climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Anything related to Canada or Canadians
This happened yesterday: 50,000 people march in Montreal to demand more climate action
I hadn’t heard about it in advance and I don’t know the people behind it or what will result of it. Still, the level of media attention and my experience of the March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate in Toronto make this case seem compatible with the view that people now take climate marches for granted and they don’t usefully put pressure on government to decarbonize.
In an ideal world, politicians would rely on high quality sources of information to determine what they should consider to be true factually about the world. They could then apply their political philosophies and ideologies to the question of what public policy ought to exist.
It’s not only conservatives who invert or pervert this process, beginning with their desired political conclusions and working back to facts from there, but the conservative tendency to do so is a noteworthy feature of contemporary politics. It’s not all post-Trump either. Conservatives have disliked the implications of everything from the study of human anatomy in the context of sexual differentiation to climate change, and have often assuaged their discomfort by just refusing to accept features of the universe they dislike.
Hence ‘People’s Party of Canada’ founder Maxime Bernier’s tweet about how “CO2 is NOT pollution. It’s what comes out of your mouth when you breathe and what nourishes plants.”
While the claim has the appearance of a scientific assertion, I think it’s a clear case of working back from policy preference to fact. Even for experts like Canadian conservatives it’s hard to deny chemically that when you burn coal, oil, and gas you generate CO2. If the policy priority is to keep expanding those industries as much as possible, it becomes necessary to recast that consequence as benign or even desirable. It doesn’t seem to matter much if that’s done in a way that contradicts other claims (like there being no need to curtail supply because we should focus on limiting demand, or saying that Canadian action to curb CO2 emissions would be pointless because China produces so much more).
To an extent we all suffer from motivated reasoning along the lines of ‘when the facts don’t seem to support my beliefs, find some new facts’. The importance of understanding the climate problem, however, means we need to demand more from ourselves and our leaders in this area. Not only are people who make these sorts of climate denier comments showing they cannot be trusted to be put in charge of climate and energy policy, they are proving that they aren’t competent to lead at all.
Tanya Whyte, one of my classmates at U of T, has been integrally involved in setting up Lipad: a searchable online database of everything said in Canada’s Parliament since 1901.
It’s sure to be valuable to everyone from elementary school students researching projects to academic researchers, journalists, and politicians.
There was a segment about it on TVO yesterday: Every Parliamentary Word Ever Spoken.
Incidentally, it seems that perhaps the first reference to climate change in Parliament was Cyril Lloyd Francis (Liberal) in 1974. Admittedly, it doesn’t discuss anthropogenic climate change, but simply the possibility that the climate will revert of its own accord to something less accommodating for humanity. Nonetheless, some of the predicted consequences align with what we now expect from continuing with unfettered fossil fuel burning.
Tzeporah Berman’s comments to the Alberta Teachers Association are well worth reading.
She highlights how Canada keeps operating with an outdated notion of how usable and competitive the bitumen sands are, and that the case for new pipelines collapses when you consider what the world as a whole needs to do to address climate change.
She also discusses the tone of the debate, which she sees as unhelpful, while acknowledging that civility itself cannot produce an answer. Canada is going to learn a hard lesson about the billions we wasted on the bitumen sands. The hope now is that we won’t waste billions more.
Canadians (and especially Canadian politicians) seem to often work from the assumption that so much has been spent on developing Alberta’s oil sands that Canada is now committed to continuing with the project.
There are many problems with the argument. Particularly when it comes to new investments, it could be seen as a case of the sunk cost fallacy at work. When you have an investment which may already be unproductive it can be psychologically appealing but not actually strategically smart to invest more instead of working away from the danger you have set for yourself.
One article estimates that $200 billion has been invested since 1999. For comparison, Canada’s GDP is about US$1.53 trillion. That makes all the investment in nearly 20 years equivalent to 13% of one year of all Canadian economic activity. The Economist recently reported that Americans spent $498 billion per year on cars and car parts. That shows how the bitumen sands investment is really pretty small in global terms (and also how much could be gained from discouraging American car use, breaking up the cycle of cosmetic annual vehicle replacements, and discouraging new automobile infrastructure).
Since climate change literally threatens the economic prosperity of the entire planet, there’s no comparison between the losses associated with shutting down the bitumen sands versus the losses associated with unchecked climate change. Of course, the bitumen sands aren’t the only source of climate change. What they represent, however, is the self-destructive determination of the richest, dirtiest states to keep investing themselves in the most destructive forms of energy. That worsens the collective action problem which we all face and suggests to all other states that there is no point on holding back from realizing short-term profits from fossil fuels for the sake of averting global catastrophe.
We can afford to stop new bitumen sands development, and then to go on to gradually close down existing production, making it possible for Canada to follow an emission reduction pathway that represents a fair share of what the world needs to do to keep below 2 ˚C or 1.5 ˚C of warming. We can afford to help the workers who will need new careers.
Unfortunately, politicians, the banks, and the corporate media are terrified about any future where bitumen sands development and pollution do not continue to rise, making the idea politically impossible in Canada for now. Hence the need to change our politics, media, and perhaps our economic system.
A carbon tax is a liberty-respecting, economically efficient mechanism to help address the threat of climate change and build a sustainable, prosperous society. It ought to be welcomed and supported by policy-savvy fair-minded conservatives who want to live up to their ideals while stewarding the integrity of the planet for future generations.
Meanwhile in Canada: UCP Leader Jason Kenney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford to hold anti-carbon tax rally in Calgary
Steve Paikin’s show on TVO is a video equivalent to CBC’s The Current, in that they both tackle matters of going political importance, tend to get into the substantive matters involved, and feature hosts that press guests to go beyond sound bites.
The recent segment with author Chris Hedges on American decline – “The Collapse of the American Empire?” – is a good use for half an hour:
They also had a good recent segment on Ontario’s Ford government undoing carbon pricing and much of the pro-climate legacy of the Liberal Wynne government: The Cost of Ford’s Energy Shake-up. He tries to press the anti-carbon pricing panellist to go beyond criticism and offer solutions, but the other panelists are pretty effective in arguing that right wing critics are privately content to do nothing about climate change (the representative spouts some nonsense about how we can just adapt, regardless of the severity).
Climate change activists often (plausibly) assert that “the science is settled” and present themselves as the informed contrast to people whose lack of scientific understanding or manipulation by fossil fuel actors has left them with the false belief that climate change isn’t happening.
At Toronto’s smallish Rise for Climate march on Saturday, I saw at least four people who were trying to convince people that chemtrails from aircraft are actually secret nefarious geoengineering by governments. Along with a large banner with pictures of aircraft chemtrails and frightening claims, they were distributing a colour handout:
It’s a bizarre document. It claims that chemtrails (themselves a conspiracy theory that has been around for many years) are a secret “form of climate change mitigation” via solar radiation management (SRM). It also claims, however, that “SRM aerosol cloud canopies trap more heat than is deflected by SRM programs”, so the supposed chemtrail program actually makes climate change worse. It also claims that along with the chemtrails “associated microwave transmission atmospheric manipulation” is “decimating the ozone layer”. It’s a fever dream re-interpretation of contemporary environmental politics, marrying an old conspiracy theory with new concerns about the real potential technology of geoengineering by solar radiation management. They throw in that the geoengineering chemtrails cause autism, along with allergies and dementia, and claim that the program “was fully deployed immediately after WWII”.
It’s crazy from top to bottom, from the claim that the secret program is somehow “illegal” to the contradictory claims that the program is “officially denied” but also that there are “countless official documents which confirm” it. It’s also a bit ironic given how self-conscious the public conversation about geoengineering has been, including about whether any sort of testing could produce unwanted side-effects and how any geoengineering ought to be governed.
When you lose trust in formal sources of information like governments and scientific bodies, it becomes impossible to have an informed position on climate change. The internet is full of nonsense, as everyone expects, and the environmentalist movement includes many who are highly credulous when it comes to claims that they are inclined to believe, whether those are about health and nutrition or about government conspiracies.
One frequent talking point from people who see no problem with continuing to enlarge the bitumen sands is that action by countries like Canada is pointless as long as larger places like India and China continue to build large amounts of coal capacity.
The Economist recently reported (in an issue with a cover story about how “the world is losing the war against climate change“):
Although coal is horribly filthy, India is utterly dependent on it. It generates more than three-quarters of the country’s electricity. Mining it and turning it into power accounts for a tenth of India’s industrial production. It provides jobs as well as power. Coal India, a state-owned coal miner that is the world’s largest, employs, at last count, 370,000 people, and there are up to 500,000 working in the coal industry at large. Far from reining in production, Coal India plans to increase it, from 560m tonnes in 2017 to 1bn tonnes by 2020. The government’s target for national production is 1.3bn-1.9bn tonnes by 2030.
…
Coal’s life will be made harder by increased competition from cheap solar and wind. Because of that, Mr Subramanian suggests that Mr Modi, his solar-evangelist boss, should slow down his roll out of renewable energy. “In my ideal world India should do a bit less renewable and a bit more coal for the next 10-15 years,” Mr Subramanian said in May. Some dismiss his comments as deliberately provocative. Yet he has rubbed salt into the wounds of environmentalists by describing efforts to wean energy-poor countries such as India off fossil fuels as “carbon imperialism”.
Coal’s staying power may be reinforced by India’s sense of immunity from international pressure to clean up its act. India resists the idea that it cannot put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere simply because the rich world, which produced much more per head during its own development, has used up all the available “carbon space”. In fact, the government continues to support coal projects to keep them afloat. A report by the Centre for Financial Accountability, a think-tank focused on India, says that coal projects in India received almost three times as much support as renewable-energy projects in 2017, mostly from government-owned banks.
Dealing with climate change is only possible on the basis of broad and effective international cooperation. States like India which are still building huge amounts of new energy infrastructure have the capacity to make choices that will make avoiding catastrophic climate change impossible. Persuading them to make different choices requires many things, including financial and technical assistance, but critically it requires that countries like Canada be willing to move first and accept what seems like an economic sacrifice for the sake of a better future for everyone. I say “seems” like a sacrifice because in a world with extreme climate change the cash Canada is banking through continued fossil fuel development is liable to be meaningless.
Everyone who has to give something up or adjust their lifestyle about decarbonization seems to raise some kind of ‘fairness’ argument: why should I give up what I feel I deserve? Why should I act when others aren’t doing so? Countries like India where extreme poverty remains widespread have a genuine and convincing case that they should not have to sacrifice important human welfare developments for the sake of global decarbonization. Still, coal is so awful once you add up the health, environment, and climate costs that even the poorest places with the worst problems should not still be deploying it. For Canada and other rich states to credibly encourage that requires both far more aggressive domestic action to stop fossil fuel development and the determination to provide sufficient technical and financial assistance to help states like India decarbonize quickly enough to help us all avoid global catastrophe.
There’s a lot that’s unnerving about the rise of China: their no-questions-asked support for authoritarian regimes, the worsening arms race they are in with the US and others, the surveillance state they have developed, and their massive contribution to climate change, to start with. One element that hits close to home is how their gaokao university entrance exam — which tests loyalty to the Chinese state as well as knowledge — is starting to be accepted for admission to western universities including the University of Toronto and McGill.
Judging by my own teaching experience, a significant fraction of people admitted to university on the basis of Chinese credentials don’t have the English language and other skills necessary to succeed in an undergraduate program taught in English. It’s even more uncomfortable to think that people will be getting in using scores that were awarded for properly parroting back the ideological preferences of the Chinese government.