How a Canadian climate activist came to believe, ‘We're going to need a bigger treaty'
The US is leading the charge with President Trump's 'drill baby drill' policies that ignore the Paris Agreement's net-zero goals and embolden the fossil fuel industry's disinformation.
In this episode, we look at an international non-profit group that is working from the ground up to fight against 'drill baby drill' and put in place a treaty that will force the fossil fuel industry to stop producing oil and gas.
The leader of this movement is a Canadian woman, Tzeporah Berman, who felt compelled to act when she realized that the Paris Agreement did not even mention oil, gas and coal. The landmark agreement was signed in 2015 by nearly every country in the world with a goal of limiting global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Berman couldn't figure out why oil, gas and coal wouldn't be mentioned when they are responsible for more than 86 per cent of carbon emissions.
' And then I started realizing, 'Oh my God, we're all playing into their hands.' They want it to be about emissions and net-zero and offsets, et cetera. Like the tobacco industry before them, they just want us to not constrain their product from growing,' said Berman.
From there, she came to believe that the Paris Agreement wasn't enough to force an end to the production of oil, gas and coal — and that a whole new treaty would be needed with the explicit goal of constraining fossil fuels if the world were to actually avert the disaster the Paris Agreement is intended to address.
As a long-time environmental activist who worked as a Greenpeace campaigner against clear-cut logging in British Columbia and pipelines in the Alberta tar sands, Berman believed protesting alone would not bring change fast enough.
In this episode of The Takeover, we look at an international non-profit group that is working from the ground up to fight against 'drill baby drill' and put in place a treaty that will force the fossil fuel industry to stop producing oil and gas.
'Even today in government, there's this idea that there's nothing wrong with building more fossil fuel infrastructure as long as we have a plan to reduce our emissions,' she said.
As she analyzed treaties — the Montreal Accord that saved the ozone layer, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Ottawa Treaty which banned land mines, she decided what was needed to stop the fossil fuel industry. That's episode six, The Treaty.
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