By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
Roger Gagne is Calgary’s sign guy who is taking climate change to the streets of Calgary, Alberta’s oil capital.
Gagne is a longtime environmentalist who’s tried taking action in many ways. He’s written scads of letters, articles, and he’s even started several websites, the latest of which is Climate Plan Alberta.
But through it all, he remained wholly unsatisfied with the lack of engagement and the lack of action on climate change in his home province of Alberta.
“I care a lot about our economy, and I care about people’s houses being devastated by hailstorms in Northeast Calgary. Twice in the past five years, we’ve had hailstorms that caused— each of them— over a billion dollars in damage. It horrifies me that we have wildfires that are burning hotter and wiping out communities,” says Gagne.
So Roger got an idea while watching the sign guy on Facebook. The idea is to take the interactions to the streets, face to face with a declarative statement on a sign followed by the words “change my mind.”
Into the belly of the beast
Roger made his sign, hopped in his bike, and headed down to Bow Valley Square right in the heart of downtown Calgary, the oil capital of Alberta.
Surrounded by oil company headquarters, Roger stood right in front of oil companies with his sign.
Roger’s original sign said, “Alberta is not ready for a world moving away from fossil fuels. Change my mind.”
But for some reason, he says people seemed to be confused by the message. So he made the message clearer.
“My new sign says sort of a declarative statement.”
“The world is moving away from fossil fuels. Alberta’s getting caught badly off guard. Am I wrong?”
Instead of wishing and hoping people find his messages online, he took it to the streets and the front doors of the oil industry.
“With my sign project, I kind of get out in people’s faces, everyone’s faces, everyone who gets out on a public walkway or on a public sidewalk or takes a C train [light rail transit in Calgary], and there’s that guy. What does that sign mean?”
“I just think it’s a really unique and useful tool to get into people’s brains and get them thinking about climate change and the energy transition,” says Gagne.
I remember thinking as I was seeing Roger’s posts on Facebook, “wow, that guy has nerves of steel – this is not something many people would or could do.”
“Everywhere I go, I get a lot of curious glances. I get a few thumbs up. I get a few conversations. And every once in a while, I get someone who tells me to F-off,” says Roger.
As of this writing, Roger has hit the streets almost 40 times, first in Calgary and since then in many towns and cities across southern Alberta, including Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Vulcan, Okotoks, Nanton, and High River.
He’s been asked to leave numerous locations, such as Bow Valley Square, and has even stood outside the Petroleum Club in Calgary.
Roger has had every kind of response you could imagine, from thumbs up to a guy who walked up to him in downtown Calgary where hundreds of oil and gas workers were walking by.
Not for the faint of heart
“The first words out of his mouth were ‘you’re a moron.’” The fellow wouldn’t let Roger talk and insisted Roger was wrong, and his facts were incorrect.
“I don’t think I’m going to change his mind, but he’ll never change his mind as long as he’s feeling entrenched, defensive, and attacked,” says Roger, adding “Even he has to be heard out.”
But when this happens, other people gather around to listen, and as Roger says, “They get the chance to look at this and go, who seems more sane? Who seems more credible?”
Roger has a lot of empathy for the people in the industry.
“We have to hear what they care about, hear what they’re worried about. And for some people that means, ‘my God, I work in oil and gas and I like my well-paying job and I don’t want to lose it and you’re talking about something that threatens that.’”
He’s even stood outside Premier Danielle Smith’s constituency office in Medicine Hat.
“We have such a bubble around us in Alberta,” says Gagne. “Premier Smith can say something like, we’re a natural gas province and we’re going to stay a natural gas province. So in the same month that she said that Reuters News reported that globally 68 gas-fired power plants were planned for construction, and they were cancelled [or put on hold] because they could not compete on cost with solar plus batteries.”
Roger is worried that Alberta is not only not taking meaningful action on climate change, but he’s even more worried about the province blocking momentum on renewable energy and other low-carbon solutions to the climate crisis. This hurts our future economy, he says.
He worries that Alberta’s one-trick pony [oil and gas] will gradually become the old gray mare as trillions are being invested worldwide in low-carbon and non-fossil fuel solutions to transportation and energy.
He points to the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia which recently published a paper entitled “Putin the Green? The Unintended Consequences of Russia’s Energy War on Europe.”
Europeans are now doing everything in their power to reduce their reliance on natural gas thanks to Russia’s “energy war” on Europe that quadrupled the price of natural gas at the outset of the war with Ukraine.
Prices have subsided, but the goal of weaning Europe off natural gas is now entrenched.
Roger has had many conversations, many of which resulted in people thinking more deeply about the wisdom of Alberta’s singular strategy of focusing on fossil fuels while taking little or no action on climate change.
Sometimes other people join Roger out on the sidewalk with his sign, but mostly he does this alone. It’s hard not to admire his dedication and courage.
You can follow Roger Gagne’s journey on Facebook or Linkedin.
