Eriel Deranger has won the Climate Breakthrough award. The co-founder of Indigenous Climate Action, Deranger is a Dënesųłiné activist and a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. The three-year funding will help Deranger build a global network of advocates determined to ensure Indigenous people have decision-making authority on climate and environmental issues. "The point of this project is not to convince or to lobby governments," Deranger said. "It's to convince and lobby Indigenous Peoples to enact their sovereignty, and drive their solutions forward without the permission of our colonizers. This is how we see change."

The world's oldest known wild bird has laid an egg… at the ripe age of 74. Wisdom, a Laysan albatross, was tagged in 1956 when she was five. Albatrosses mate for life and share chick-rearing duties but Wisdom is thought to have outlived at least three mates. 

"It's really been remarkable," a biologist at the Midway Atoll national wildlife refuge told the BBC. "Wisdom seems to pique the interest of people across the world. We wait each year with bated breath for her return."

The federal government could soon face another court challenge over the carbon price from the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations, reports Natasha Bulowski.

The Indian Resource Council of Canada (IRC) and some Treaty Six Chiefs held a news conference on Parliament Hill on Wednesday, indicating they intend to file a judicial review against the climate policy.

The latest Ontario Auditor General report reveals deep flaws in the Ford government’s controversial use of minister’s zoning orders (MZOs) to fast-track development projects.

The auditor general identified including arbitrary decision-making, ignoring environmental and agricultural impacts, and a lack of meaningful consultation with Indigenous communities.

“Last chance tourism” is “where the real and practical world of the North confronts an idealized and romanticized Arctic. It’s an imaginary Arctic, part of an image sold for southerners’ consumption.” Matteo Cimellaro reports from Northern Manitoba where angry tourists shout at Indigenous hunters harvesting country foods.

“Conservation, in that context, becomes fraught: if the idea is to protect a landscape from humans, what happens to the humans who are enmeshed with the landscape? The question is no longer academic in Churchill. The town and the Indigenous communities up and down the Hudson Bay coast will be the ultimate decision-makers over plans to establish a new National Marine Conservation Area in the coming years down the west coast of the bay.”

“In the current political reality, it seems impossible that public funds could ever be committed to international climate action at the scale that’s needed,” writes Anjali Appadurai about the meagre $300 billion pledged to help developing countries and their economies against climate disasters.

“And of course, a Pierre Poilievre Conservative government would be far weaker on this issue than the current Liberal government, but this is beyond political parties. This shouldn’t stop us, as a civil society, from holding the line, remembering what’s at stake and taking a global view of the climate crisis.”

We need to treat fossil fuels like Big Tobacco, writes Dr. Joe Vipond after returning from COP29, “having been surrounded by nations and corporate lobbyists advocating for continued and even increasing fossil fuel use. It reminds me of decades ago when Big Tobacco used disinformation and lobbying to weaken health policy on smoking. But we can draw hope from public health winning that battle…”

Max Fawcett says the truth is coming out on the carbon tax: “As a new paper from University of Calgary economists Trevor Tombe and Jennifer Winter shows, Canada’s carbon tax has added a grand total of 0.5 per cent to food prices… a tiny fraction of the 26 per cent rise in food prices in Canada over the past five years.”

“But the apparently inevitable demise of the carbon tax in Canada is an important reminder of how you can win a battle of the facts and still lose the war.”

“I really believed that the environment and the economy could go hand-in-hand and include a vibrant oil and gas sector,” says Catherine McKenna, a former federal minister of environment and climate change, writing in The Star.

“It turns out the consensus was a mirage. Or, more accurately, a sham. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me that our industry partners were working against us from the inside…”

“The oil sands sector has been lying to us for years. They are not getting cleaner. They are not part of the solution. As I tell my kids all the time, life is about choices. Canada can choose to be on the right side of history. We can act with the urgency the climate crisis requires and the economic case makes clear. Or, we can double down on the oil sands, abandon the Paris Agreement, ignore the economic opportunities of clean energy, and leave our children a deadly and unsustainable future.”

Only half of Canadians are even aware that the Trudeau Liberals have proposed to cap climate pollution from the oil and gas industry. “Awareness was highest among Conservative supporters (58 per cent), and those in Alberta (59 per cent),” Abacus Data found. 

“Among those who are aware of the announcement, opinions are split – 32 per cent of Canadians support the cap as a necessary action for climate change, while 32 per cent oppose it, citing concerns about its negative economic impact. Further, 33 per cent have mixed feelings, depending on how the policy is implemented… Climate change remains one of the most divisive policy issues in the country.”

Canada's Minister for Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, aggressively continues to defend his government's $100 billion strategy to build an electric vehicle (EV) industry. In an exclusive interview with Canada’s National Observer, he claims his critics lack “vision and ambition.”

In other EV news, China’s share of the global market reached 76 per cent this October. Last year, almost 60 per cent of EV sales were in China, according to the International Energy Agency.

But we may be focused on the wrong wheels. The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars. “They are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present… On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans and trucks… wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers on the road last year.”

“For centuries, the Western Arctic has been home to Mr. Dillon and his ancestors, the Inuvialuit, as the region’s Inuit are called. But these days, the thaw slumps — like the one Mr. Dillon’s team was documenting 10 miles south of their hamlet, Tuktoyaktuk — are the most dramatic evidence of a phenomenon that could turn the local Inuvialuit into Canada’s first climate refugees.” The New York Times reports from the melting permafrost.

“Your best choice would be to move,” he said.

“Re-move?”

“Re-move.”

“But where?”

“That’s exactly,” Mr. Dillon said, “everybody’s question.”

Scientists have a new possible explanation for the recent surge in global temperatures: the Earth may be getting darker. A reduction in albedo (making the planet less reflective) because of a reduction in low clouds. Warming oceans may be upsetting cloud formation, reports the CBC’s Nicole Mortillaro.

Carrboro, North Carolina has filed a lawsuit against an electric utility in “the nation’s first-ever climate accountability lawsuit against an electric utility,” reports The Guardian.

Carrboro has accused Duke Energy of a “deception campaign” to hide the dangers of fossil fuels. The result was delay in climate action which means it’s now much more expensive, the lawsuit says.

“When you’re dealing with something like the existential threat of climate change, that requires us to make bold moves,” said Carrboro’s mayor, Barbara Foushee.

In November, the state of Maine “became the ninth US state “to bring legal claims against several major oil and gas companies, alleging the companies and their chief trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, have deliberately misled the public about the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels,” reports The New Lede. “In all, more than two dozen climate deception lawsuits have been brought against fossil fuel companies by cities, counties, states, and Tribal governments over the last seven years.”

“There is a new kind of hum of activity at Oakville Transit’s depot in southeastern Ontario these days,” reports Electric Autonomy Canada.

“It really is exciting to be a part of the transition from diesel to zero-emission,” says Adrian Kawun, director of Oakville Transit.

“The more electric vehicles you get out there, it just becomes part of the landscape. This will be the norm in the future.”

Patricia Lane catches up with John Redfern, the Calgarian who founded Eavor Geothermal: “This is the most rewarding thing I have ever done,” says Redfern. The company uses a closed-loop system to minimize water waste, and a pump-free design to avoid electricity use.

“Everyone from my kids to my parents loves the idea once they understand it. My friends in the oil and gas sector don’t like to think about climate change. I get it. No one wants to be the turkey talking about Christmas. But I get to help them make the transition by valuing their skills and knowledge as a path to a clean energy future.”

Please remember to email with your recommendations for cli-non-fi. And I’ll leave you this week with a piece by Genevieve Guenther. You might remember we reviewed her new book The Language of Climate Politics earlier this year.  Guenther’s prediction for the year to come is this:

“We will see a fundamental transformation in the language of climate politics. We’re going to hear a lot less about “reducing emissions” from scientists and policymakers and a lot more about “phasing out fossil fuels” or “ending coal, oil, and methane gas.”

Writing for Wired magazine’s World In 2025 issue, Guenther argues the return of Donald Trump and a “drill, baby, drill” agenda could accelerate the transformation and “climate discourse will recenter on the message that halting global heating requires the phaseout of coal, oil, and gas. This new consensus will shift the politics of climate change and help motivate an urgent sprint to a clean-energy, ecologically integrated economy—the only economy that ensures a livable future.”