five biggest oil sands facilities emitted the annual equivalent of 4.25 Mt CO₂eq. This is at least twice as much as the fugitive emissions from all of Canada’s coal mines and almost eight times more than the leakage from Alberta’s 250,000 (or more) abandoned oil and gas wells, which Danielle Smith was at one time keen to spend 20 billion taxpayer dollars to clean up.

Bottom-up estimates used to be the only option we had to guesstimate methane emissions. But with satellite technology, methods have improved a lot. To claim, as the AER has, that traditional bottom-up estimates “reflect the best available data at the time and may not align with emission estimates conducted by other parties,” without even acknowledging, as the federal government has, that “atmospheric measurements of methane have indicated that the official [bottom-up] national inventory underestimates emissions,” seems naïve at best and duplicitous at worst.

Even more confounding is the fact that the AER actually has access to atmospheric measurements from satellites but apparently doesn’t use them in its model. GHGSat has been monitoring Alberta oil and gas infrastructure for years on behalf of both the AER and some of the corporations they purport to regulate. The AER is also a user of data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite—but you’d never know it from searching the AER website.

More concerning: the AER missed a September 28, 2022, methane plume at a “hub of oil and gas” west of Lloydminster with an emission rate of 11 tonnes an hour. It was instead identified by a French firm, Kayrros SAS, using Sentinel-5P data. Why Because AER doesn’t use the Level 2 data that reflects methane concentrations for each orbit, instead using the Level 3 dataset that averages concentrations over time, conveniently making it impossible to pinpoint a perpetrator and make them stop.

Overall, the promise that current regulations and market-based incentives will reduce methane emissions seems to amount to so much Alberta government mumbo jumbo. Torleif Haugland, a Norwegian economist and statistician who co-founded Carbon Limits AS and is an expert in climate change mitigation, sees through the mire. In a concise and straightforward manner, he concluded in a 2020 case study about Alberta for a UN project on best practices for methane management in the oil and gas sector that “the ambitious target to reduce methane emissions from 27 million tonnes CO₂ equivalents recorded in 2014 to 15 million tonnes CO₂ equivalents by 2025 is not on track to be met.” This is largely because fugitive emissions, which are significant and “present a quantification challenges,” fall “outside the carbon pricing system and offset system.”

What are we to make of yet another vast gap between the data-based conclusions of the scientific community and the unsubstantiated assertions of a captured government that has a history of getting these kinds of things very, very wrong I’d suggest it’s just the latest data point in a predictable pattern, which scientist David Schindler spent his career unmasking. Failure to adequately monitor, measure and regulate pollution from the fossil fuel industry has been a hallmark of every conservative government since “King Ralph” dismantled our science and regulatory capacities, bequeathed to Big Oil the keys to the royal treasury, and cloaked the coup in a shroud of buffoonery and secrecy.

Methane is both invisible and perilous, which makes it a potent symbol for the inscrutable logic of Alberta’s increasingly out-of-touch conservative politicians. Until we free ourselves from “leaders” that exude such palpable duplicity and incompetence, we’ll never know with any certainty whether our government is telling us the truth and looking after our best interests. History suggests this formula will only lead to the continued degradation of our land, water and air and to an ever-hotter climate. It’s like relying on an addict to manage your money; eventually, the story ends in bankruptcy.

Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and now lives in Montana. He is writing a memoir about family, history and fascism.

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In fact, the capacity of Alberta’s big cities to attract talent and investment is being actively undermined by our provincial government. This has become a point of contention between the provincial government and the two city councils, the latter of which were elected in the fall
of 2021.

New Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek, for example, announced on her first day on the job that the city would declare a climate emergency. Then-premier Jason Kenney characterized this as a “peculiar priority.” Nonetheless a month later Calgary’s city council voted 13–2 to declare a climate emergency. Gondek says that such a declaration—aside from acknowledging the seriousness of climate change—attracts people and businesses. “I look around the world and I see that access to capital hinges on saying, ‘We understand that this is an issue and we will do better,’” she says. “It made absolute sense to make that declaration.”

But this motion didn’t endear her to the UCP government. “You can’t be a supporter of the energy sector and declare a climate emergency,” Gondek recalls being told. “[But] I found it fascinating that they were creating this false dichotomy, because the industry itself has been transitioning.”

Calgary’s declaration, meanwhile, was hardly a novelty. Two years earlier the House of Commons had voted to declare a national climate emergency. And Edmonton was quick to follow suit. Indeed for many years now Alberta’s capital city has been taking concrete steps towards climate action, first by creating an Energy Transition Strategy in 2015, and then a Climate Change Adaptation Plan in 2018. Like Calgary’s declaration, Edmonton’s plan proposed that “increasing resilience can help attract businesses, talent and residents.” It added that climate action “lowers social and GDP costs and improves investor confidence and credit ratings.” In so doing, the plan spoke directly to the objectives of Kenney’s “Alberta is Calling” campaign—to attract more residents.

Yet the aspirations of both cities have only created resentment in the provincial government. “We haven’t had a lot of success with the [UCP government],” says Ashley Salvador, Ward Métis councillor. “In the absence of provincial leadership, the city has had to step up.” Given the nature of the municipal–provincial relationship, however, cities are extremely limited in what they can do on their own.

Cities in Canada carry ever-increasing responsibility. Since the 1990s this has expanded beyond the delivery of basic services such as road repairs, wastewater management and policing, to bigger challenges such as attracting workers and businesses, tackling structural inequity (e.g., racial biases) and reducing carbon emissions. The implications of a more complex role—extra responsibilities come with extra costs—have complicated the relationship between provincial and municipal governments, as cities raise funds primarily through property taxes and are prevented by provincial law from levying other taxes or running deficits. So, for cities to go beyond their mandate as “service corporations,” they need funding from senior levels of government.

“When a senior order of government decides to offload responsibility to somebody else, [that somebody else] generally becomes the municipal government,” Gondek says. “So we have to take on these wicked problems, try to find a way forward as a local government. But frankly we can’t do it without the provincial and federal governments helping us.”

Jack Lucas, an associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary, says provincial governments tend to be more conservative than those in cities, and the gap only grows when cities adopt new responsibilities. “Over the last 20 years cities have taken on new meaning in our political and policy debates,” he says. This creates “a source of real frustration for municipal councils… [they] are trying to do big things.”

And Lucas says things have lately gotten testier. “There’s a difference between the inevitable ongoing tensions of multi-level governance and the deeper tensions we’ve been seeing in Alberta,” he says. “Since the 1980s, we’ve been having these ongoing discussions about giving additional powers and authority to the cities of Edmonton and Calgary.” Not that long ago things looked to be improving. The Progressive Conservative government of Jim Prentice supported new powers in the form of city charters, signing a framework agreement with Edmonton and Calgary in 2014. During the NDP government era, 2015–2019, the two cities worked with the province to create the charters, culminating in the City Charters Fiscal Framework Act. The municipal affairs minister at the time, Danielle Larivee, said, “Our goal is to help Calgary and Edmonton address climate change, plan smarter communities and work more efficiently on issues from tax assessments to parking tickets.”

The agreements came into effect in 2018, granting Edmonton and Calgary access to a reliable source of provincial funding and giving them more authority.

But just months into their mandate the UCP government under Jason Kenney eliminated charters, scrapping most of the progress that had been made. The cities were back to being supplicants to the province. This reversal of fortunes renewed frustrations leading up to the 2021 municipal elections. “The whole purpose of city charters was to build a stronger partnership [between] big cities and the provincial government,” says Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi. “They needed to be strengthened, not weakened.”

In essence, instead of enabling cities to meet new challenges and demands, the Kenney government tied their hands and added to their financial burdens. Calgary and Edmonton are now set to receive even less provincial support for infrastructure, with the Local Government Fiscal Framework expected to reduce funding for cities by nearly 40 per cent when it comes into effect in 2024. And since the release of its first budget in 2020 the UCP government has slashed budget items that would have allowed Calgary and Edmonton to improve services in the areas of affordable housing, health and social services.

Furthermore, “the UCP actually increased the taxes it drew from municipalities,” says Lori Williams, a professor of political science at Mount Royal University. Indeed, in 2021 the provincial government announced a 1.5 per cent increase to the education property tax requisition, an amount municipalities collect in the form of property taxes and then send to the province to fund the operational costs of public schools.

In Calgary and Edmonton, this tax represents about 30 per cent of property taxes. As the needs and responsibilities of Alberta’s largest cities have grown, mayors in both places have insisted that Calgary and Edmonton be allowed to keep this revenue. Instead, both cities have now had to increase property tax rates just to cover their operational costs. “The provincial government walked away from their responsibility, downloading more to [us],” says Sohi. “It really put a lot of pressure on the local resources.”

Adds Lucas: “If [citizens] ask a municipal government to be responsible for something, and they’re not able to pay for it, that’s a recipe for conflict.”

Gondek and Sohi and councillors in both cities insist that their mandate from citizens is not only to provide basic services but also to prepare their communities for a lower-carbon future. “The energy transition represents the single best economic opportunity of our time,” Edmonton’s Ashley Salvador says. “We need the foresight to know that investing in climate action means attracting and incubating the next generation of energy companies, it means green jobs and economic growth, and it also means remaining competitive in a changing global economy.”

A 2020 poll by the Pembina Institute found that 68 per cent of Albertans support taking action to reduce carbon emissions. According to a survey prepared for the City of Edmonton, three out of four Edmontonians believe climate change requires action. Over 60 per cent of Calgarians report being concerned about fossil-fuel dependence, high energy consumption and air pollution.

“City charters needed to be strengthened, not weakened,” says mayor Amarjeet Sohi.

Last fall, Edmonton’s city council voted for a 5 per cent property tax increase over the next four years in support of a budget that includes significant investments in green initiatives. In Calgary property taxes are slated to rise by 4.4 per cent over the same period. In the latter city, however, only a small share of the budget—$3.8-million annually, and a one-time $44-million infusion—will be devoted to following up on council’s 2021 emergency declaration and “to set the foundation for work required to achieve 2050 climate targets.”

According to Noel Keough, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, investing in housing and transportation are key ways for cities to reduce carbon emissions. As Keough outlines in his book Sustainability Matters, a just society is a sustainable society: ensuring equitable access to housing and public transit gets more citizens to reduce carbon emissions. But despite the evidence, “[Provincial] government funding hasn’t been forthcoming in support of climate action,” Keough says.

The fact that Calgary and Edmonton already have more than half of Alberta’s population—even as the UCP government and municipal governments alike try to attract even more residents—means they’re also more vulnerable to the consequences of a changing climate. As global temperatures continue to rise, extreme weather events will become more commonplace. Alberta is expected to see increased risks of drought, forest fires and flooding. The effects of climate change have already intensified in Alberta, as two of the costliest natural disasters in Canada’s history took place in Calgary: the 2013 flood and the 2020 hailstorm.

“We need to take this crisis very, very seriously,” Sohi says. “Without municipalities’ participation, [Canada] will not be able to meet our climate targets. We can reduce emissions by [incentivizing] people to use sustainable modes of transportation,” Sohi says. “And the integration of land-use planning and transportation planning, where people live and how people move, are directly linked to how much pollution and emissions they create. The role of cities is crucial,” he adds. “That’s where most people live [and] where economic activity is generated.”

In the face of the UCP government’s lack of support, Calgary and Edmonton are attempting their own strategies. Edmonton’s adaptation plan outlines a series of actions that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make the city carbon-neutral (emitting and absorbing equal amounts of carbon) by 2050. In addition, Edmonton’s climate and resilience strategy has driven the creation of an energy incentive program to upgrade buildings, expand the city’s bike lane network and LRT system, and implement a carbon budget. Carbon budgeting is a new field that provides information on the greenhouse-emissions impact of each budget request. Edmonton is the first municipality in Canada to incorporate a carbon budget into its financial budgeting process. But curbing emissions isn’t cheap. The city estimates that these initiatives over the next decade will add about $24-billion.

Calgary’s updated climate strategy aims to reach net-zero by 2050 at a total cost of $87-billion. Over its first three years the plan calls for Calgary to retrofit existing buildings and improve low-carbon transportation options such as walking, cycling and transit.

The success of both strategies, however, relies on the availability of stable, consistent and sufficient funding from other levels of government. “The less power and money that municipalities have, and the more control is usurped by the province, the more challenging it’s going to be for [local] officials,” MRU’s Williams says. Indeed, Edmonton’s first carbon budget, published in December 2022, shows that without significant investment from the province the city won’t meet its net-zero target by 2050. (Calgary is expected to release its first carbon budget later this year.)

On top of these and other climate issues, Gondek and Sohi have contended with the effects of a relentless pandemic, growing mental health and addictions crises, and a steep increase in the cost of living. “The provincial government hasn’t given Edmonton the support it deserves,” Sohi says. “We want to work with them based on data and on good information to correct those inequities.”

Last year, for example, Edmonton requested roughly $60-million to operate existing supportive housing and for money to build more housing. Months later the city received $12-million from the province for mental health supports and $9-million for more emergency shelter spaces. After the province released its 2023 budget, Sohi noted the dearth of provincial support for efforts to address homelessness and addiction. The provincial government “ha[s] not fully understood the gravity of the problem that Edmonton is facing,” Sohi told Global News in March.

Similarly, mayor Gondek has been vocal about the need of increased provincial support to revitalize the city’s downtown, build more affordable housing and expand the city’s mass transit system. Gondek said she was disappointed that the UCP government’s 2023 budget offered zero money for downtown revitalization efforts. “But we’ve had some wins too,” she says. These include some provincial funding last fall to address homelessness and public safety issues, and a pledge in early 2023 that a new fiscal framework could soon see cities receive more funding.

In some respects, both mayors and councils see their roles as having been reduced to solving problems created or exacerbated by provincial underfunding. “We need all sectors and all orders of government to come along to meet our goals,” says councillor Salvador. “There’s a sense that we’re putting out fires… filling in gaps in the absence of provincial leadership.”

“It’s quite problematic for municipal governments when they need help from [other] levels of government,” says MRU’s Lori Williams. “And now it seems Danielle Smith sees her path to victory in the 2023 election in running against Justin Trudeau and resisting collaboration with him—whereas municipalities absolutely need to work with both levels of government.” In other words, the nearly 2.5 million Albertans living in Calgary and Edmonton are vulnerable not only to legislation that diminishes cities and to the impacts of a changing climate but also to the political whims of a combative premier.

While the provincial election is underway, the mayors of Calgary and Edmonton have an additional challenge, Williams says: to remain neutral while also advocating for their cities. “[They have to] challenge the provincial government to do better for municipalities, but also remain neutral enough that they can work with whoever is elected.”

Last November Smith wrote a letter to Mayor Gondek suggesting her government would be interested in expanding Calgary’s LRT to reach the city’s airport—a plan so far stalled for a lack of funding. In February the provincial budget allocated $5-million towards engineering work for the airport link. Some observers doubt the premier’s commitment to seeing the project through, as earlier she had expressed concerns about the “high costs” of Calgary’s much-needed Green Line, a sticking point in the Alberta–Calgary relationship since the UCP government took over.

Considering Smith’s previous assertion that “Edmonton’s a bit ahead of Calgary” on building LRT, the provincial budget’s allocation of $760-million over three years for Edmonton LRT projects was unexpected. Moreover, the 2023 budget allocated more capital grants and investment to Edmonton than to Calgary—$3.2-billion and $2.9 billion, respectively. Critics, however, pointed out that the sudden funding boost came in an election year, with the UCP and NDP polling in a dead heat and every seat in Edmonton and Calgary being critical. And despite the LRT funding, other key priorities in Edmonton remain underfunded, according to Sohi, a situation that follows a familiar pattern. “The discrepancies aren’t caused by the UCP government,” the mayor says. “They’re caused by how Edmonton has been seen by provincial governments over the decades. And the discrepancies have grown.”

Political biases and whims of provincial politicians are yet one more reason, Lucas says, that our biggest cities need access to reliable, predictable and stable funding.

“Cities’ ‘wicked problems’ require provincial and federal help,” Mayor Jyoti Gondek says.

Meanwhile Premier Smith’s Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act could worsen cities’ already dicey predicament. As the chasm between the two most senior levels of government—provincial and federal—grows, the tensions between Alberta’s largest cities and the province could deteriorate even further. “Municipalities are being put into a position where their own status isn’t entirely clear,” Williams says about Premier Smith’s Sovereignty Act and the lack of consultation with municipalities during its creation. “Their relationship with the provincial government could be soured by accepting funds or programs that are being directed by the federal government.”

The hostility between the federal and provincial governments has already taken a toll in Alberta’s cities. Provincial budget cuts in 2022, for example, caused Calgary to miss out on federal funding to cover Calgary Transit’s operational costs.

But Gondek’s primary concern with Smith’s Sovereignty Act is that it could jeopardize what autonomy cities still have. “What worries me is the availability of that option to tell us what to do,” she says. “This puts us in a position of conflict, because if we’re required [by the Sovereignty Act] not to follow federal law, or legislation, or practices, and we’re required to do something different, then we’re stuck in the middle, and nothing good comes out of that situation.”

In March the UCP government announced that its “Alberta is Calling” campaign would expand, from Toronto and Vancouver subway stations to billboards in smaller cities, including Hamilton, Windsor and Sudbury in Ontario and Moncton and Halifax in the Maritimes. But if our government is serious about attracting people to move to this province and then stick around, empowering Alberta’s cities is essential. “We are the level of government that is closest to the people, we’re on the ground, in the community, and often the most accessible,” Salvador says. “When people see those challenges on their doorstep, local government is the go-to… [even as] oftentimes the jurisdiction and responsibility lies with the province.”

Williams says, “At all levels of government, representatives need to remember they’ve been elected by voters [who] want them to work together to find solutions to the problems
we face.”

After this spring’s election our biggest cities must receive a greater level of provincial support. There is, after all, only one taxpayer. “The powers of municipalities to manage matters of great concern to their constituents have been significantly undermined both by Jason Kenney and now by Danielle Smith,” Williams says. “If that continues, it’s going to become more challenging for civic officials to effectively represent their constituents.”

Ximena González is a writer and editor in Calgary. Her work also appears in The Globe and Mail, The Tyee and The Sprawl.

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I had the same expectation about Abbot Pass Hut, a solid stone building on the pass summit constructed by the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Swiss mountain guides in 1922 for the use of their mountaineering clients. 

Abbot Pass Hut, 1924. The hut’s footing of compacted scree and rock was made stable by permafrost. Photo: Whyte Museum.

At an elevation of 2,925 metres, it was for many years the highest habitable structure in Canada, since edged out by Neil Colgan Hut on the Fay Glacier, at 2,957 metres. Abbot Pass Hut was officially acquired by the Dominion Parks Branch in 1968, then assigned to the control of the Alpine Club of Canada in 1985. In 1992 Parks Canada designated the so-called Abbot Pass Refuge Cabin and its surroundings as a national historic site. But this year, Parks Canada did not announce a centennial celebration for the beloved refuge. Instead, the hut will be removed this summer. Like the Lower Victoria Glacier that it overlooks, the hut is yet another casualty of climate change and glacier recession.

According to an old colleague of mine, Robert Sanford, who is a Global Water Futures fellow at the Institute for Water, Environment and Health, some 300 glaciers disappeared from the Rocky Mountain national parks between 1920 and 2005. Things are getting worse. In the extreme summer heat of 2021, the toe of the Peyto Glacier retreated some 200 metres. This is “10 times faster than the last half century of retreat,” according to hydrologist John Pomeroy of Global Water Futures.

The Abbot Pass Hut’s foundations are sitting on the headwall of the Lower Victoria Glacier. The lip of the ice at one time nearly reached the hut’s east wall. Now the glacier’s edge lies 50 metres downslope. The builders and stonemasons in 1922 may not have realized that the col of compacted scree and fallen rock had been stabilized over time by snow, ice and permafrost. This matrix is melting and eroding. According to Parks Canada, in 2021, “approximately 114 cubic metres of material fell from the slopes under the hut.”

This undermining of the hut foundations threatens to topple the building. Since 2017 Parks Canada has spent some $600,000 on geotechnical studies and the installation of rock anchors to try and save the hut. The anchors have been to no avail. The work was also interrupted by bad weather, lifting limitations of supply helicopters and pandemic health mandates; the hut is now too dangerous to use. 

Zac Robinson, vice-president for mountain culture with the Alpine Club, describes the news as “devastating for our members and for the history of mountaineering in the Rockies.”

A toll booth between heaven and earth, risen from the rocky saddle…

The men who built the hut—without the backing of their employer Canadian Pacific Railway—were two Swiss guides named Edward Feuz Jr. and Rudolf Aemmer, who, as Robinson says, “were homesick for their Swiss mountain culture.” The duo hired local outfitters to haul building materials up the glacier with horses and mules as far as they could go. When the ice got too steep for the equines, the men used sleds and winches to move the material up to the summit. 

Although it looked more Swiss Alps than Rocky Mountains, the little cabin, made of limestone quarried on site, had the organic presence of a temple, or a toll booth between heaven and earth that had risen magically out of the rocky saddle of the Great Divide. “Where else can you climb two 11,000-foot glaciated peaks in one short trip and have such a wonderful place to stay between climbs?” asks Robinson. 

“It was such a special place. There was always a group of people staying there, often a lot of strangers. So after the climbing was over for the day, the cozy little hut made for such warm camaraderie and good cheer. The place was just made for storytelling.” 

I have traversed the Abbot Pass from Lake O’Hara in Yoho National Park and Lake Louise in Banff National Park many times, starting in 1962 when I took a summer job at Lake O’Hara Lodge and began climbing. Patrolling the pass was part of my duties in 1966 as an assistant park warden at Lake O’Hara.

As a warden, I often overnighted at the hut, sometimes accompanied by my supervisor, Bernie Schiesser. The hut will sleep about 20 people, and the attic contained dozens of red Hudson’s Bay point blankets that had been packed up from Lake Louise by the CPR’s Swiss mountain guides back in the 1920s. These made for cozy, if not dusty bedrolls on stormy nights. We kept them draped over a wire clothesline out of reach of the pack rats that sometimes haunted the joint. 

We were responsible for maintaining the hut in those days, and every week found one of us (usually yours truly) backpacking supplies of firewood, kerosene, shingles and hardware from Lake O’Hara at 2,020 metres up to the 2,925-metre pass. The trek involved a gruelling slog up 457 metres of loose scree to reach the hut.

In those days the heavy snowfalls of winter refreshed the world-famous view of the Lefroy and Victoria glaciers, that much diminished selfie-scape that is jpeg-ed a thousand times a day every summer from Chateau Lake Louise. Snow often packed the crevasses of the Lower Victoria Glacier in Abbot Pass with solid bridges that lasted into late summer. It took from two to three hours to reach the hut if conditions were favourable. 

It is an easy hike of less than six kilometres from Lake Louise to the Plain of Six Glaciers Tea House. But from there the trail ends and the route up to the hut threads through the notorious “Death Trap” canyon of the lower glacier. 

This spot is particularly prone to avalanches and ice falls from the upper glacier on Mount Victoria. It was always an eerie place for mountaineers to transit; nowadays the Death Trap is impassable. The worst climbing accident in the history of the pass occurred in 1954, when four climbers fell near the summit ridge of Victoria and rolled in a snarl of ropes and crampons down the ice, then plummeted over a glaciated cliff to smash into this forbidding redoubt.

Even back then, the Abbot Pass route should never have been attempted by people who lacked crevasse rescue training and equipment. But as a 17-year-old ingénu at Lake O’Hara Lodge, I thought nothing of trotting solo over the pass and beetling down the other side among the crevasses on a day off to buy pipe tobacco at the Chateau Lake Louise, then catching the late bus back to O’Hara. I tremble at such blissful ignorance now, even as I long for the speed and stamina that made it possible. 

I once encountered a pilgrim of sorts who had made the journey from Moraine Lake to Lake O’Hara via the Opabin Glacier clad in a saffron-coloured robe and straw hat. His feet looked battered and slightly frostbitten. He did point out to me that his sandals had rubber soles made from old car tires which gripped well on ice. When he left me, he was headed for Abbot Pass, and to this day I don’t know if he made it back. 

In 1999 I was planning a nostalgic trip through the pass and a sentimental climb of Mount Victoria with two old ropemates. I had not climbed in the area for 20-some years. I checked on the route with Fuhrmann and with a former colleague, Tim Auger, who was then in charge of the public safety team for Banff National Park. The pass, I learned, had been trashed by climate change. “Nobody uses the old route anymore,” Auger warned me. “It’s nothing but holes and seracs.” 

“It’s been a no-go zone for at least five years,” Fuhrmann explained at the time. He told me that instead of one bergschrund—the name for mega crevasses that typically form near the top of a glacier—there were now about 20. Fuhrmann has instead revived the old Swiss Guide’s route that follows a yellow rock
band up along the west side of Mount Lefroy to reach the pass. 

Describing the hut in my book Switchbacks, I wrote “the first time I saw it was the first time I really understood the love affair between men and mountains. Abbot’s Hut—a place made to be haunted by their shades. At night, the beacon of a candle flame in its window was like a lighthouse in the clouds.” 

I am one of those who have seen nearly every home they ever lived in fall to the wrecker’s ball, so memory is constantly challenged by a reality that has erased the objective touchstones of my past. I am not alone in this modern form of spatial amnesia. Still, losing a place like Abbot Pass Hut, which was a focal point for so many lovers of mountain wilderness, is somehow worse. 

However this issue is decided, one thing remains clear to me. When the sanctuaries and temples of a culture are gone, the spirits of the past have no place to gather and speak across the ages to the transient souls of today. And we are all lessened, as humans, by that kind of loss.

Sid Marty has published five books of non-fiction and five books of poetry. This article was originally published in The Tyee, Mar 28, 2022. Abbot Pass Hut was dismantled over the last two weeks of June 2022.

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