Why climate must top priority list
Twenty years is not a long time; perhaps three or four prime ministers, the career of an indie band, the lifespan of a really good T-shirt. Time enough, though, to witness “dramatic” and “unprecedented” changes to human civilization.
A new report from the National Intelligence Council in the United States looks at the security implications of climate change, not as some remote scenario, but right now.
“Over 20 years, the net effects of climate change on the patterns of global human movement and statelessness could be dramatic, perhaps unprecedented. If unanticipated, they could overwhelm government infrastructure and resources, and threaten the social fabric of communities,” it says.
This is not a mere possibility. This is upon us. Every step Canada takes to reduce greenhousegas emissions is an attempt to make further global catastrophe just that little smidgen less bad. That is the context in which we must judge environmental policy.
This country may contribute only 1.6 per cent of the world’s emissions, but that’s coming from 0.5 per cent of the world’s population. Our duty doesn’t stem merely from being members of human civilization, but from being disproportionate early contributors to that change. And we have a self-interest in the effects, whether that’s the rise of a terrorist protector state in a water-dependent area or sovereignty over our own territory.
“Contention over Russia’s claim to 1.2 million square kilometres of Arctic shelf ... could increase friction with rival claimants, including Denmark and Canada,” the report predicts. It was written in collaboration with the U.S. intelligence community, as advice for the U.S. National Director of Intelligence. That’s one small bullet point, one example among many of what might change, very soon. Again, these are just the early changes. Environmental policy, therefore, has already moved from the periphery to the centre of what a government does, whether that government is aware of it or not. It is at the heart of foreign policy, health policy, defence policy and economic policy.
As if all this weren’t scary enough, it is possible that Canada will be facing the challenges of the next few years with its security and prosperity tied to the whims of a president who has repeatedly called climate change a hoax.
This is no longer about earnest conversations about respect for the Earth and what sort of future we want to leave our grandchildren. Our grandchildren will certainly, inevitably, face an unfathomably difficult future. That future has, in some sense, already happened; it is now a question of degree.
The latest report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, released last Tuesday, shows that August was the 16th consecutive record-breaking month, almost one full degree Celsius above the 20th-century average (in Ontario, it was two or three degrees above average). Hot years and cold years come and go, but this shocking year is a small reminder that within a long-term shift, factors in the complex systems that make our weather can create sudden dramatic swings, especially if climate change pushes those systems past certain tipping points.
“Even if sudden shifts in the climate do not materialize, gradual shifts in climate could nonetheless spark surprising secondary effects — such as a massive release of gases from melting permafrost, persistent megadroughts, extreme shifts in critical ecosystems, emerging reservoirs of new pathogens, or the sudden breakup of immense ice sheets,” warns the NIC report.
Yes, the Earth’s climate has always been in flux. But this rate of change is something new. The NIC report puts it, “A body of scientific research indicates that the current rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the highest in perhaps as long as 66 million years, sea levels are rising faster than in the past 2,700 years and the oceans are acidifying more rapidly than in the past 56 million years.”
This is the enormous background that must inform our discussions about things such as whether all provinces should have a carbon price. Politicians can and should disagree about how to tackle this problem. But no responsible politician can push climate policy to the periphery, ever again.