09/05/2026
THE CLIMATE CONVERSATIONS, Episode 6 - In this week’s Climate Conversation with Dr. Sinead Earley, Associate Professor in UNBC’s School of Planning and Sustainability, they talk about how communities are rethinking energy in the north.
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Talk is cheap — so what does climate action look like on the ground? This week, Dr. Sinead Earley, an Associate Professor in UNBC's School of Planning and Sustainability, joins the Climate Conversation to make the case that climate change can't be solved one lecture hall at a time. Her research asks a deceptively simple question: who gets a seat at the table when energy and climate policy get made?
Dr. Earley traces her own path into climate research back to BC's mountain pine beetle outbreak — which she argues was the province's first slow-motion, landscape-altering climate disaster, unfolding over two decades rather than in a single shock. She takes us to Atlin, a remote community powered almost entirely by an Indigenous-owned, run-of-river hydro project, and to McBride, where local hydro power has all but ended blackouts. Along the way, she unpacks how the oil and gas industry invented the "carbon footprint" to shift blame onto individuals — and why real climate progress may depend on communities building power together.
Dr. Sinead Earley is a faculty member in the Environmental and Sustainability Studies program (based in the School of Planning and Sustainability), the Faculty of Environment, the NRES Graduate Program, and Northern Studies. She holds a PhD from Queen's University, an MA from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a BA from the University of British Columbia. She joined UNBC's Geography Program as a lecturer in 2015.
Her research spans critical policy studies, resource governance, low-carbon transitions, environmental justice, procedural policy tools, settler colonialism, decolonization, and critical resource geographies. She currently leads the Northern Regional Energy Dialogues (NRED), a five-year project amplifying northern voices in the shift toward community-owned clean energy.
