Heat waves, hard questions in former land of ice and snow

A revealing story in the Wheels section of this newspaper five Saturdays ago pointed out, based on figures from the International Energy Agency, that all reductions in carbon emissions in the world brought about by the purchase of electric vehicles are being wiped out by increased sales of gas-guzzling SUVS.

Which, once again, raises the depressing question: When are we going to “get it” with regard to climate change and what are we going to do about it?

The question has been juiced up with a vengeance with the Western heat wave, in which Canada, for the second time in those mere few weeks, lit up headlines across the world in an unfortunate way.

Think about the speed of the unfolding catastrophe. How recently was it that Canada was still, in world lore, the quintessential land of snow and ice, with summer heat a brief delight?

Now I see this headline in Britain's The Guardian: “Canada is a warning: more and more of the world will soon be too hot for humans.” A CNN report said the nearly 50 C (halfway to the boiling point) temperature recorded in Lytton, B.C., was hotter than anything ever recorded even in South America.

A new federal report says Canada as a whole is heating up twice as fast as the global average, with the Arctic three times as fast, and that our infrastructure is not ready for it (think of the rail line and highway past low-lying Amherst, as Nova Scotia gradually and perhaps inevitably becomes an island).

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, putting on a brave face, vowed to help Lytton rebuild after it was destroyed by a subsequent flash fire, one of hundreds raging between Ontario and B.C. But what does “rebuild” mean under such circumstances? And who's next?

At its core, the world still resists the reality rolling over it. For centuries, the Western world has presumed that progress meant defeating the forces of nature — the pioneers, for example, for whom the forest was the enemy. Now we have defeated it, and taught the rest of the world to do the same. Nice going.

The key to doing anything about it is mainly the United States where, alas, even the inadequate environmental component of President Joe Biden's defining infrastructure bill has had to be stripped away because the Trumpies are still kicking. The Republican party has mostly dropped outright denials of global warming — although for some, like COVID, it's a hoax — but are determined to clog up any measure to deal with it at the behest of oil companies and others of their polluting funders.

Finding a silver lining in all this is a hard hunt. Ron Colman, in his book What Really Counts that I reported on in my last column, argues that the world, if ever properly motivated, will be able to deal with this using its COVID response as practice — as governments learned to “shut down entire economies.” Thus, shutting down entire economies to salvage the climate — can we imagine such a thing? — becomes what would pass as a last hope “optimistic” scenario. How close are we to that?

There is some more upbeat stuff out there. I stumbled onto several websites announcing “climate good news,” which I eagerly scanned. But these mostly report piecemeal adaptations to rising seas and climate extremes — floating farms in Bangladesh, a species saved, trees planted, businesses going green, scientific experiments of all sorts. Indeed, there is tremendous green activity out there, and tremendous awareness, but it's far from catching up with the forces of destruction which are, alas, part and parcel of the crude but dominant concept of “economic growth,” a fact which we cannot seem to admit.

What will it take to rouse us collectively to action? My own expectation is that the flashpoint, when it comes, could well be food prices, and perhaps even inflation generally as we deal with the rising cost of disasters (including unforeseen non-climate ones, like COVID) and of preparing for future ones. Food prices have risen by 40 per cent worldwide over the past year, according to The Economist magazine.

Reports throughout the heat-and-drought zone are of crops shrivelling or not planted at all — which includes the entire western half of North America right down to Mexico, which is reporting pressure on its food production, plus other parts of the world.

In the U.S., the main concern is about California, which provides half of all the vegetables to the U.S. and three quarters of its fruits and nuts, plus probably as much to Canada as well.

Meanwhile, talking about wheels, whenever I'm driving to nearby Yarmouth on Highway 103, provocatively sticking to the speed limit in my small car, I always wonder what it would take to make the guy impatiently driving a monster truck up my rear end contemplate global warming and its implications. EDITOR'S NOTE: Ralph Surette's column was unavailable last week due to technical difficulties.