Category Archives: climate crisis

Video: Bali Ballyhoo

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Here’s the video of my appearance on CH News last Tuesday evening with Lorrie Goldstein from the Toronto Sun, debating the role Canada is playing in Bali. (As in, we don’t even seem to agree on the reality of what Canada is doing and saying, let alone if their actions are positive or not.)

You’ll note that Lorrie repeatedly claims that “no one” is saying that all countries should reduce their emissions by the same percentage on the same timeline. I guess he hadn’t seen this news story before we went to air (which is convenient, since otherwise he would have had to admit he disagrees with the government):

A Canadian environmental group says leaked federal document shows Canadian negotiators in Bali are under explicit instruction to undermine a fundamental principle of the Kyoto Protocol.

Climate Action Network Canada, an alliance of environmental groups, says the move is guaranteed to derail momentum as the Bali negotiations enter their critical final week.

“The leaked instructions direct Canadian negotiators to demand that poorer nations accept the same binding absolute emission reduction targets as developed nations,” the alliance said in an e-mail to The Canadian Press.

You’ll also note that Lorrie agrees with me at the end of the video when I say that the test of success in Bali will be whether or not countries agree to the level of reductions that the science tells us is necessary. Again, it turns out that Lorrie disagrees with the Conservative government on this point. Yesterday, John Baird reiterated that his government will not support a reduction in emissions greater than 20% from today, which doesn’t even come close to our modest Kyoto commitment, let alone the levels the IPCC and others say are necessary to avert massive climate destabilization.

Of course I agree that “every country must be part of the solution.” No one’s arguing against that. But soundbites notwithstanding, that’s very different from the strategy being pursued by the Conservatives. I remain convinced that the prime minister and the minister of the environment have no understanding of the science of climate change or its grave implications (and, conversely, its opportunities). If they did, their actions would be monstrous. And I’d much rather think of my prime minister as an ignoramus than a monster.

Live-ish At 5:30

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Just got back from taping an appearance for tonight’s not-so-appropriately-named “Live at 5:30” news program on CH Hamilton (which I’m told is channel 11 most places, including Toronto). The Toronto Sun’s Lorrie Goldstein and I debate (again, “ish”) what’s going on in Bali and what Canada’s role should be. Lorrie keeps rightly pointing out how complex the issue is, which probably means it shouldn’t be dealt with in 8-minute television double-enders, but there you have it. If you miss it at 5:30, it re-airs at 11:30 (at which time, I’m assured, it’s still called “Live at 5:30”).

Will we ever be on the same page?

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In an extremely thoughtful piece in Saturday’s Globe, Charles Montgomery uses some of my comments from a previous blog post on Bali as a spring-board for analyzing the ethical dimensions of the climate crisis.

On one side of “the perfect ethical storm” sit John Baird and Stephen Harper, moralizing about their position:

“It is simply unconscionable to think that only the [developed] countries can do the job themselves,” John Baird told Parliament. “We are not prepared to allow the big emitters, the big polluters like the United States, China and India, to get off the hook. We need all the big emitters on board, everyone with an oar in the water rowing together.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper also hinted at virtue and the ethics of his stance at last month’s Commonwealth summit in Uganda. “It’s the only right position,” he said of his efforts to block a deal that called on rich countries to accept binding targets on greenhouse-gas emissions.

The other side (where I am dutifully located) also uses “morally charged rhetoric:”

Activist Sunita Narain, for example, has warned that Canada would have “the blood of the poor” on its hands if it waits for developing nations before acting on climate change. Toronto Green Party candidate Chris Tindal has written that anything less than Canada’s full participation in Bali would be “an immoral failure on a grand scale.”

And this week KAIROS, a coalition of Canadian Christian groups, issued an open letter to Canada and the conference in Bali urging them to stand by the “obligations and moral leadership” of the Kyoto framework and to advocate for a “just” climate-change agreement.

This presents a problem, argues Dale Jamieson, a professor of philosophy and director of the Environmental Studies Program at New York University, since climate science realities (and therefore, the related ethical dilemmas) are very complex.

“If Jack steals Jill’s bike, it’s easy to see why that’s wrong and to have an intuitive sense that there must be compensation, that Jack should be punished. That’s pretty uncontroversial.”

But what, he asks, if Jack and a large number of unacquainted people set in motion a chain of events that prevents people in the future, or in some faraway part of the world, from ever having bikes? “That’s the challenge of climate change.”

And check out this disturbing observation by Donald Brown, a professor of environmental ethics, science and law at Penn State University, about what happens when we only discuss the “costs” of climate change in economic terms:

For starters, the IPCC measures benefits and harms in terms of global market value – incomes and gross domestic products – but it takes everything else off the table.

“This results in the bizarre effect that the lives of people in poor countries are virtually worthless compared to the lives of people in rich countries, since the measure of their value is their earning power.”

And here are some of the most important ideas in the story, and also one of the best explanations I’ve seen as to why the Harper-Baird approach is wrongheaded, despite sounding logical on the surface.

In October, Sunita Narain, director of the New Delhi-based think tank the Centre for Science and the Environment, flew to Guyana to brief Commonwealth finance ministers on an increasingly popular concept of climate justice among poorer countries.

It suggests that in a truly fair world, the right to use the atmosphere would be spread equally among the world’s people – an approach that takes into account not only per-capita emissions today, but how much each nation has already polluted the atmosphere.

However, by the time she was done, Ms. Narain says, the Canadian delegation had stopped listening. Perhaps, she suggests, because under either a per-capita or historic measure Canada has failed its ethics test miserably.

“Industrial countries like Canada have used the atmosphere so they could grow,” she says. “If you look at the total of those emissions from mid-1800s until recently, you find that the entire atmospheric space has already been colonized by the rich countries. Now, they tell the rest of us there’s no more atmosphere for us to use.”

From 1950 to 2000, Canadians used 707 tons of greenhouse gas per person – or about 44 times as much as the average Indian. And today we are emitting about 19 tons per person while countries such as China hover around the four-ton mark.

But the IPCC has concluded that to avoid catastrophic climate change, a safe level of per-capita emissions would amount to about two tons for every individual on Earth.

Actually, “wrongheaded” might be too generous a descriptor for the Conservative non-plan. Montgomery gives the last word to Prof. Jamieson, who’s a little more, shall we say, critical.

[The Conservative government’s suggestion that all nations must “grab an oar and row at the same pace”] is a powerful metaphor, but ethicists such as Prof. Jamieson say it is slightly “perverse,” considering our skyrocketing jump in emissions. And it is a jarring departure from the position the country has taken since 1992, when it agreed with other rich nations that it would have to start rowing first.

It could also lead to a more obvious ethical problem: total inaction.

“Now, Canada’s position could be interpreted as saying we’re not going to do anything unless other countries go first,” Prof. Brown observes. “These kind of arguments can’t be excused. They just don’t meet ethical scrutiny now that climate change is already killing people around the world.”

That’s a damning (and, in my view, accurate) indictment of this government. So, will we (meaning the human race) ever build a large enough foundation of common ground to solve the greatest challenge we’ve ever faced as a species? The answer must be yes, as failure cannot be an option. (Or, as Petra Kelly put it, “if we don’t do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.”)

On the other hand, will this government ever “be on the same page” with reality? All evidence suggests otherwise. They oppose reality itself with a dogmatic vigilance resembling the Catholic church’s initial reaction to evolution. The continue to pontificate their talking points even when they know they’re not true. No, the government will not change, therefore we must change the government.

We Will Not Save The Environment Until…

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With all the focus on the politics and math of mitigating climate change (which is getting exceptionally urgent, by the way), it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. Last night Spacing Magazine launched their 10th issue, the “green issue.” Inside the front cover is the following, by Pier Giorgio DiCicco, Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto, edited from a speech at the Walk21 conference two months ago. It is, IMHO, profound.

After the many seductions, logical and visionary, have been played—I shall make a plea for the salvific aspect of the act of walking. Yes, salvific. Not just to save the environment, but to save ourselves, and not just by regarding the environment. We will not save the environment until we have found a reason for living together. Until we discover civic care in each other, until we restore the city to its definition as a place of unexpected intimacies, not just as a place of amenities, convenience, business, and entertainment, we will not have sustainability. For sustainability is about replacing an ethic of entitlement with an ethic of sufficiency. And sufficiency is what we find in each other. In an era that glorifies independence and even inter-dependence we are shy of admitting the awful truth: that is, we are dependent on each other, not by connectedness, but because we are one body breathing the same air. It is not cars that are the enemy of the pedestrian. The enemy is the absence of civic communion, the lack of empathic citizenship, our inability to see cohabitation as that place where we enjoy ourselves, by enjoying others. All human traffic is under siege, because it is becoming increasingly purposed, guarded, and negotiated. The body is not just a means of locomotion. It is our chief means of restoring a city to its raison d’être, its purpose. And that purpose is civil encounter.

But civic trust has been corroded. Our cities are becoming disinhabited, even when the streets are safe and landscaped; gentrified neighbourhoods are no more interactive than the brownfields and cloverleafs they replaced. The problem is not, fundamentally, to get people to slow down, or to move without being toxic to their environment. The problem is to make people aware that anonymity is as toxic to the ecology of heart as hydrocarbons are toxic to the atmosphere. The problem is how to restore intimacy, curiosity, trust, and play into the happenstance encounter of citizens, in an era when the happenstance and the unpredictable are a threat.

When all the cars will have been taxed or tolled on their way to the cities, when bike paths and parks will have reconfigured our neighbourhoods, when safe and cleaner transportation has cut emissions, a fundamental question will remain. Is the safe city, the sanitized city, the sustainable city, the same as the livable city? If all we want is clean and well-designed cities, it will likely come to pass. But in the long run, to save the environment means that we will want to save the environment not just for ourselves, but for each other. And to reverence each other means that we will have to discover each other.

I wonder if any of the delegates and observers to Bali channeled Dr. Eleanor Arroway on arrival, saying “they should have sent a poet.”