Ignoring climate change is hardly viable plan
There are steps Ontario can and should take, and they’ll likely cost more than a carbon tax
Premier Doug Ford’s signal achievement in his first 100 days leading Ontario has been to kill the province’s climate-change policy and replace it with promises.
He flew back from his western tour, having appeared with Premier Scott Moe and Alberta conservative leader Jason Kenney to rail against the evils of carbon taxes, to take a short Thanksgiving break and then rally once again in his Etobicoke riding Tuesday night, celebrating his three months in office.
In the meantime, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published yet another of its grab-us-by-the-lapels-and-scream reports, and an economist won a Nobel for a lifetime of work on climate-change policy. By its actions, the Progressive Conservative government asserts that they’re ninnies.
The UN panel’s latest work, summarizing the current state of climate science, doesn’t examine ways of reducing emissions, only what happens if we don’t. Even there, it’s focused on a narrow difference: between an increase in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is what we will have by midcentury if we get our collective butts in gear urgently, and 2C, which is what we get if we’re just a little more slothful about it.
Some of it is what you’d expect: more killing droughts at 2 C than at 1.5 C, but also more storms and floods depending where you live, for instance. Higher sea levels. More dead fish, more tropical illnesses escaping the tropics. Bad enough, those things.
But not every effect is linear. If ice is just below zero and warms to just above zero, it stops being ice. If water rises a centimetre above your protective wall, you have a flood where you didn’t before.
The scientists think the difference between 1.5 C and 2 C could be critical for vast ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica; if substantial ones crash into the sea, they could raise ocean levels by metres, not centimetres, and suddenly, not slowly. Whole cities could be flooded out. At 1.5 C, the panel thinks the Arctic could be completely ice-free about one summer every century; at 2 C, that could be once a decade. The difference between 1.5 C and 2 C is probably about two million more square kilometres of permafrost turning into muck. That’s an area the size of Nunavut, or two Ontarios.
The IPCC report — or rather its summary for policymakers — is 34 pages of this. Just on and on and on.
So then ... what? What do we do about this?
As it happens, that Nobel memorial prize in economics was also given out this weekend. Two economists shared it; one of them is American William Nordhaus, for work on incorporating climate change into large-scale economic modelling. Among his conclusions from a lifetime of worldclass work are that climate change is a massive threat to long-term growth, and the most economically efficient way of avoiding it is, um, a wide tax on greenhouse-gas emissions. That’s how we get the most benefits for the least cost.
Except in Canada, where the premier of the most populous province calls carbon taxes the dumbest, most useless form of taxation ever devised, based on substantially no actual evidence. Where we await an alternative plan for reducing greenhousegas emissions, due this fall, that will somehow not cost people anything.
Getting to work on adapting to a warmer future would at least be an honest alternative. Ontario has some things we should do, things that will probably end up more expensive than carbon taxes. We don’t know for sure, because the province has never done a full risk assessment for what the future might hold.
Start by rebuilding our sewers for bigger rainfalls, a multibillion-dollar project for Ottawa alone that the city government can’t afford on its own (Ontario cities already need $6.8 billion worth of work like this, according to the provincial environment commissioner). Spend more on city water, too, and accept brown parks and fields through much of the summer. Re-map our floodplains so people who own houses close to water can start paying up for insurance and see their property values properly discounted. Renovate public buildings, especially schools and nursing homes, to cope with hotter summers; add air conditioning, improve ventilation and start planting shade trees. Get cracking on medical research and training to cope with afflictions we aren’t used to seeing here. Increase our capacity to fight forest fires.
Quebec estimates that 93 people died in last July’s heat wave. Ontario doesn’t gather such numbers. We ought to.
Nationally, we should plan for refugees fleeing famines and droughts and wars over scarcer water and food — preparing either to accept them, as the law currently requires, or to meet them with new laws (not compatible with international treaties, but hey) allowing us to turn them away. Start building roads to the Far North, so when Russia or somebody starts eyeing our Arctic we can get up there in time to stop them with something other than pickup trucks. Much of metro Vancouver will need flood walls.
All of this will make for a more expensive, more precarious, more cruel world. If we aren’t seriously trying to stop it, we should be getting ready for it.