Canada's great northern forests,
they're the place of my heart.
They hold 25 percent
of the Earth's wetlands.
And they're the nesting
and breeding ground
of the majority
of North America's songbirds.
They're the traditional territories
of hundreds of Indigenous nations.
And my climate journey started here
as a forest activist a long time ago.
I was horrified that Canada's
old-growth forests are being logged.
They're burning.
They're being destroyed
by beetle infestations.
But also because so much
of the forest is under threat
because of what lies under it.
Oil.
At the time,
I thought that Canada's failure
to reduce emissions
was because we had a government
that just didn't believe
in climate change.
But then in 2015,
we elected a new government.
And Prime Minister Trudeau came to Paris
and with his hand on his heart,
he said, "Canada's back."
And he went home to introduce
some really good climate policy,
carbon pricing.
And our emissions didn't go down.
And the government
continued to green-light
and even subsidize
new oil sands, pipelines and fracking.
And that, for me, was the moment
when I realized where one
of the big problems lie.
Our governments are regulating emissions
but not the production of fossil fuels.
You see, climate policy and agreements,
they are complicated,
but what's simple
is that the majority of emissions
that are trapped in our atmosphere today,
well, they come from three products:
oil, gas and coal.
For decades, our countries
have been negotiating targets.
But behind our backs, the fossil fuel
industry has been growing production
and locking in further emissions.
I started reaching out to climate policy
experts from around the world
because I wanted to understand
what frameworks exist to negotiate
who gets to produce what and how much;
what policies help governments regulate,
constrain the production side
of fossil fuels.
I found out that very few do.
I will never forget the day
that I sat with the Paris Agreement
and I searched for the words
fossil fuels,
oil, gas, coal.
They didn't appear.
Not even once in the world's
climate agreement.
The fossil fuel industry has been
successful in making itself invisible.
I started reaching out
and met with, for several years,
the CEOs of major oil companies
because I wanted to understand
what these CEOs see
when they read the science.
How can they justify expanding oil
and gas at this moment in our history?
And also because I believe
that there are good people everywhere.
There are good people
stuck in some bad systems.
What I learned is that they know.
They know that we're going to have to
wind down fossil fuel production.
But they are all holding out hope
that they will be the last barrel sold.
Or that unproven technologies,
like carbon capture and storage,
will allow them to continue
to increase production.
The problem is the math
just doesn't add up.
We are currently on track today
to produce 120 percent more fossil fuels
in the next decade
than the world should burn
if we want to stay
below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
In fact, even if we phased out
coal overnight,
oil and gas in existing projects
would take us beyond 1.5 degrees.
For decades, climate policy
has been designed on a theory
that we are going to reduce demand,
that the price of carbon
is going to go up,
and the markets turbocharged
by alternatives --
wind and solar, now cheaper
than fossil fuels --
well, the markets are going
to constrain supply.
The problem is it's not happening.
Not fast enough to keep us safe.
Why?
Because the markets today are distorted,
they're distorted by tax breaks
and fossil-fuel subsidies,
but also because of the power
of the fossil fuel industry.
The influence of the industry,
who no longer deny climate change.
But they have moved
from denial to delusion:
that technologies
that are not yet proven at scale,
that are not yet cost-competitive --
are going to fix it.
In the future.
I've spent 30 years running
environmental campaigns,
I've advised multiple governments
on climate policy,
I’ve been arrested on the blockades,
and I've negotiated in the boardrooms
of some of the largest banks
and corporations in the world.
And when I figured out
that we don't have a framework
for constraining the production
of fossil fuels,
I thought I was crazy.
And so did some of my colleagues.
But here's the thing.
Today we are granting permits,
we are spending trillions of dollars
to increase the production of products
that we say we're transitioning off of.
It's not a transition
if we're still growing the problem.
We have more than enough fossil fuels
in existing installations,
even if we stopped expansion today,
of oil, gas and coal
in existing projects to use
while we carefully manage a phasedown.
And so the world is spending
its intellectual,
its financial, its technical capital
to dig up stuff
that we know we can't burn,
and if we do, it will burn us.
So what do we do?
A year ago, a group
of academics, advocates,
scientists and former diplomats
came together to create
the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation
Treaty Initiative
to create the missing framework
so countries can negotiate
a wind down of fossil fuels
in a way that is fair,
in a way that is equitable.
Shockingly, one of the things we found out
is that we don't have accounting
or transparency right now
on who's producing what and how much.
So work is now underway
to create a global registry
of fossil fuel production and reserves.
We are also at work
creating the principles of equity
that have to underlie a treaty
because the challenges to stop
the expansion of fossil fuels
in some countries
are going to be so different
than in other countries.
There are countries today
in the developing world, like Ecuador,
that are drilling for new oil
in the heart of the Amazon
just to feed their debt.
So no,
we cannot rely just on the markets
to constrain fossil fuel production.
If we do, it will be an unmanaged decline
instead of a managed decline,
and more people will suffer.
We need financial leadership
at this moment.
We need divestment at this moment.
But we can’t let governments off the hook.
The wealthy countries need to act first.
That means Canada and the US
and Norway can't do more oil drilling
and fracking and new pipelines.
It means that the UK cannot call itself
a climate leader right now
and build the Cambo oil field.
(Cheers and applause)
So here's the good news.
Support for the treaty is growing.
Every day, I'm so excited
to turn on my computer.
101 Nobel laureates,
including the Dalai Lama,
have endorsed the principles
of a fossil fuel treaty.
Cities from around the world
are passing motions at their city councils
to endorse a fossil fuel treaty:
Sydney, Barcelona, LA, Vancouver.
Over 100 elected officials
from around the world, from 20 countries
starting in the global South
have endorsed the principles
of a fossil fuel treaty.
Over 2,000 scientists have now endorsed
the principles of the Fossil Fuel Treaty.
Indigenous leaders, youth groups,
over 800 civil society organizations
who have been fighting
fossil fuel projects for decades
are now calling on their governments
to negotiate a treaty
to keep it in the ground.
Some of the criticism we get
is that it's too big, it's unfeasible,
it'll take too long.
But the same was erroneously said
about weapons treaties.
For me, the answer is we don't have time
for more of the same.
We know that oil-producing nations
are not likely to embrace
the Fossil Fuel Treaty.
But what we've learned
from studying landmines,
what we've learned from studying nuclear,
is that the journey matters.
Just proposing a fossil fuel treaty
is creating new conversations
and new climate ambition.
A fossil fuel treaty
will help us wind down
the production of fossil fuels.
It will provide a complement
and help us achieve
the goals of the Paris accord.
It is a big, bold new idea.
But at this moment in history,
we need some big, bold new ideas.
In 2021, millions of people
lost their homes.
Thousands of people lost their lives
as the fires and the floods
and the heat waves swept our planet.
I know that this can seem overwhelming.
But we are capable
of enormous change in our lifetimes.
I had a conversation with my grandmother
once when I was out of hope.
Feeling overwhelmed.
And she said to me,
"Do you understand how much
the world has changed in my lifetime?"
She said, "When your mother
was growing up,
we didn't have cell phones or computers.
We had a phone on the wall,
it was a party line.
When it rang twice, it was for us."
She said, "I didn't know anyone
who'd ever been on a plane."
She told me that the world
had entirely changed in her lifetime.
She said, "How we travel,
how we communicate,
and it will in yours as well."
So when I do this work every day
for a fossil fuel treaty,
I'm holding on to the idea
that one day I'm going to be
sitting with my grandchildren,
I'm going to be telling them
about this time in our history
when we clawed at the last
primary forest to get at the oil.
This crazy time in our history
when we used to fill our cars with gas,
heat our homes with gas.
And they,
well, they will barely believe me,
because the world
will be such a different place.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)