We can't keep dodging the iceberg: getting moving on Net Zero - By Michael Powell Vice President, Government Relations, Canadian Electricity Association
I
f it wasn’t for COVID-19, the big news story of 2020 would have been the global natural disasters that climate change is causing.
The year began with a continent literally on fire. The recordbreaking Australian bushfire season razed more than 18 million hectares— an area about 50% larger than Southern Ontario. As the year wore on, the Atlantic hurricane season matched the record with a number of storms so high, they were running out of names. The world tied for the warmest year on record. In late 2020, Iceberg A-68a, a chunk of ice that had broken away from an Antarctic iceshelf three years earlier, twice the size of Luxembourg, seemed like it was going to run around in the shallow waters around South Georgia Island.
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canadian electricity association - THE GRID 2021 | Renewal
Sitting there, the iceberg risked blocking access to food for the hundreds of thousands of penguins, seals and sea birds that reside there. This blockade would have crushed the microscopic sea life that is foundational to other parts of the ecosystem, creating irreversible damage to our planet. Not to worry though – in the end, it broke up and moved elsewhere... this time, at least. Collectively, we are those penguins, living our lives while a colossal frozen metaphor for anthropogenic climate change lurks just out of sight, ready to threaten us with an existential and catastrophic change. Fortunately, we have some agency and are able to act on it. It seems that we are finally willing to do so.
