Canada’s government should act as a true leader on climate change
The climate and the climate debate are heating up. At the speed this is happening, the first is terrifying; the second is a heartening indication that we may yet solve the crisis of the biosphere. Undoubtedly, the Federal Government takes seriously its responsibilities on the climate front and is doing good work fostering public engagement. I had a small part in organizing the climate consultation with all five Waterloo Region MPs that took place on Aug. 18 in the Kitchener City Hall. It was an astonishing display of reasoned, knowledgeable public involvement by the more than 300 people who took part. It felt wonderfully hopeful. Another admirable initiative is the Federal Government’s Let’s Talk Climate Action — letstalkclimateaction.ca.
That being said, we might well ask, “Is the government listening?” Probably not, at least not with the kind of close attention those of us who are active in the campaign to reduce global temperatures hope for. There is too much detail for that, and the detail will only mount over time. The Let’s Talk site has nearly 3,300 submissions so far, some of which contain a plethora of further submissions. Inevitably, the government will generalize; how it generalizes is a matter of existential importance.
Recently, looking for clues as to how the government will use this information to set policy, I examined 500 entries on the site. Unsurprisingly, most deal with mitigation and adaption technologies. Surprisingly, about a third is from global warming deniers; surprising because it is difficult to comprehend how anyone could see the utility of denial. It doesn’t matter if the IPCC is wrong about global warming; it matters very much if the deniers are misguided. To them I would say, “Give us room to address what the rest of us consider a crisis; forego some of your entitlements,” to the government, “Resist the urge to use the deniers’ claims as an excuse to continue business as usual.” Tragically, “business as usual,” is the message of the government’s masthead, business/ economics-oriented Vancouver Declaration. Instead, Canada could more than meet its Paris commitments by closing the Alberta tarsands and halting Saskatchewan lignite extraction, along with decarbonizing home heating and powering light-duty vehicle transportation with non-carbon electricity. Continuing with the tarsands and coal will mean that Canada’s Paris commitments will be much more costly for the rest of the country.
Canada faces special challenges in meeting its commitments to fossil-fuel reduction. Our country is enormous and sparsely populated, the extreme variability of its climate is matched only by that of Russia, and resource extraction is the foundation of our wealth. Nonetheless, Canada has striking advantages. Paradoxically, the most important is its size and the length of its coastline. Second, Canada leads the world in non-fossil electrification. We could use our vast soils and coastlines to biologically sequester enough carbon to far more than compensate for our ongoing carbon emissions. Unfortunately for those corporations invested heavily in the tarsands and in coal generated electricity, neither is viable. If the federal government and corporate leadership have a modicum of ethical interest in the future well-being of our country, they must work together now to shut down those industries, and mobilize their financial muscle to create jobs and profit in climate stewardship. Conventional gas and oil, and in a few cases even coal, should continue to be a part of our madein-Canada energy strategy, but to relentlessly pursue off-shore sales of extreme fossil fuels is ultimately suicidal.
Only about one per cent of submissions to Let’s Talk offers suggestions related to biological sequestration of carbon. Sadder still is the absence of any mention of runaway human population. If the biosphere is to successfully run the climate gauntlet we humans have created, we will all need to take a much more holistic approach to alleviating climate change than mitigation and adaption alone. We must pay attention to sequestering carbon biologically, continue to refine the technology that will help us to transition to a carbon-free economy, arrest and reverse human population growth, and restore nature. Canada must advance on all these fronts simultaneously with imagination and pluck. Above all, its government should act as a true leader and courageously move outside the growth-economics box which is destroying our only home, the biosphere.