Politics – Page 39 – a sibilant intake of breath

How much has been put into the bitumen sands?

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.

Our appalling legacy

There’s another dire warning from the IPCC: Final call to save the world from ‘climate catastrophe’

There seems little reason to hope that people will react differently to this one than to the 1990, 1996, 2001, 2007, and 2014 reports.

Our collective future is a massive ethical blindspot. People who wouldn’t think about missing a pension contribution or not enrolling their kids in an enriched learning program are collectively deciding by default to ravage the planet which we all depend on, and our political and economic institutions are acting almost exclusively to encourage that outcome.

The right’s anti-carbon-tax hostility

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

Resistance to World Health Organization Ebola efforts

Another case of conspiratorial thinking, selfish politicians, and conflict threatening to make a deadly serious threat into a dire global emergency:

Pockets of “reluctance, refusal and resistance” to accept Ebola vaccination were generating many of the new cases, Salama said.

“We also see a very concerning trend. That resistance, driven by quite natural fear of this terrifying disease, is starting to be exploited by local politicians, and we’re very concerned in the run up to elections, projected for December, that that exploitation… will gather momentum and make it very difficult to root out the last cases of Ebola.”

Some people were fleeing into the forest to escape Ebola follow-up treatment and checks, sometimes moving hundreds of kilometers, he said.

There was one such case to the south of Beni, and another to the north, close to the riverbanks of Lake Albert. Both were inaccessible for security reasons.

Neighboring Uganda was now facing an “imminent threat”, and social media posts were conflating Ebola with criticism of the DRC government and the United Nations and “a range of conspiracy theories”, which could put healthworkers at risk.

Ebola was a particular fear of mine in childhood, and it remains very worrisome and uncomfortable where we now live in a world where periodic outbreaks are now treated largely as business as usual.

We’re still losing the fight against climate change

OPEC may not be the most disinterested source, but their projections are nonetheless disheartening:

In a forecast that will dismay environmentalists – and which questions the theory that oil company reserves will become “stranded assets” – Opec’s annual report significantly revised production estimates upwards. Most of the production increase will come from countries outside Opec, led by explosive growth from frackers in the United States, with China and India leading the increase in demand.

Opec expects global oil demand to reach nearly 112m barrels per day by 2040, driven by transportation and petrochemicals. That is up from almost 100m today and higher than last year’s projection.

Coal will continue to be be burned in record amounts, despite concerns about its impact on climate change. Opec estimates that coal usage in the OECD countries will plummet by a third by 2040, but it will increase by 20% in developing countries to reach five times the volumes burned in the west.

The world’s airlines will be the single fastest growing user of oil, increasing consumption by 2.2% a year on average, to 2040. However, the largest absolute growth is expected to come from road transport.

The number of vehicles on roads across the world are expected to leap from 1.1bn now to around 2.4bn in 2040. In its central scenario, Opec expects just 320m of those to be electric, a number that climbs to 720m in a scenario where battery-powered cars take off rapidly.

In short, knowing what a colossal threat climate change poses, and that the critical behaviour for averting the worst is decreasing fossil fuel use, the world seems set to keep burning heedlessly along, damn the consequences.

The researchers and trauma experts Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane write, “Reason and objectivity are not the primary determinants of society’s reactions to traumatized people. Rather … society’s reactions seem to be primarily conservative impulses in the service of maintaining the beliefs that the world is fundamentally just, that people can be in charge of their lives, and that bad things only happen to people who deserve them.”

I have frequently seen such irrational and defensive “conservative impulses” applied to organizational systems over the years, but perhaps never more than when I have collaborated with child protective services (CPS) workers and firefighters. Both groups have gruelling, scary, demanding jobs, and yet the way people react to them is strikingly different. CPS workers carry a heavy burden of feeling that they are hated—by everyone. Firefighters, on the other hand, tend to have the benefit of an age-old image of them as saviors and heroes. This contrast speaks to every level we’re touched on: the personal, the organizational, and the societal.

van Dernoot Lipsey, Laura and Connie Burk. Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others. 2009. p. 30–31 (ellipses in original)

saganangst — fear of nuclear war, and particularly nuclear winter

We live under constant threat of sudden destruction via nuclear war. It wouldn’t take that many warheads falling on major cities to darken the atmosphere — making the consequences of even a regional exchange (or the payload of a single ‘boomer’ sub) global, and potentially a threat to the integrity of human civilization. The control systems carry a frightening risk of malfunction, particularly in a crisis when nuclear-armed forces may be out of communication with higher level command and at immediate risk of nuclear attack.

The only safe option is to disarm as a global community — spare everyone the costs of the nuclear arms complex, while greatly diminishing the total severity of potential wars.

Open thread: shadow solutions to climate change

In the absence of real political solutions to climate change, Stephen Gardiner argues that: “we are susceptible to proposals for action that do not respond to the real problem. This provides a good explanation of what has gone wrong in the last two decades of climate policy, from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen. However, the form of such “shadow solutions” is likely to evolve as a the situation deteriorates. Some recent arguments for pursuing geoengineering may represent such an evolution.”

One example from today: Build walls on seafloor to stop glaciers melting, scientists say

Another example was back when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce suggested we could adapt to climate change by altering our physiology.

American decline on The Agenda

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).

Open thread: climate justice

Both in the literature on fossil fuel divestment and when speaking with divestment activists the concept or worldview of “climate justice” is prominent. A good example is Jessica Grady-Benson and Brinda Sarathy’s paper “Fossil fuel divestment in US higher education: student-led organising for climate justice“. They contend that climate change is increasingly seen as a social justice issue.

As I understand it, the key features of the “climate justice” perspective are the view that climate change is not a distinguishable issue that can be isolated from others like unjust power differentials, poverty, or racism. That analysis helps produce a program of action that emphasizes intersectionality: the efforts of those in one justice-based struggle to assist those involved in others, even if the immediate connection between say, maternal health in low-income countries and environmental policy in European municipalities or conditions in American prisons, is obscure. The conceptual motivation connects to both networking and political pragmatism, through the hope that social movements can be mutually reinforcing and therefore that alliances between climate change activists and those advocating for racial or economic justice will help everyone achieve their policy goals.

This climate justice terminology is comparatively new. In a post back in 2007 I used the term to refer to the question of the fair international distribution of burdens in addressing climate change: a perspective much more along the lines of institutionalist liberal environmentalism which basically accepts the existing order of the world and seeks to make the institutions that already hold power change their behaviour for the sake of their collective longer-term interests.

The liberal environmentalist account sees problems like climate change as techinical, scientific, and with the potential to be solved within existing institutions. Climate change is an unfortunate accidental product of fossil fuel energy that doesn’t automatically carry any moral lessons beyond that. British Comedian David Mitchell has a ‘soapbox’ talk describing this view succinctly.

One relevant consideration concerns motivation. Even if I accept it intellectually, Mitchell’s portrayal of climate change as an accident that nonetheless obligates a response may lack the emotional heft needed to actually produce a change in behaviour. Another key issue is the need to not only adopt decarbonization policies but to maintain them for long enough (decades) to avoid the worst possible climate change effects. Arguably, this requires a political consensus that extends beyond the left or progressives and, in fact, a political program that demands agreement on every progressive cause risks being alienating and ineffectual rather than a path to solidarity and success.

All these questions are intensely contested, and certainly cannot be resolved in a blog post or subsequent comments. On the one hand, the case that climate change is interwoven with other issues of injustice is highly convincing; it’s because some people are privileged over others that it’s so easy to allow unfettered fossil fuel use for the benefits it provides to the privileged while ignoring the harms it imposes on the marginalized, non-human nature, and future generations. It’s also plausible that the climate change movement needs to forge and maintain strategic alliances to succeed. In the end, we can’t know in advance what will work because we have never faced a problem like this before. We may never have the opportunity to do so again, since a sufficiently bad failure on climate change carries the risk of making all other human political projects moot. As such it seems obligatory to me to open up and maintain multiple paths to success, including those that require reaching beyond comfortable networks of people who broadly agree and solutions that consist of behaviours that we largely see as desirable anyhow. Stopping catastrophic climate change will mean giving up a lot, not only in terms of personal comforts and indulgences, but also in terms of comfortable political associations and worldviews.

Category: Politics