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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
I’m Kate, the agriculture and food policy reporter. Sierra is lost in the woods somewhere. On purpose, I believe. I’ll be filling in this week until she makes her prodigal return. I’ve got some good news about kelp forests and humanity’s search for life (and hope) wherever it can be found. We’ve also got some stuff about investing in pipelines, and how to understand Canadian identity through literature.
Without further ado...
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Resource Riches: Alberta records unexpected $8.3-billion surplus off higher resource royalties
- B.C. Supreme Court: Prince Rupert Gas Transmission project’s regulatory approval faces challenge in B.C. Supreme Court
- Architourism: A look at the $30-billion eco-friendly neighbourhood being built in Toronto over three decades
- Beach Cleaner: Is that a Zamboni? On a beach? No, it’s BeBot, Canada’s first beach-cleaning robot
- Photo essay: Brazil’s depleted jungle rivers make midwives even more essential when the water breaks
- Photo essay: In Ireland’s peat bogs, rural traditions and EU climate laws are mired in conflict
- Design: When it comes to climate change, Canada needs more resilient outdoor spaces. Indigenous landscape architecture can help
- Oceans: How have Canada and the U.S. tried to save North Atlantic right whales? A timeline of policies and politics
A deeper dive
From loss to life: How a Canadian ocean scientist keeps her hope alive
For this week’s deeper dive, an excerpt from a story about hope in the face of heartbreak, from our happiness reporter by Erin Anderssen.
Canadian marine ecologist Karen Filbee-Dexter has grieved for a celebrated kelp forest scorched into extinction by a summer heat wave in St. Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia.
She’s also discovered five-meter-tall sugar kelp flourishing under the ice in Canada‘s Arctic where such a forest was not expected to exist.
The cost of climate change has broken her heart. And the remarkable resilience of nature has patched it up again.
This is how it goes when you study the vulnerable life under an ocean we still barely understand. The damaged-yet-resilient sea makes you weep then laugh, fear then hope. Tossed in the waves, Dr. Filbee-Dexter says, you keep researching and publishing and hoping for stronger action.
Being part of the solution, even in a small way, “is an easier way to get up in the morning.”
Last November, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, Dr. Filbee-Dexter sat in a session, cuddling her five-month old daughter. A researcher was explaining a chart projecting the life-altering rise of global temperatures to 2100. Looking down at Ida, she realized her daughter would turn 75 that year. In that moment, her calling become personal, forever shaped by a mother’s responsibility.
“You want the world to be a good place for her, and you’re going to do everything in your power to make that happen.” Read more here.
What else you missed
- Climate advocates say oil and gas representation on pension fund boards could be problematic
- Fossil fuel subsidies review stalls as Argentina ceased communication with Canada
- Israel-Iran war highlights Asia’s reliance on Middle East oil
- Alberta surpasses natural gas flaring ceiling for second year in a row as province eliminates limit
- Two First Nations setting up encampment near proposed bridge to Ring of Fire
- Toronto to review gaps in city’s heat strategy at Mayor Olivia Chow’s request
Opinion and analysis
Marsha Lederman: We need to cool it: In our warming world, we deserve temperature safety
Roseann Runte: As we ponder the Canadian identity, literature can be our road map
Carole Saab and Rick Smith: Climate disaster preparation is central to Canada’s economic security
Green Investing
Enbridge says a new Alberta-B.C. pipeline would require specific conditions, including legislative change
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is confident that at least one private-sector pipeline operators would come forward with plans to transport oilsands crude to the Port of Prince Rupert, B.C., thereby testing the federal government’s new regime to speed along projects deemed in Canada’s national interest.
But pipeline companies are not so bullish.
Enbridge - Canada’s biggest shipper of crude oil - would explore market-diversifying projects, provided the demand is there from customers, it said in a statement Wednesday. The company also wants to see “real provincial and federal legislative change” around climate policy, regulatory timeliness and Indigenous participation.
“We will be there to build what is needed for our shippers, for Alberta and for Canada – that’s our job, our mission as a company – but only when the conditions make sense and the right framework is in place,” Enbridge said.
The Climate Exchange
We’ve launched the next chapter of The Climate Exchange, an interactive, digital hub where The Globe answers your most pressing questions about climate change. More than 300 questions were submitted as of September. The first batch of answers tackles 30 of them. They can be found with the help of a search tool developed by The Globe that makes use of artificial intelligence to match readers’ questions with the closest answer drafted. We plan to answer a total of 75 questions.
Photo of the week
A life-size animal puppet, part of 'The Herds', is seen against Tower Bridge, during their journey from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle, in London on June 27, representing the effects of climate disaster.BENJAMIN CREMEL/AFP/Getty Images
Guides and Explainers
- Want to learn to invest sustainably? We have a class for that: Green Investing 101 newsletter course for the climate-conscious investor. Not sure you need help? Take our quiz to challenge your knowledge.
- We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn about what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP29 and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
- We have ways to make your travelling more sustainable and if you like to read, here are books to help the environmentalist in you grow, as well as a downloadable e-book of Micro Skills - Little Steps to Big Change.
Catch up on Globe Climate
- Shifts in habitat
- Keeping G7 leaders safe from grizzlies
- B.C. cedes provincial park to Nuchatlaht First Nation
- How to fix instead of waste
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