The following is a re-print of the December 2024 edition of Shift Storm, the CCPA’s monthly newsletter which focuses on the intersection of work and climate change. Click here to subscribe to Shift Storm and get the latest updates straight to your inbox as soon as they come out.


It may have been the hottest year in recorded history, but you wouldn’t know it from the pace of climate action in 2024.

More than two billion people went to the polls in national elections this year, and climate was not a winning issue. In some places, as in the U.S. and European Parliament elections, voters embraced outright hostility to the environment.

But even where voters rejected climate backsliding, as in France and the UK, the alternative was only tepid support for a somewhat cleaner economy—one where private markets are entrusted to lead with voluntary decarbonization efforts.

Those efforts include liquified natural gas, fossil hydrogen, carbon capture and other false solutions that appear to reduce emissions in the short term but ultimately make it harder for the world to achieve net-zero emissions in the long term. It was a banner year for many of these industries, which are siphoning up a growing share of private capital investment and crowding out truly sustainable alternatives.

In Canada, the federal government focused on delivering outstanding promises, including the Sustainable Jobs Act and a cap on oil and gas sector emissions, but offered little in the way of new climate ambitions. A new national climate target falls well short of Canada’s fair share of emissions reductions. And yesterday’s fall economic statement had no new climate spending of note.

Meanwhile, opposition leaders and recalcitrant provincial governments continued to make federal climate policies into outsized political targets—brace yourselves for the “carbon tax election”—while offering no alternatives of their own.

To cap it off, we lost a giant of Canadian activism this month with the sad passing of Tony Clarke. As his long-time friend Bruce Campbell writes over on the CCPA blog, Tony was “a formidable activist for social, economic, and environmental justice for people in Canada and around the world” who made an immense impact on the country.

I got to know Tony through the Green Economy Network, which he founded in 2009 and I joined several years later. To the end, Tony was as good-humoured as he was committed to winning a better world. His final book, Getting to Zero, remains a touchstone for environmental activism.

This month’s newsletter is dedicated to Tony, who I’m sure would want us to keep our chins up through these difficult times.

Storm surge: this month’s key reads

New book offers definitive overview of a people-centred just transition

J. Mijin Cha is, in my opinion, one of the most important academics working on the issue of a just transition. Her extensive on-the-ground interviews with affected workers and communities inform her clear-eyed understanding of the challenges facing climate action and environmental justice with lessons that go far beyond the American communities she focuses on.

Her new book, A Just Transition for All, summarizes and builds on a decade of work in this area. It tackles just transition from all angles, including its history and theory, before focusing on practical approaches for advancing climate justice.

To Cha, just transition cannot be reduced to a simple policy problem, as technocratic policy wonks are wont to do—and something I’m certainly guilty of from time to time. Policy still matters, but winning a just transition is inherently a political problem that can only be achieved by building worker and community power and levying it against vested fossil fuel interests.

One of the book’s novel contributions is its emphasis on “non-reformist reforms,” which are focused on transforming power relations for the better instead of simply addressing their symptoms. It’s an important acknowledgement that even where governments and the private sector seem to be pulling in the right direction on climate, their version of green capitalism is not the same thing as a comprehensive transition to a just world. Examples of non-reformist reforms include public ownership of energy infrastructure and labour conditions that shift income from owners to workers—measures that not only reduce emissions, but also produce a more human-centred society.

A Just Transition for All is part textbook, part policy handbook and part manifesto. I hope and suspect that it will become a go-to resource for organizers and researchers alike in the important years to come.

Shout-out to MIT Press for offering a completely free open access version of the book as well.

Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate

McKenna’s mea culpa a wake-up call for governments fooled by oil industry greenwashing. In an op-ed for the Toronto Star, former federal environment minister Catherine McKenna admits that the oil industry was never serious about reducing emissions, even as her government made compromises to appease it. This isn’t exactly news, but McKenna’s crystal clear conclusion that the “oil sands sector has been lying to us for years… they are not part of the solution” is vital for current governments to understand. We are compromising our way to oblivion with a partner that has never acted in good faith.

Clean economy on track to create two green jobs for every green worker. LinkedIn’s latest Global Green Skills Report finds that, based on current trends, there will be a 50 per cent shortfall in the number of qualified workers available to fill new green jobs by 2050. The report offers some really useful numbers on a sector-by-sector basis, but it falls short in terms of recommendations. There is a clear need in Canada and elsewhere for major public investments in workforce development. The market alone will not fill skill gaps in this timeframe.

Scotland bets on green hydrogen to replace oil exports. In A Trading Nation, the government of Scotland outlines a plan to export 25 gigawatts of hydrogen per year by 2045. Unlike Canada, which has a hydrogen strategy bent on repurposing existing fossil fuel infrastructure, Scotland is hoping to invest solely in hydrogen produced using zero-carbon renewable energy. To help put this new plan in context, the University of Manchester has a new publication, On Hydrogen, that dives into hydrogen’s potential role in the UK’s broader clean energy transition.

Rising liquified natural gas investment threatens climate progress. This newsletter has been consistently critical of LNG as a climate solution, and a new report from the Paris-based NGO Reclaim Finance offers more reasons to be wary. Frozen Gas, Boiling Planet finds that planned LNG expansions could generate the equivalent of 10 gigatonnes of CO2 over the next five years alone—comparable to about one year of current global coal emissions. Expansions are being fueled by private banks and investors, who have ponied up US$213 billion toward LNG projects since 2021. In addition to perpetuating fossil fuel dependency, the report argues, LNG is also siphoning investment out of the renewables sector in some markets, which threatens long-term decarbonization plans.

EU and Africa poised to leapfrog U.S. on climate action. Last month I argued that Trump’s re-election could have the surprising side effect of accelerating Canada’s transition away from oil production. Another potential silver lining of U.S. backsliding on climate is resurgent leadership elsewhere in the world. The European Think Tanks Group makes precisely that argument in a recent article, which argues that the EU and Africa should deepen green industrialization partnerships in the wake of the U.S. election.

Can Morocco use renewable energy to address inequality? It may get short shrift compared to the Denmarks and Costa Ricas of the world, but Morocco has quietly emerged as a leader in renewable energy development. The country is a wind and solar hotspot, and the government has committed to decarbonizing the power sector and investing aggressively in the clean economy. A new report from the U.S.-based Middle East Institute, Renewable Energy and Morocco’s New Green Industries, argues that this new industrial boom presents an opportunity to redress lingering inequities in the labour market. Young people and women, in particular, are struggling economically, but the current training ecosystem hasn’t made it a priority to bring those groups into the clean economy fold.

Global automakers are not fully committing to electrification. Despite all the progress made in the auto sector over the past decade, the latest Automotive and Transportation Manufacturers Benchmark from the World Benchmarking Alliance finds that few automakers are making serious plans to phase out internal combustion engines. It’s a trend we see clearly in the energy sector as well—commitments to invest in renewables without divesting from fossil fuels. The research also finds that no automakers have made concrete just transition plans for their workers. It all points to an industry that won’t transition on its own without greater regulatory pressure from governments.Green jobs offer a hopeful future for young workers. Let’s end the year on a positive note with a feature article in the National Observer, “How Canada is building a workforce for the energy transition,” that includes some truly heart-warming perspectives from young people training for jobs in the green economy. At a time when many young folks are worried about the future, green jobs offer gainful employment and the reassurance that you’re helping to solve the biggest problem of our time. That offer of hope is partly what’s driving calls for a Youth Climate Corp, which I’m hoping to see come to fruition in 2025.