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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
Is it that time of year already? Globe Climate will be taking a short break, but it’ll be back in your inbox on Jan. 6.
Thanks for reading and happy holidays!
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Policy: Ottawa pledges to cut emissions at least 45% by 2035
- Board games: The growing backlash to DEI and ESG in the U.S. is affecting Canadian companies as well
- Wind: B.C. to skip environmental assessments to fast track wind power projects
- Pipelines: B.C. Environment Minister to decide fate of pipeline project in spring
- Environment: Imperial Metals facing 15 charges under federal Fisheries Act stemming from 2014 tailings dam spill in B.C.
- Travel: Air Canada planes using new canola-based fuel from Parkland’s B.C. refinery
- Health: Malaria cases rose last year as conflict, climate change thwart fight against disease
- Investing: Ottawa proposed $15-billion incentive plan to get pension fund investment in AI green data centres, sources say
- On the ground with The Narwhal: Some say plastic recycling is ‘hopeless.’ Others are determined to fix it
A deeper dive
Labrador Inuit have dozens of words to describe sea ice travel
Jenn Thornhill Verma and Johnny C.Y. Lam are Pulitzer grantees. For this week’s deeper dive, they talk about Unsettled, The Globe’s series looking at how Inuit communities are adapting to climate change, which disproportionately affects coastlines in Canada’s Far North.
Labrador Inuit frequently refer to two times of the year: the time for travelling on the ice, and the time for travelling on the water. In mid-December, with the sea ice not yet catching over most of the bays, the time is now in-between.
The sikuliak, new ice that is thick enough to walk on, is still more than a month away in Nunatsiavut, the sprawling, self-governing Inuit region on the northeastern edge of Labrador. And sikutsiavak, perfect solid ice, is a few more weeks on from then.
Holding the Nain sea ice travel map booklet, Joey Angnatok points toward the direction of the Umiak I ship track where the icebreaker travels to and from the Voisey’s Bay nickel mine. Nain, Labrador.Johnny C.Y. Lam/The Globe and Mail
To check whether the sea ice is safe for travel, Inuk knowledge keeper, Joey Angnatok, will carve a manguguma or hole in it using his harpoon.
“The first time you spear the ice, you may notice it break a certain way at the end of your harpoon. If it doesn’t break by the fourth jab you know it’s safe to cross,” Angnatok says.
But with sea ice weakening at an alarming pace in Canada’s Far North because of climate change, Angnatok is part of a larger effort to combine traditional Inuit practices with modern tools and technologies, such as relying on sea ice sensors and satellite imagery.
On thin ice, the first story in our Unsettled series, describes the community-led innovations across Nunatsiavut for adapting to sea ice weakening. It also presents, in partnership with the Sikusiutet SmartICE committee in Nain, a glossary of the dozens of terms Labrador Inuit use to describe sea ice.
SmartICE Nain’s Levi Semigak (L) and Patrick Harris (R) drill a hole in the sea ice with an auger, backdropped by the SmartKAMUTIK, a sled-mounted sensor that provides real-time snow and ice thickness measurements via smartscreen mounted to the operator’s snowmobile.Johnny C.Y. Lam/The Globe and Mail
Recording this terminology is as critical to communicating safe travel as it is to preserving Inuit culture, traditions and languages.
In our second story in the series, we’ll take readers under the ice, where an earlier spring melt is speeding up the arrival of plankton, vital nourishment for the entire marine food chain, including the country foods that are important to Inuit.
That story publishes on Wednesday, so stay tuned for more.
- Jenn and Johnny
The Globe and Mail
What else you missed
- Ontario didn’t inform public about expert advice to shift away from natural gas
- U.S. study links Canadian wildfire smoke to doctor visit spike in Baltimore
- Trump transition team plans sweeping rollback of Biden’s EV and emissions policies, document says
- Climate change cases at U.S. Supreme Court should be avoided, Biden administration says
- Tiny, endangered sea turtle found on Quebec’s Magdalen Islands for the first time
- Climate change will likely push monarch butterflies on threatened species list in U.S.
Opinion and analysis
Andrew Willis: Emera finds carbon capture cash in Florida, where the Governor denies climate change
Gary Mason: UN climate conferences have become a pointless waste of time
Green Investing
Cyclic Materials reaches deal with Glencore on copper recycling
Cyclic Materials Inc., a Toronto-based metals recycling company, has struck a multiyear deal with Glencore PLC to supply the global miner with copper extracted from electronic scrap.
Under the agreement, Swiss-based Glencore will take recycled copper from Cyclic’s operations and process it into copper cathode at its Horne Smelter and Canadian Copper Refinery in Quebec, the companies said on Wednesday. The cathode will be used in new products. No dollar figure was given.
- How do we make housing more affordable and meet our climate goals?
- Acadia, companies eye $9-billion U.S. renewables rollout
- The new Dodge Charger Daytona is an EV trying to convince you it isn’t an EV
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
Want more? See a selection of winning photos in the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards
The portfolio winner in the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards is a series of photos by Flynn Thaitanunde-Lobb of a very animated squirrel taken in Southampton, England. ‘I first heard of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Award when my mum showed me last year's winner of a kangaroo playing air guitar,’ Flynn said. ‘I thought it was quite funny. I got into photography when my mum gave me her Nikon D3000 camera when I was five years old.’Flynn Thaitanunde-Lobb/Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards
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
- Armed Forces in a changing Arctic
- A site for Canada’s nuclear waste
- Science meets tradition
- Entangled in cross-border measures
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