The following is a re-print of the January 2026 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.
In 2025, global investment in data centres—the massive computing warehouses behind cloud services and the artificial intelligence (AI) boom—exceeded a quarter trillion U.S. dollars. So much money poured into data centre construction that it was single-handedly responsible for the majority of U.S. economic growth last year. In 2026, that figure may rise to half a trillion dollars. By 2030, as much as US$5.2 trillion may be invested in AI data centres around the world.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of this AI-driven investment mania. Rachel Pettigrew and I break down a bunch of those reasons in this month’s issue of the Monitor magazine. But let’s focus for a moment on energy.
Data centres already consume around two per cent of total global electricity, but the impacts are highly regional. In the U.S., data centres are on track to consume 12 per cent of the country’s electricity by 2028. In places like Georgia and Virginia, the epicentres of the data centre buildout, consumer electricity rates have already been driven up as much as 267 per cent over the past few years. And to the extent that new electricity generating capacity is being brought online to power these facilities, much of it is coming from coal and gas plants.
The net effect is a rapid expansion of infrastructure that is bad for the environment, that is bad for affordability and, incidentally, that doesn’t create many jobs. Whatever their broader benefits, data centres are clearly a lose-lose proposition for the communities that host them.
This is triggering serious, bipartisan backlash across the U.S. At least $64 billion in data centre projects have been held up by community and government activism. The Georgia legislature, for example, is now considering a moratorium on data centre construction.
It’s a fight that is primed to spill over into Canada. Attracting large-scale data centre investment is a stated goal of the federal government and of several provinces, and we may start to see more shovels in the ground this year. Data centres do have a role to play in the Canadian economy—for reasons of digital sovereignty as much as anything else—so we can’t shy away from building them. But, to date, there has been little consideration given to how those centres will be powered and how they will impact communities.
The promise and peril of data centres in Canada is a subject the CCPA will be diving into more this year, so stay tuned for that research.
Other things I’m keeping an eye on in 2026 include:
- The new or updated federal strategies for clean electricity, artificial intelligence and the auto sector.
- The first International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in Colombia in April.
- The finalization of details under the Canada-Alberta pipeline agreement (April-July).
- Several key political moments, including the federal NDP leadership convention (March), China’s new Five-Year Plan (March), the Québec election (tentatively October), the U.S. midterm elections (November) and COP 31 in Türkiye (November), all of which will have a bearing on Canadian and global climate action.
- The ever-present prospect of yet another record-breaking year for global temperatures… and all the disasters that entails.
We have a big year ahead, so thank you for joining Shift Storm for the journey. Let’s get into the research!
Storm surge: this month’s key reads
Electric vehicles are booming everywhere… except Canada
A quarter of global vehicle sales are now electric, according to a new report, The EV Leapfrog, from the think tank Ember. That’s more than five times the share from only a few years ago. While European countries continue to lead (Norway is closing in on 100 per cent EV sales), the largest growth markets are in East and Southeast Asia. Half the vehicles sold in China are now electric. Nepal, Singapore and Vietnam are in the same ballpark. Other global leaders include Ethiopia and Uruguay.
How does Canada stack up? As Barry Saxifrage illustrates for the National Observer, Canada is the only major country that has seen a significant regression in electric vehicle sales in the past year. That’s largely due to the expiry of federal and provincial purchase incentives, but recent federal regulatory changes haven’t helped. Eliminating the consumer carbon price reduced the lifetime cost-of-ownership of an international combustion engine vehicle by around $9,000. And the recent pause to the electric vehicle sales mandate has taken pressure off manufacturers and retailers to push more EVs.
Canada’s new tariff deal with China will allow 49,000 EVs per year into Canada tariff-free. That’s too few vehicles to truly transform the market, but even so it understandably angered Canadian auto workers who are already reeling from U.S. trade attacks. A better solution would be to invest in the domestic EV supply chain. At a minimum, cars sold in Canada by Chinese and other foreign manufacturers should have to be built here, as Jim Stanford argues in the Toronto Star.
It may also be time to revive the idea of an all-Canadian car company. A new report from the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing at Western University, Shifting Gears, explores that prospect in some detail. While the report is ultimately skeptical—the financial, design and commercialization barriers are enormous—there is still merit in exploring the idea, potentially in partnership with a more established European automaker.
If you’re interested in hearing more about these ideas, I’ll be speaking at the Globe and Mail’s Future of Automotive Summit on Feb. 11. You can register to attend the webcast here.
Climate policy is being smothered by climate politics
A new paper from researchers at the University of Victoria, “Affective Climate Polarization and Public Support for Just Transition Policy Bundles in Western Canada,” draws on survey data to highlight the increasingly ideological nature of climate opinion in Canada. Support for and against climate policy is as emotional as traditional political identity. And, as a consequence, the details of climate policies do little to change the degree of public support or opposition they receive.
But what if we don’t call it climate? I’m reminded of a recent article published in The Lancet Planetary Health, “Assessing public support for degrowth,” which found that the vast majority of people surveyed in the UK and U.S. support the idea of degrowth when it is described to them, but only a fifth continue to support the idea when it is labeled as “degrowth.”
A recent blog from Re.Climate also calls out the disconnect between the public’s policy preferences and the public’s perception of climate politics, pointing out that most Canadians are concerned about climate change but falsely believe that they are in the minority. As a result, people are reluctant to talk about climate or express their support for climate action.
This all feeds into something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. “Climate” has been so mainstreamed, for better or worse, that we’re not even talking about climate change anymore, let alone the actual scientific and policy nuances of this complicated crisis. “Climate” is simply something you are for or against—a checkbox rather than a conversation.
As advocates, we would do well to take a step back. We need to be willing to take the time to reiterate the science of climate change, to outline the specific risks of inaction and to explain how and why our proposed solutions will make people’s lives better. “Because climate” is not a winning argument in itself.
Research radar: the latest developments in work and climate
Diversifying export industries is an Elbows Up strategy for Canada. A new report from the Transition Accelerator, Exporting the Future Economy, argues that clean energy supply chains offer the most viable industrial path for Canada over the long term. A key insight is that our fossil fuel industry is deeply tied to the U.S., so leaning into other industries—the report focuses on minerals, chemicals and manufacturing—is a de facto trade diversification strategy. Another insight is the need to move away from neoliberal free trade agreements and toward collaborative industrial policy arrangements with like-minded countries. As the free trade consensus comes crashing down, a managed trade approach needs to fill the void.
A comprehensive vision for the future of the Alberta economy. This was just released so I’ll need to spend some more time digging through it, but Stephen Legault at Environmental Defence has pulled together a monumental new report, New Frontiers, that charts an ambitious transformation of the Alberta economy. This is exactly the kind of visionary regional planning we need more of. It’s also deeply hopeful. Alberta can both decarbonize and be as prosperous as ever, but Albertans need to make that choice.
Federal climate plan is off track, but at least we know by how much. The federal government published its obligatory 2025 progress report on the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan. On the plus side, it’s a detailed document that sets a new high bar for transparency in climate reporting. Unfortunately, it confirms that Canada is way off track to hit its 2026, 2030 or 2035 emissions targets (as well as a bunch of important secondary targets). Despite a legal requirement to do so, it’s not clear to me that the government has a plan for bridging that gap. Among other issues, there is no reckoning in this document with the government’s stated goal of expanding bitumen and liquefied natural gas production for export.
New oil pipelines mean more oil production. One of the arguments for building new oil pipelines is that they’re simply a different way of moving oil that would be extracted and shipped anyway (likely by rail). In other words, pipelines are a reaction to external levels of supply and demand. As the folks at EnviroEcononomics explain on their blog, however, that’s simply not true. New pipelines actively incentivize new supply as production ramps up to fill them. It’s an important reminder as the federal government plays chicken with a new oil sands pipeline.
Industry wants carrots, but effective industrial policy must use sticks. A handful of new academic studies—published in the journals Nature Climate Change, Global Policy and New Political Economy—all arrive at a crucial related conclusion. Industrial policies that defer to the private sector to deliver climate solutions are fundamentally insufficient, because even where they succeed in helping clean technologies and industries scale up, they fail to wind down dirty industries and polluting behaviours. I rant about this a lot, but, from a climate perspective, the only thing that matters is a reduction in emissions, not how many new wind turbines or EVs we build.
Renewables keep getting cheaper; nuclear keeps getting more expensive. A brief from the Pembina Institute notes that solar and wind costs have halved in the past ten years and they’re likely to do so again in the next decade. Meanwhile, the cost of nuclear power is moving in the opposite direction. By the time new nuclear comes online, the same investment in renewables could have been producing power for more than five years at a fraction of the cost. That doesn’t mean nuclear has no role to play, but Canadian utilities are dragging their feet on what are far-and-away the best power options for the 21st century.
Canadian pension funds are all over the map on climate. The NGO Shift’s latest Canadian Pension Climate Report Card finds that some pension funds, such as Québec’s La Caisse, are explicitly directing their 12-figure portfolios toward climate goals. Others, including the CPP, have publicly abandoned net-zero commitments and doubled down on fossil fuel investments. Collectively, Canada’s largest pension funds manage $2.7 trillion in assets, which could be far better leveraged to advance decarbonization and Canada’s economic sovereignty.
Clean energy jobs not keeping pace with clean energy growth… In its annual Renewable energy and jobs review, the International Renewable Energy Agency in collaboration with the International Labour Organization finds that the global clean energy jobs boom slowed down last year despite record capacity growth. In part, that’s due to economies of scale in industries like solar. Over the long term, fewer and fewer workers are needed to manufacture, deploy and maintain a lot of renewable infrastructure.
…but at least they’re paying better. In A green wage premium?, the UK-based Grantham Research Institute digs into wages in green vs. brown industries using Norway as a case study. It finds that green jobs offer above average pay compared to the rest of the economy, but jobs connected to the fossil fuel industry still pay better overall. This is a perennial challenge in just transition work—even where re-training and new jobs are guaranteed, fossil fuel workers are often (understandably) reluctant to accept a pay cut.
The 2025 climate bill is coming due. Last year was, unsurprisingly, one of the hottest years in recorded history, and the consequences were predictably dire. The top ten climate-related disasters of 2025 dealt at least US$123 billion in damages, according to a new report, Counting the Cost, from the charity Christian Aid. In Canada, we escaped with only $2.4 billion in direct damages, according to an Insurance Bureau of Canada report, a big drop from the $9.4 billion record set the year before. Of course, isolated disasters are only the most obvious consequences of climate change. As a new article in PNAS Sustainability Science finds, climate-related temperature variability has single-handedly reduced overall incomes in the U.S. by as much as 12 per cent since 2000. These sorts of hidden, structural costs are the real economic killers.
The fossil fuel industry has never been “part of the solution.” An article published in Energy Research and Social Science provides a really useful theoretical overview of the concept of “false solutions,” which is language that climate advocates have been using for several years to describe actions nominally intended to address climate change but which ultimately serve to entrench fossil fuel interests. Carbon capture is the preeminent example—a tactic explicitly designed to perpetuate the coal, oil and gas industries under the guise of climate action.
From just transitions to just transformations. For the just transition scholars, a new article in Environmental Policy and Governance, “The Widening Scope of Just Transitions Research,” lays out a sweeping history of literature in the field since 1998. Just transition scholarship exploded after 2020 and its conceptual scope keeps expanding. That’s a good thing, as the just transition literature is increasingly embracing a more transformative politics.
Dark clouds: artificial intelligence on the horizon
The difference between exposure and displacement is adaptability. A new report from the U.S.-based Brookings Institution, Measuring US workers’ capacity to adapt to AI-driven job displacement, makes the important observation that exposure to AI is not in itself a labour market threat. Around 70 per cent of AI-exposed workers in the U.S. likely have the capacity to adapt, even if it means shifting to a new job. The big issue from a social and policy perspective is the 30 per cent who can’t. These workers are disproportionately women, older and rural, and they have few options if their jobs are automated.
The AI jobs crunch is already hitting young workers in Canada. Building on their earlier theoretical work, Statistics Canada has released a new empirical study of AI impacts on the Canadian labour market over the past three years. The first key takeaway is that no particular sector has been hard hit by AI. Even theoretically exposed industries, such as software development, keep hiring. However, there have been measurable consequences for young workers across a range of industries. In sectors highly-exposed to AI, entry-level employment has stagnated even as older, more experienced workers are gaining. It’s a correlation study, and it’s still early days for the generative AI era, but this is important work. As Stat Can contends with layoffs, I hope this is work they’re able to continue doing.
