USA Now SURROUNDED By Countries Led By Radical Climate Science Knowers
Be afraid! Be very afraid!
The big news from Monday’s Canadian election is that Canadians overwhelmingly said Fuck You to Donald Trump’s weird fantasy of absorbing Canada into the US, giving Liberal Party leader Mark Carney a not-quite majority of the seats in Parliament. He’ll need to build a coalition by getting three members from other parties, which should be easy enough. Canadians also said Fuck You to the Conservative candidate, Trumpish wingnut Pierre Poilievre, who not only lost the national election but was also voted out of his own seat in Parliament. Neener to you, sir, and I say again, neener.
But what with this being an election that was primarily about the existential threat posed by Canada’s southern neighbor (I had a neighbor like that once but I could just move), and the economic threat posed by Trump’s tariffs, climate change wasn’t a major issue for most Canadian voters. In one poll shortly before the election, climate didn’t even make voters’ top 10 issues. (It made 12th place.)
Americans are pretty accustomed to climate being treated as a minor issue, but just six years ago, climate was among the top issues in Canada’s 2019 national elections, and again in 2021, the year of the heat dome and the devastating wildfires in British Columbia. (Yes, the record-setting 2023 wildfires in Canada were even more catastrophic, but there were no national elections that year.) As for 2025, well, having a fascist at your door can be distracting, so climate was less of a thing.
Here’s the good news, though. Even though Carney didn’t make climate a major part of his campaign, he knows his climate stuff inside and out, and climate activist Bill McKibben yesterday celebrated Carney as “the world leader who knows more than any of his peers about climate change. And who knows roughly twenty times as much about climate and energy economics as anyone else in power.” McKibben says Carney may well “turn out to be a truly crucial figure in the fight to turn the climate tide,” and with a raving enemy of clean energy doing all he can to break climate science in the US, we desperately need a world leader to push the rest of the world to keep moving in the right direction.
But wait, there’s more! The good climate leadership isn’t just to the north of us, it’s also to the south: As we noted when she was elected last June, Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, isn’t just that country’s first woman (and Jewish) president, but she’s also the first genuine climate scientist to be elected a world leader anywhere. She served on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which in 2017 won the Nobel Peace Prize, and as mayor of Mexico City increased rooftop solar, bicycle infrastructure, and electric-powered public transportation.
And for another hooray, Sheinbaum has begun pursuing energy policies that will move in a far more climate-friendly direction than those of her predecessor (and political mentor) Andrés Manuel López Obrador. When she took office last fall, Sheinbaum announced that she would aggressively pursue the transition to renewable energy, a huge departure from the fossil-fuel expansion pursued by López Obrador, who had largely shut down the transition.
Prior to pursuing politics, Carney was governor of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crash, and after that, he was hired to head the Bank of England just in time to deal with the mess of Brexit, so he knows his way around a crisis (hello, Trump tariffs, we didn’t forget you).
And for a finance guy, or maybe as a finance guy, he’s also very attuned to the havoc that global warming will bring. In 2014, well ahead of other world financial types, Carney said at a World Bank panel that to hold planetary warming below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F) above the preindustrial average. He also explained in a 2015 speech to Lloyds of London that economic calculations of risk needed to account for the impacts of climate change long before they actually became widespread, noting that “once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.”
Like Sheinbaum in Mexico, Carney brings a wealth of knowledge on climate into a job governing a country that has relied for far too long on fossil fuels. In Canada, the dilemma may be even tougher since the majority of oil production is centered in Alberta, with its nasty tar sands, one of the biggest masses of carbon on the planet. Albertan officials and businesses aren’t all that hot on keeping the stuff in the ground.
Carney disappointed some Canadian climate activists with one of his first acts after taking over from Trudeau, ending the unpopular consumer portion of Canada’s carbon tax. It was a key part of Trudeau’s climate policy, for which Poilievre and the Conservatives hammered him, painting it as a cost-of-living issue. (Then again, if Carney had kept it in place, there’s no telling whether he would have won the election even with Trump barking at Canada.)
Carney campaigned on making Canada an “energy superpower,” a phrase previously used by Conservative Stephen Harper. The difference is that Harper was talking almost exclusively oil and gas, while Carney promises to greatly expand renewable energy. It’s good old “all of the above” energy strategy, building up renewable capacity and pairing it with all that oil from Alberta and Saskatchewan. He also wants to build up new energy infrastructure — possibly pipelines to get oil east, so it won’t need to be imported by tanker, but also greatly expanding electric transmission to bring more renewables online. Yes too to regulations aimed at driving widespread adoption of electric vehicles, coupled with expansion of the public fast-charging network.
This should be interesting!
Meanwhile, in Mexico, President Sheinbaum is also pushing for greater adoption of renewables, especially as the country keeps getting hit by hurricanes that are more intense and grow more quickly due to climate change. She’s set a goal of getting 45 percent of Mexico’s electricity from renewables by 2030, a huge increase over the 24 percent share that renewables made up last year. She’s also set the country’s first ever cap on oil production of 1.8 million barrels per day. Sheinbaum will also reverse López Obrador’s stupid Trumpy ban on auctions for new solar and wind development, allowing more private-sector investments in those resources.
And yeah, just as Carney can’t afford to piss off Alberta too much, Sheinbaum has been careful to push for more clean energy without criticizing some decisions by López Obrador, such as the construction of a new $20 billion refinery that in another decade may have far less Mexican crude to refine. Politics is politics.
Previous presidents had sought much higher production targets; López Obrador called at the start of his presidency for as much as 2.6 million barrels per day. Forget it, says Sheinbaum, calling such targets “environmentally impossible” and saying, “It is better to promote efficiency and renewable sources.” Just as well, since experts estimate that the amount of oil still available by conventional drilling — without fracking or new offshore drilling — is only good for another 10 years, so all the more reason to boost renewables.
Much of Mexico’s oil production infrastructure is aging and dirty, so it’s ripe for replacement by cleaner alternatives — if the revenue can be raised, always the challenge. Sheinbaum set out an ambitious new energy policy in January, focused on modernizing the power grid and bringing more renewables online, with an emphasis on attracting international investment, which might become a lot more available now that the US has decided it isn’t doing “international” anymore.
Hmmm. Some of this is sounding a little familiar, actually. Maybe the next big rightwing freakout will be an updated version of the paranoia around the “NAFTA Superhighway” that the conspiracy kooks insisted would run straight from Mexico to Canada, destroying American sovereignty and forcing the three countries into a new common market with the Amero as the currency.
Time for a conspiracy theory about a new hydro, solar and wind-powered CANAMEX power grid that will start charging reliable, affordable Chinese EVs that will zip all over the continent, while Mounties and Federales come confiscate all our giant pickups? Damn. I’m scaring myself here. Get me Glenn Beck’s phone number!
[The Crucial Years / The Narwhal / AP / Corporate Knights / Mexico Business News
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Alberta: Me tar sands, you Jane.
"Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, isn’t just that country’s first woman (and Jewish) president"
Whenever I'm reminded that she's Jewish, I think about the time when someone tried to claim she wasn't really Jewish because in her victory speech she thanked Jesus. She was referring to her husband.