There’s a crisis on the horizon

Earth is rapidly headed for a place of no return, where climate change will leave the planet a more hostile place for people, plants and animals.

The impacts and costs are greater and coming faster than expected, according to a comprehensive new assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that says we have about a dozen years to come to grips with the issue.

But there is some hope. The IPCC also found that reducing global warming by even half a degree Celsius would dramatically reduce deaths from heat, drought and disease; the loss of species from diminishing habitat; and submerged land caused by melting ice caps and rising oceans, with the loss of homes and livelihoods that would accompany such flooding. Half a degree less of warming could even save some of the world’s coral reefs.

That’s why the panel is urging world leaders to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees C rather than the looser goal of staying under 2 C set at the Paris climate change conference in 2015. It’s particularly sobering news since the world — based on current warming trends and lacklustre carbon reduction commitments to date — is set to blow by both numbers and see the climate heat up 3 C by the end of the century.

If there was ever reason to doubt the life-or-death impact of global warming, that’s long gone. And yet the message is still not getting through, in part because so many politicians are keen to play a politically expedient short game rather than focus on the environmental and economic imperatives that will become all too apparent over the longer term.

So while thousands of experts around the world warn of a global catastrophe requiring urgent action, political leaders such as Ontario Premier Doug Ford are seemingly happy to pretend this doesn’t matter — and certainly isn’t worth doing much about.

Ford’s first act as premier was to end Ontario’s cap-and-trade system, which was designed to reduce emissions by pricing carbon and using those funds to invest in environmental programs to help homeowners and businesses further reduce their carbon footprint. He set aside $30 million to fight Ottawa’s plans to impose a federal carbon tax on any province without a suitable plan of its own. That leaves Ontario with no plan whatsoever to combat climate change.

Worse still, he’s now peddling this nonsense beyond Ontario’s borders. “It’s really, my friends the worst tax ever, a tax we can’t afford,” Ford told an anti-carbon tax rally in Calgary last Friday. The truth is we are already paying the cost of doing nothing. And, as the Insurance Bureau of Canada knows all too well, it runs into the billions of dollars annually with the destruction caused by extreme storms, wildfires, ice storms and floods. It’s only going to get worse.

Canada is among the many nations set to fall short of its climate change commitments, and turning that around becomes harder the longer provincial politicians spend their time — and taxpayer dollars — squabbling with Ottawa instead of fighting climate change.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government demonstrated admirable leadership when it first announced it would impose a minimum national price on carbon. At the time, it seemed possible that Saskatchewan would be the only province where Ottawa would actually have to intervene with a federally imposed carbon tax.

Then Ontarians elected Ford’s PCs, pipeline politics left Alberta wavering on its carbon-price system, Manitoba suddenly did an about-face last week and there are questions around the plans of Atlantic provinces.

That leaves Ottawa with the unenviable prospect of imposing a carbon tax in every province save British Columbia and Quebec, and that will certainly make for tough political times.

But with politicians like Ford eager to seize short-term political gain from opposing carbon pricing plans without offering anything meaningful to replace them, the Trudeau government is left with no other choice.

Someone needs to be the adult in the climate change room and do what’s necessary. This week’s report makes that all the more clear.