Whether or not you want one, can afford one or think they will do essentially nothing to stop global warming, electric vehicles are coming to Canada en masse. This week, the Canadian government set 2035 as the “mandatory target” for the sale of zero-emission SUVs and light-duty trucks.
That means the sale of gasoline and diesel cars has to stop by then. Transport Minister Omar Alghabra called the target “a must.” The previous target was 2040.
Canada is on track to add more than 200,000 clean energy jobs this decade, considerably more than 125,000 that will be lost in a declining fossil fuel industry, Clean Energy Canada concludes in an analysis released last week.
As the shift off carbon accelerates, clean energy companies are scrambling to find the people power they need to keep the lights on.
“The renewables jobs market is heating up and candidates with the right abilities are becoming harder to find,” writes Bloomberg Green, citing comment by Miguel Stilwell, CEO of Portuguese clean energy firm EDP Renováveis. His company will be looking to hire 1,300 more workers by 2023.
Australia’s fossil-heavy state of Queensland is committing A$2 billion to create what Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk called a “self-reinforcing cycle of investment—a job-generating clean energy industrial ecosystem”.
Our dominant system for providing electricity to homes and businesses in the United States—through investor-owned energy utilities—is deeply problematic. By prioritizing shareholder profits over people’s needs, these utilities repeatedly exacerbate climate disasters through their insistence on fossil-fuel use and force millions of families to choose between keeping their homes from either freezing or overheating and feeding their children or seeing a doctor. Increasingly, the consequences can be deadly.
Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US (and the EU) have a great part of the immense wealth of the richest countries in the world in 2021. This wealth is more than sufficient to provide for the needs for food, water, health, housing and education of the global population.
