The Next One

Just as the COVID crisis recedes, Heather Scoffield writes, the next crisis is upon us:

Hundreds of British Columbians are dying in extreme heat — an event climatologists warn will happen with more and more frequency as the planet warms further. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, environmental groups pointed out on Tuesday that a major natural gas project has lost a key source of financing after shareholders in a French bank voted to limit their exposure to fracking.

And that’s just this week. The momentum of the investment effects as well as the public health effects of climate change seems to be picking up.

The climate crisis is a public health crisis and an economic crisis all at once, and like we saw with COVID-19, our hesitation to deal head-on with the complicated bundle of issues will cost us dearly.

And, as was the case with COVID, climate change hurts the poor and ill-housed the most:

When the pandemic first gripped us a year ago now, vulnerable people were hurt first — seniors, people in crowded homes, the poor. The federal government moved in with billions of dollars in income support and scrambled to find masks, medical equipment and protective gear around the world. But not before the virus took hundreds of lives, hitting low-income neighbourhoods and seniors’ homes especially hard.

The heat wave is hurting the same bunch, taking the lives of more than 200 people in the past few days.

“We are seeing this weather can be deadly for vulnerable members of our community, especially the elderly and those with underlying health issues,” Cpl. Mike Kalanj of the Burnaby RCMP said this week.

In the end, we threw everything we had at COVID. The climate crisis demands the same kind of response. There will be those who will say it costs too much. They're misinformed:

The Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, has just released a new assessment of the long-term state of the country’s finances, and has concluded that the federal government — despite all the pandemic spending — is in fine shape. So are Quebec and Nova Scotia, and even Ontario.

The other provinces, not so much. And as a growing proportion of the population ages and moves out of the workforce, health costs will increase steadily. That imbalance needs to be taken care of, either through increased federal transfers or higher taxes — or both.

We must heed the lessons of the crisis we have just lived through.

Image: Getty Images

Mnuchin's Madness

Last week, at Davos, Steve Mnuchin told Greta Thunberg to go back to school and study economics. Paul Krugman writes:

One can only surmise that Mnuchin slept through his undergraduate economics classes. Otherwise he would know that every, and I mean every, major Econ 101 textbook argues for government regulation or taxation of activities that pollute the environment, because otherwise neither producers nor consumers have an incentive to take the damage inflicted by this pollution into account.

And burning fossil fuels is a huge source of environmental damage, not just from climate change but also from local air pollution, which is a major health hazard we don’t do nearly enough to limit.

The International Monetary Fund makes regular estimates of worldwide subsidies to fossil fuels — subsidies that partly take the form of tax breaks and outright cash grants, but mainly involve not holding the industry accountable for the indirect costs it imposes. In 2017 it put these subsidies at $5.2 trillion; yes, that’s trillion with a “T.” For the U.S., the subsidies amounted to $649 billion, which is about $3 million for every worker employed in the extraction of coal, oil and gas.

Without these subsidies, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would still be investing in fossil fuels.

But, even though investing in fossil fuels doesn't  make economic sense, the fossil fuel industry still calls the shots. Why? Krugman says it comes down to one word -- greed:

The bigger issue, however, is sheer greed.

Given the scale of subsidies we give to fossil fuels, the industry as a whole should be regarded as a gigantic grift. It makes money by ripping off everyone else, to some extent through direct taxpayer subsidies, to a greater extent by shunting the true costs of its operations off onto innocent bystanders.

And let’s be clear: Many of those “costs” take the form of sickness and death, because that’s what local air pollution causes. Other costs take the form of “natural” disasters like the burning of Australia, which increasingly bear the signature of climate change.

In a sane world we’d be trying to shut this grift down. But the grifters — which overwhelmingly means corporations and investors, since little of that $3-million-per-worker subsidy trickles down to the workers themselves — have bought themselves a lot of political influence.

Gordon Geckko famously claimed that greed is good. Apparently Mnuchin has drunk Gekko's Kool-Aide.

Image: birchbox.com

Can We Do It?

Robin Sears wonders if Canadians can come together to fight climate change. He writes:

Great social change rarely succeeds as a partisan project. How did we forget that lesson where the climate crisis is concerned? It is not clear when it became a partisan club wielded by progressive activists against “knuckle-dragging” conservatives. It was not true when Margaret Thatcher was an early acid rain pioneer, or when Jean Charest fought for real environmental change at the Rio Summit, or when Brian Mulroney fought hard on CFCs.

But sometime around the turn of the century many conservatives around the developed world decided that the climate crisis was an overhyped partisan attempt by the left to force bigger government, higher taxes and wealth distribution to the Third World from rich nations. The hapless Australian conservative leader brought a large chunk of coal into his parliament and slammed it defiantly on his desk. Donald Trump bragged how much “Trump Digs Coal.”

Progressives wear a lot of the blame for this increasingly adolescent war of torqued rhetoric and insult. Little deference was paid to the millions of working people around the world whose lives depended on their jobs in oil and gas, coal mining and the forests.

The divide is deep. And it will take a lot of effort to bridge it:

So now it is the task of every responsible Canadian politician to begin building rather than bombing fragile bridges across the climate divide. Federal politicians should refrain from sneering at those who disagree with their approach to pricing carbon and seek possible shared paths forward. Progressives need to get much more serious about “off-carbon” economic strategies that give some comfort to the workers who will face the brunt of such a transition — as Rachel Notley attempted.

And federal Conservatives will hopefully recall their great environmental victories of decades past — protecting the Great Lakes, acid rain, CFC’s — and drop the Harper-era climate denial childish rhetoric, and acknowledge the reality that we now see the impact of daily.

Then maybe this second man-made partisan climate crisis — the one that makes progress impossible, by holding real change hostage to partisan tribal warfare — can be over. As we did on equal marriage, on linguistic and Indigenous respect and reconciliation, and on immigration, we can then begin to build a new Canadian consensus, this time on saving the planet.

The big question still remains: Can we do it in time?

Image: US News And World Report

Racing Toward An Uninhabitable Planet

William Rees believes that the climate crisis could cause mass human extinction. He writes:

On Aug. 15, in a memorable session of the BBC’s HardTalk, [Roger] Hallam irritated multiple cultural nerves by claiming, on the basis of “hard science,” that six billion people will die as a result of climate change in coming decades.

More specifically, our ruling elites’ inaction and lies on climate change will lead to climate turmoil, mass starvation and general societal collapse in this century. Normally unflappable HardTalk host, Stephen Sackur, just couldn’t wrap his mind around Hallam’s unyielding assertions.

There are lots of scientists who are as sceptical as Sachur:

One key to understanding these scientists’ rejections is their language. They assert that there is “no mainstream prediction” nor analysis in the “peer reviewed literature” that climate change will precipitate such catastrophic human mortality.

But keep in mind that scientists are reluctant, for professional reasons, to go far beyond the immediate data in formal publication. Moreover, organizations like the United Nations, including even its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are so dominated by economists’ concerns and bent by political considerations that extraneous noise obscures the scientific signal.

But, if you look at data on the human population explosion, Hallam's claim becomes quite believable:

When something is growing exponentially, it has a constant doubling time. For example, a population growing at two per cent a year will double every 35 years. Interestingly, the increase that occurs during any doubling period will be greater than the sum of the increases experienced in all previous doublings.

As the figure below shows, it took 200,000 years for the human population to reach its first billion in the early 1800s. In other words, population growth was essentially negligible for 99.95 of human history. But when sustained exponential growth kicked in, it took just 200 years — 1/1000th as much time — for the population to top 7.5 billion early in this century!

The same exponential math applies to the climate crisis:

As much as a decade ago a climate symposium organized to discuss the implications of a 4 C warmer world concluded, “Less than a billion people will survive.” Here [Hans Joachim] Schellnhuber is quoted as saying: “At 4 C Earth’s... carrying capacity estimates are below 1 billion people.” His words were echoed by professor Kevin Anderson of the U.K.’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change: “Only about 10 per cent of the planet’s population would survive at 4 C.”

Similarly, in May of this year, Johan Rockström, current director of the Potsdam Institute opined that in a 4 C warmer world: “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.... There will be a rich minority of people who survive with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden world.” Meanwhile, greenhouse gas concentrations are still increasing.

Keep in mind that a global temperature increase averaging 4 C means land temperatures would be 5.5 to 6 C warmer away from the coasts. Much of the tropics would be too hot for humans and many densely populated parts of the temperate zone would be desertified. A 4 C warmer world map suggests that as much as half the planet would become uninhabitable. (A ‘4 C world’ assumes business-as-usual or no new climate policies in coming decades. Note, however, that known and unknown ‘feedback’ mechanisms could make 4 C possible, even with new politically acceptable policies in place.)

We are racing -- blindly -- toward an uninhabitable planet.

Image: Countercurrents

Our D Day?

In the wake of the 75th anniversary of D Day,  some are drawing analogies between the climate crisis and the Second World War. Certainly, Elizabeth May sees a connection. Susan Delacourt writes:

Here in Canada, Elizabeth May and the Green party have put this comparison at the heart of the plan recently unveiled as “Mission Possible.”

One of the more intriguing components of the plan is to form a “survival cabinet” made up of members from all parties, a suggestion inspired by the wartime cabinets of Winston Churchill and William Lyon Mackenzie King.

May has been making the link between climate change and war for some time now, going back at least to last fall, when she spoke in the House during the emergency debate on the findings of the International Panel on Climate Change — that’s the panel that warned the world it just had 12 years to get its act together to avoid global catastrophe. 

It was Dunkirk, not D-Day, that May was talking about during that speech. She said she had been thinking about that mass evacuation of more than 300,000 trapped soldiers during the Second World War — an audacious act of leadership by Churchill that called upon civilians to help rescue troops trapped by the German forces at Dunkirk.

“Churchill of course, surrounded by naysayers, thought up a miracle, one that is clearly undoable. He asked, ‘How many civilian boats are there in Dover? We could get those civilians to cross the English channel and rescue over 300,000 men.’ Really? It was hardly plausible,” May said. “In this time and age we need to face the facts just as squarely. We need to tell Canadians that we have hope, to not despair or think it is too late.”

In many ways, these are dark days. But it's worth remembering that we're not the first generation to face dark days. What matters is how we respond to the darkness.

Image: Pinterest