Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Hayhoe on climate change and differing morals

“How do I talk about this … to my mother, brother-in-law, friend, colleague, elected official?” I’m asked this question nearly everywhere I go.

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Usually, they’ve already given conversation a try. They’ve boned up on a few alarming scientific facts. They’ve tried to explain how fast the Arctic is melting, or how bees are disappearing, or how carbon dioxide levels are rising. But their attempts have fallen flat. Why? Because the biggest challenge we face isn’t science denial. It’s a combination of tribalism, complacency, and fear. Most don’t think climate change is going to affect them personally, or that we can do anything reasonable to fix it; and why would they, if we never talk about it?

It’s important to understand what’s happening to our world and how it affects us. But bombarding someone with more data, facts, and science only engages their defenses, pushes them into self-justification, and leaves us more divided than when we began. On climate change and other issues with moral implications, we tend to believe that everyone should care for the same self-evident reasons we do. If they don’t, we all too often assume they lack morals. But most people do have morals and are acting according to them; they’re just different from ours. And if we are aware of these differences, we can speak to them.

Hayhoe, Katharine. Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. 2021. p. xi-ii

Related:

Climate anxiety is widespread among young people

Back in 2008, I wrote about the Future Leaders Survey and the gloomy views it uncovered among young people about the future of the planet.

Recently, The Lancet published a study based on a survey of 10,000 people aged 16–25 in 10 countries. It demonstrates that apocalyptic psychology is a broad-based phenomenon, not exclusively concentrated among climate change or environmental activists.

83% of those surveyed said people have failed to care for the planet; 75% that the future is frightening; 65% that governments are failing young people; and that just 31% think governments can be trusted.

See also:

Canada’s election 2021 climate change platforms

UBC professor Kathryn Harrison was interviewed by the CBC’s Front Burner: Where the major parties stand on climate change

See also:

Canada’s two kinds of environment ministers

Based on my experience of Canadian environment ministers (whatever the department is called at a given time), there are essentially two types. The rarer type is the genuine environmentalist who thinks they can get things done through the compromises of government. They’re true believers on climate change but rarely have much support from cabinet or the prime minister because what they want to do is not actually popular. Set in the abstract, people want to keep the climate stable and protect the planet. Give them the choice between that and something concrete, however, and you have the recipe for delay and misdirection which has been ongoing in Canada for 30+ years. I would say Stéphane Dion and Catherine McKenna are the clearest example of the genuine environmentalist set, and demonstrate how people with those priorities get sidelined. When you have no natural allies in cabinet because most of the other departments are pro-fossil (industry, transport, finance, natural resources, etc) the constraints of cabinet solidarity put ministers of this type in the position of unsuccessfully demanding the bare minimum behind closed doors, before defending inadequate plans to the public.

The other type of Canadian environment minister is the public relations spinmaster whose behaviour does not demonstrate any sincere concern about climate change, but simply the need to manage it as a PR issue. This is a much easier approach to the job since you can always just say nice things, avoid hard decisions, and cut dirty deals in the background. I feel like John Baird, Jim Prentice, Peter Kent, and Jonathan Wilkinson fall in this category. My father recently collected a set of letters on climate change for Minister Wilkinson (mine is here) and the experience illustrates how Wilkinson is a PR man for a government which in practice largely serves the same interests as the Harper Conservatives, but who work to maintain a false public and media narrative that they are bold environmental champions.

Part of the problem, surely, is that politicians have a hopelessly distorted understanding of the scale against which they should be judged. They give themselves kudos for being better than some of their electoral competitors, rather than comparing the scale of the efforts they propose against the scale of what needs to be done. The consequences are that the future becomes more dire for everyone, and that Canada will have an infrastructure and economic base poorly matched to what success in a post-fossil world will require.

Forgone fossil fuels

Back in 2012, Justin Trudeau said that “there’s not a country in the world that would find 170 billion barrels of oil under the ground and leave them there.”

At an event in June organized by Bank of America, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman supposedly said: “We are still going to be the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”

Since avoiding catastrophic climate change is chiefly a problem of prompt global fossil fuel abolition, such sentiments are positively frightening. Trudeau’s cynicism may not be entirely justified, however, as there are examples of government choosing not to develop fossil energy, either out of innate concern about climate change or because they expect such industries to be in decline as the world decarbonizes.

For example, Greenland has banned oil exploration and Quebec’s government rejected a $14 billion LNG export project.

A few examples don’t make a trend, and enormous investments in fossil fuels continue to be made. At the same time, every noble example provides a case that can be raised with politicians who say action is impossible or that nobody will do it. If countries like Canada which have become rich on a high-carbon trajectory and which maintain excessively high per capita emissions continue to refuse to decarbonize we perpetuate a global suicide pact in which we all end up with ruin because each jurisdiction scrambled to pull in as much fossil cash as possible beforehand.

Will Trudeau gamble on a 2021 election?

For weeks, the press has been full of reports about a potential election, with the Trudeau Liberals potentially hoping to replace the 147 seat minority which he won in the 2019 election with another majority like in 2015.

Speculation has reached the point that a prominent potential Liberal candidate has told the media that he won’t be running this time because of other commitments.

There is a common view that the ongoing implosion of the Green Party may be part of the rationale for going to the polls.

Presumably, Trudeau’s team at the Prime Minister’s Office has encouraging interal voter models, since they have allowed widespread speculation on an election and encouraged it with the traditional statements that the current Parliament isn’t working. Nonetheless, it may be a risky prospect. A Nanos poll found that only 26% of Canadians want an election. Furthermore, there is good cause to worry about another big new wave of COVID cases as protective restrictions are scaled back, people change their behaviour, and variants continue to spread within populations around the world where far too many people have refused vaccinations in the places where they are available. That could leave the government punished on both sides, first from those who support strong public health policies and feel let down by the government’s willingness to contain the pandemic, and also from the mega-libertarian crowd who have hated the precautions which have been taken and will rage if they are reimposed.

From a climate change perspective, it’s hard to know what to hope for. The Liberal government’s climate change policies have been deeply inadequate and sometimes counterproductive (insisting that fossil fuel development can continue, building long-lived infrastructure to that effect, refusing to set targets that are within the time period where the government will be accountable and which are compatible with a 1.5–2.0 ˚C limit and Canada’s fair share). The Conservatives would clearly be worse, as a central part of their pitch is dismantling the carbon pricing system which has been the Liberals’ main contribution with some notion of wooly support for technological development, The NDP and Greens might theoretically be better but (a) they can’t win given first-past-the-post and the preferences of Canadians and (b) it’s not clear their climate change policies would be better. The NDP has been perhaps the most inconsistent party, torn both by anti-environmentalist union sentiment and the party’s hope of replacing the Liberals on the centre-left, making them chiefly critics of that party. The Greens have far too little support to plausibly form a government, and tend to be riven anyway by campaigns to posture for moral purity. Ironically — at a time when people are opening up to the idea that climate change is the defining challenge of our time — the focus of the Greens is elsewhere.

Perhaps the best outcome would be an election that produces little change: a similar seat count, another Liberal minority, and a continued need to cooperate with other parties to stay in power. There is a case that a majority would let them act more boldly on climate, but I would say there is a stronger case that having to maintain support from other parties pushes them to do more than their status quo backers in the finance and resource industries would prefer.

Related:

Wet bulb temperatures and human death

The many human impacts of climate change are complex and often indirect, like how warmer winters in the mountains affect downstream agriculture. The most direct possible effects — however — have been on display in the brutal heat waves on the west coast, as well as elsewhere in the world.

CNN recently published an editorial by Ban Ki-moon and Patrick Verkooijen on the most direct imaginable way in which increased global temperatures can bring harm upon people:

Sweltering temperatures have become the norm in Jacobabad, a town of around 200,000 inhabitants in Pakistan’s Indus Valley that has become one of the hottest places on earth. Temperatures can top 126 degrees Fahrenheit and air conditioning is scarce, leaving the streets deserted and forcing farmers to till their fields at night.

The city, along with Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates, has temporarily crossed the threshold beyond which the human body cannot sweat enough to cool itself down. A “wet bulb” temperature of 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) — which factors both heat and relative humidity — can be fatal after a few hours, even assuming ideal conditions such as unlimited drinking water, inactivity or shade. In practice, the bar for this wet bulb temperature, which is measured by covering a thermometer with a wet cloth, is much lower — as shown by the deadly heat waves in Europe in 2003 that are estimated to have claimed 70,000 lives.

Our most basic biological function and a prerequisite and definition of life is the ability to maintain stable conditions inside the body compatible with the needs of our physiology and biochemistry; homeostasis is the term for maintaining internal conditions, and if you don’t have it you’re literally dead.

We’re already artificially coping with places which are literally unliveable without air conditioning, from scorching cities around the Persian Gulf to Phoenix and Las Vegas, which are also profoundly threatened by the loss of winter snowpack and lost river volume and reliability.

Canada submits new 2030 climate target

Canada is now promising the UN that it will cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40–45% below 2005 levels by 2030.

The government says emissions are already set to fall from 729 million tonnes (MT) in 2018 (the last year with final figures) to 468 MT by 2030.

Canada’s choice of a 2005 baseline sets it apart from the global standard of setting targets compared to 1990 emissions as required by the UNFCCC reporting guidelines, effectively forgiving 15 years in which bitumen sands output and Canadian GHG pollution rose substantially. Canada’s emissions rose from 600 MT to 747 MT between 1990 and 2005.

Related:

Linkages between the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and contention elsewhere

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Rashid Khalidi argues:

Israel’s apologists in Washington, London, and Berlin naturally trotted out the standard clichés about Israel’s right to self-defense, but they could not mask the changing tone both in the political arena and in the large demonstrations in support of Palestinians in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. For perhaps the first time, public discourse in all four of those countries (which share legacies of dispossessing indigenous peoples) featured discussion of the settler colonialist nature of generations of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Activists reinforced parallels to the oppression highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement, and many young Americans now connect the injustice they have seen in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, to what they saw in Sheikh Jarrah and other locales where security forces use the same U.S.-manufactured tear gas and the same militarized policing tactics.

…

Terms that were never employed in the past about Israel, such as “systemic racism,” “Jewish supremacy,” “settler colonialism,” and “apartheid,” are being debated and becoming part of U.S. and left-wing Israeli public conversations.

While it is far from my area of expertise and specialization, I do watch the media coverage on Israel’s ongoing inability to resolve a conflict between being Zionist, being democratic, and holding all the land they have.

It also crops up in intersectional climate change activism, which is based around the idea that each injustice should be understood alongside each other, and that strategies for resolving them all simultaneously should be pursued. Campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) campaigns have often experienced internal conflicts about whether it is strategic or ethically obligatory for them to express solidarity with Palestinians and condemnation for Israeli conduct. Oftentimes, this involves a discussion of whether Israel’s critics are antisemitic — one argument used to condemn and reject the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement intent on applying external pressure to Israel. This has been at the heart of recent ructions in Canada’s federal Green Party.

On the other side, those who are critical about linking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with issues like environmental protection see the debate as absorbing a lot of time and energy for little purpose. There’s little or no prospect that any statement by environmentalists will affect Israeli government conduct. Some would say the effort to link these conflicts stems from a desire for a feeling of personal moral purity among activists, rather than an assessment of what impact their actions could really have. As the catastrophic momentum and severity of climate change continue to worsen, there is a fair case to be made that we need to focus on the issue and not be diverted down unproductive tracks. Indeed, if some nefarious pro-fossil outfit wanted a strategy for distracting progressives from a focused and effective call for fossil fuel abolition, stirring up arguments about notional but passionately held disagreements in which those arguing have little or no actual influence would seem to be a sound strategy.