Are We Becoming Ungovernable?

 

Like the jackass who threw gravel at Justin Trudeau we're plainly becoming unruly but that's not the point. Are we, as a nation, a society, becoming ungovernable? Are we disposed to do what is required to achieve the best continuation of our nation and our people?

This election has revealed the blithe disregard our leaders show to the looming existential threat, climate change.  The candidates all have the same refrain. They're all talking shit when it comes to adaptation and mitigation. Each of them recites some promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions by X per cent by year Y and that's about it. These are not serious people whether it's Justin or Erin, Jagmeet or Annamie. 

Don't get me wrong. Cutting emissions, decarbonizing our society and our economy, is vitally important but, without more, it will accomplish very little. It's sort of like battling the fire in the kitchen while ignoring the blaze consuming the rest of the house.

You can gauge our leaders' sincerity by what they're not talking about. They won't mention the peril we're in or how much more difficult, costly and dangerous life will be for our children's and grandchildren's generations and those that will follow them.  That might invite unwelcome questions about what we need to be doing now to minimize the damage we'll inflict on society in the 2030s and the 2040s and the 2080s. A programme on the scale of the postwar Marshall Plan to secure Canadians two, three, even four generations hence. 

It's easy to write them off as a bunch of self-serving bastards who, like their predecessors, prefer to kick the hard questions down the road but what if the truth is even worse? What if they're dishing up gestural measures because they know things we don't?

Here's an example. In the early years of the climate debate the rationale was that we had to arrest and reverse man-made GHG emissions. If we failed we might trigger runaway global warming from natural feedback loops.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Earth was a repository of safely sequestered carbon. Some of it was mineralized, coal the best example. Millions of years had transformed other organic material into oil and gas fields just waiting to be tapped.  Then there was the newer stuff - methane and CO2 - safely frozen in the tundra and underlying permafrost or in sea and lake bed clathrates.

First we went after the coal as stronger nations industrialized. Then we switched over to oil and gas as our economies grew. All man-made stuff. We got it out of the ground. We burned it. We turned some of it into greenhouse gases that slowly overwhelmed our atmosphere.

It took a while for the consequences of our carbon-economies to spread through the public consciousness about 40 years ago. That's when we realized we were already in trouble and things were going to get a lot more dangerous if we didn't change course. That resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, establishing the Framework Convention on Climate Change that has been celebrated with annual summits or COPs to celebrate how much worse we're getting.  This November we'll meet at COP26 in Glasgow. 

Now the climate crisis is beyond argument save for the idiots who think there's a tracking chip in vaccines and the Earth is flat. Those are the folks that will be voting for Maxime Bernier's People's Party next week.

As for the others, they're all about cutting emissions and carbon pricing and reining in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. The Greens are, naturally, the most ardent. The Tories are at the other end of the scale. That's about it. 

That's how the political caste views climate change. It's something to be regulated, managed. It is a priority only to the extent it doesn't really impair other priorities. 

But what if this is a real emergency? What if it is already much worse than any of our leaders will admit? 

Last week the Guardian's veteran enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, dealt with the subject our politicians won't - tipping points.  We're already on the verge of a climate catastrophe, warns Monbiot, and we're heading for somewhere between 2.9 and perhaps 6 degrees Celsius of heating. Let's put it bluntly. That's the end of civilization. At this stage, emissions targets and carbon pricing are gestural at best.

Canada has its very own climate nerd. He's Paul Beckwith, a paleontologist at both Carleton and Ottawa University.  This fellow has fleshed out Monbiot's warning with a review of recent scientific papers that take this issue well past the op-ed column. Before you vote, take a look at these.

What are we to make of this? Here's the bottom line. The climate crisis is real. It's here. It's killing people. It is record-setting. It's able to erase entire towns. It is undermining our food security. But to our political leaders it's still just a political football, nothing more. 

Yes, climate breakdown is the gravest threat our nation has ever faced. Yes, it could be existential. Yes, your party of choice really doesn't give a tinker's dam. The current regime has a schizophrenic climate policy, empty promises and a brand new pipeline. Its main adversary wants to add yet another pipeline to tidewater, this one to the treacherous waters of BC's pristine north coast.

Has Canada become ungovernable. With the sort of leadership on offer, yeah.