Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 3, 2024, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A9 SATURDAY AUGUST 3, 2024 Ideas, Issues, Insights The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer W ELCOME to another beautiful August long weekend in Manitoba. If you are reading this online, outside of Manitoba and perhaps outside of Canada, I want you to know that stories you hear about the horrible weather endured here in my adopted hometown are half-truths. If you’re interested in the whole truth and noth- ing but the truth, you need to know that here in the capital of Manitoba, Winnipeg, daytime highs in the last week of July were approaching 30 degrees Celsius every single day. That trend will continue for this entire long weekend and beyond. Many people reading this are in lake country which, in some cases, is less than an hour away. They are picnicking, boating and having laughs with longtime friends and neighbours. They are not suffering the wrath of nature. The truth is nature is blessing them with all her charms. Canada is a free country. Nobody outside of those who are incarcerated are forced to live in any part of this beautiful land. That includes those living in Manitoba. I could be convicted in the court of public opin- ion if I didn’t tell you that you’ve made the right choice if you live here, even if it hasn’t always felt that way during some days that can indeed test our spirits during the season that I won’t be discussing today. But even that season which will remain name- less in this column has not been nearly as rugged in recent years. Hello, climate change. On Thursday night of this week, tens of thou- sands of football fans were in Winnipeg, watch- ing their Blue Bombers devour the visiting B.C. Lions. The Vancouver-based team is truly a beast on offence. They have a quarterback, Vernon Adams Jr., who routinely passes for more than 300 yards. But on Thursday he barely got a quarter of the way there. Winnipeg shut down and shut out the ferocious Lions 25-0. Our brilliant quarterback Zach Collaros threw for nearly 300 yards. Our amazing place kicker, Sergio Castillo, registered six field goals, one of them for 60 yards. He had one earlier in the season that also sailed for more than 60. How many kickers in CFL history had two field goals that long in the same season? Nobody. Repeat, nobody. The 31,589 fans at Princess Auto Stadium were watching history being made. They were delighted and delirious. And they drove home, happy to be living in Manitoba. The largest and longest running multicultural festival in the world kicks off tomorrow in Winni- peg. It’s called Folklorama. You can travel the world without a passport or long check-in lines. The only baggage issue you’ll experience is a full stomach after enjoying the de- licious cuisine from countries on every continent of this planet, with the exception of Antarctica. Folklorama’s tremendous food and world-class entertainment are available for the next two weeks. And the many thousands who go will also feel happy to be alive in a part of the world that almost never gets the benefit of an accurate review. And by the way, if you’re worried about being chewed up by mosquitoes at Folklorama or anywhere else in Winnipeg for the next couple of weeks, forget about it. It’s not happening. The people in charge of dealing with mosquitoes in Winnipeg have it figured out. I can tell you that I haven’t received a single bite this summer and I can say the same about last summer. Whatever you may have read or heard about our mosquito nuisance, is like all other urban legends, exaggerated. I was turning 29 when I first arrived for work in Winnipeg, 41 summers ago — hired to read the morning news. That turned into a job as news director for 58 CKY, a radio station at Polo Park, owned by one of the world’s most generous philanthropists, Winnipeg’s own Randy Moffatt. I was expecting to be here for two years. But I stayed for seven. My career then took me to several destinations in both Western and Central Canada and the United States. Then in the fall of 1998, 26 years ago, I felt like I had won the lottery, landing for a second time in Winnipeg to host the much coveted 9 a.m to noon show on the most listened to radio station in Manitoba — CJOB. I can never thank you enough for welcoming me, again and again — giving me the chance to live my best life in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com Transportation, the north and the future TRANSPORTATION in northern Manitoba received scant attention under the Brian Pallister and Heather Stefanson regimes. Based on terrain, the North is hard to plow. Based on votes, it was unimportant to them. Current politicians, and the bureaucrats that advise them, must be looking for better ideas. The Churchill trade corridor is the shortest route to international markets for the products of Western Canada. Its seasonal operations limited its use to grain exports. Scientists project that Hudson Bay will be ice-free by the end of the century. It is gaining an extra day of navigation each year, and with ice breaking, could be year- round now. Commercial interest is growing in the trade corridor for shipping a wide range of commodi- ties and intermodal containers. Western Canada has a diversified trade of energy products (e.g., liquified natural gas, hydrogen, ammonia), potash and minerals, agricultural and forestry products that would be more economical to ship through Hudson Bay to European, African and South American markets. This is good news for the Hudson Bay Railway (HBR) that has only moved about 500,000 tons on a good year. They need approximately two million tons of freight traffic per year to be self- sufficient. Canada currently exports 21 million tons of potash. Even a small share of this traffic could be enough to support the HBR. The HBR has a section of track over permafrost (Gillam to Churchill) that is threatened by climate change. Whether efforts to sustain the vulnerable track are successful, or it needs to be relocated, this strategic route will not be abandoned. Build- ing 250 kilometres of new track would cost only a fraction of the investment required to build the Trans Mountain pipeline. Specialized port terminals are needed to trans- load commodities and to tranship containers to ocean carriers. The costs of port terminals and securing the track require substantial financing, but these are nation-building investments that will outlive all of us and be borne largely by the users. Manitoba has an abundance of critical minerals that could be shipped through Hudson Bay. The problem is the cost of the feeder service from the mines to the HBR. At $5 million per kilome- tre, mines cannot afford to build more than very short roads to the rail line. The opportunity lies in using modern cargo airships to provide the feeder service. The revival of airship technology is well un- derway. Modern airships are immune to climate change because they have minimal infrastructure requirements. Economic analysis indicates that a 30-ton lift airship can compete directly with trac- tor-trailers over winter roads in Canada. Rigid airships that were built over 90 years ago could carry 100 tons today, and 200-ton airships are on the drawing boards. Cargo airships also provide a solution to the melting ice roads. Climate change is shortening the usable season and increasing the risks for drivers. First Nations want permanent roads, and some larger centres should be connected, but converting all 2,400 kilometres of winter roads to gravel would exceed $10 billion. This is 20 times the amount that the Province of Manitoba spends annually ($500 million) to maintain the existing road system. Not only does the provincial government lack the financial capacity to convert winter roads to gravel, the residents in southern Manitoba and Winnipeg are unhappy with their streets and roads. Premier Wab Kinew is hearing complaints about road infrastructure everywhere he goes in the province. The Hudson Bay trade corridor can increase the productivity of all three Prairie provinc- es. Saving commodity shippers $10/ton on the transportation of hundreds of millions of tons adds up quickly. Similarly, the savings of shipping containers through Hudson Bay, rather than via the St. Lawrence, must be $500 per container or more. Airships can provide an economically feasible alternative to building gravel roads. The impact of cargo airships on northern development are both economic and social. Lower-cost, year-round transport would relieve the overcrowding of houses in the remote communities and end food insecurity. They would also unlock the treasure chest of minerals in the North that lies beyond economic reach. Global warming is driving changes every- where, but the impacts are happening faster in the northern latitudes. Change creates winners and losers. On balance, Manitoba can be a winner. The local people in the North want to be winners, too. They welcome the opportunities for better incomes but want not to be ignored in how change comes about. Hopefully, we have learned from history how to proceed correctly. As it is almost one year since the NDP came to power in Manitoba and about a year from the next federal election, the time has come to have our political leaders seriously consider the future of northern transportation. Barry E. Prentice is a professor and the director of the University of Manitoba Transport Institute, Asper School of Business. The August deadline WHEN you spend four years writing a book on climate change, you get to know most of the leading players. I have never seen them so dismayed. “By August, if we’re still looking at re- cord-breaking temperatures, then we really have moved into uncharted territory,” said climate scientist Gavin Schmidt in April. Well, July 22 was the hottest average global tem- perature ever recorded — and July 23 prompt- ly broke that brand-new record. Here we are in August, and it is not looking promising. Gavin Schmidt is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He was choosing his words very carefully when he used the phrase “uncharted territory,” be- cause that is a frightening place to be. Now, in one sense, we have been in un- charted territory for several decades: our greenhouse gas emissions are driving global temperatures higher than anything we have experienced in the past. But at least we thought we had a map of our probable future. It was the climate scientists who drew that map, starting in the 1980s. Their knowl- edge of the various processes that drive the atmosphere and the oceans has expanded enormously, and the computer models they have learned to build let us predict what will happen with fairly high confidence. We know how much stuff we are dumping into the atmosphere, we more or less know where the winds and the clouds will be, we have a real-time readout of the ocean’s sur- face temperature (the biggest single factor), solar radiation is almost entirely predictable — and so the climate scientists can draw us a map of the future. That’s the chart that tells us how fast the warming will be (0.18 degrees Celsius per decade, or a full degree about every 50 years), and more or less what the effects will be in terms of forest fires, mega-storms, landslides and floods, or hunger, thirst and refugee numbers. This chart of the climate future can now also give us some notion of where we will hit various feedbacks in the climate system on the way up: events like the loss of the Antarc- tic ice sheet or the Amazon and Congo rain- forests that are second-order consequences of the heating our emissions have caused. It’s a pretty daunting picture, but at least we know more or less where we are and what thresholds we absolutely must not cross if we want to preserve a habitable environment for eight billion people (or at least most of them). This map of our climate future is funda- mental to the choices we make and the deci- sions we take — but suddenly it has become unreliable. What the climate has been doing over the past year is not at all what the map predicted. The scientists call it “the anomaly,” and it puts us in uncharted territory. Suddenly, in July of last year, the average global temperature jumped by around 0.2 C. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s the amount of warming the climate models were predicting for an entire decade. It’s like it was suddenly 2034. “What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” said Carlo Buontempo, the director of the European Union’s Copernicus Cli- mate Change Service. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken.” There was an understandable desire among climate scientists to believe that this was just a fluke event, and that the predictions of the climate models are still fundamentally cor- rect. Many tried to pin the blame on El Niño, a cyclical ocean event that causes higher tem- peratures in the eastern Pacific every three to seven years. It was never very convincing, because El Niño only got underway months after the “anomaly” appeared. It wasn’t particularly strong, as these things go, and it was over by this April. But Schmidt suggested waiting another three months, until August, before we collectively admit that this is something different. The three months are up, and it is. This is almost certainly connected with the far-too-early category 5 hurricane that trailed devastation across the Caribbean in June, the wildfires that are eating up whole towns in the Canadian and U.S. west, and all the other signs and portents of a climate warming much faster than we expected. So the scientists have to work out what is causing it, and the rest of us have to figure out what, if anything, we can do about it apart from brace ourselves. That’s what “uncharted territory” looks like. Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. GWYNNE DYER BARRY E. PRENTICE CHARLES ADLER MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS A classic Manitoba summer scene at Gimli Beach in June. ;