"Dear Peter" or Apocalypse and Other Distractions.

 

My friend, Peter Lowry, wrote a timely and important post, "It's raining in Greenland."  I sent Peter the following reply that I thought might also deserve to be posted:

Yes, Peter, it is raining in Greenland. Wildfires now feed on the tundra far inside the Arctic Circle. Sea levels rise. We now have a phenomenon, flash drought, to go with flash floods, the latter of which made main streets disappear in central Europe this summer and then devastated Tennessee a month later.  The Colorado River that once supplied the freshwater needs of five states is drying up. Western North America is ablaze.

Out to sea, marine life - fish, marine mammals, sea birds, the lot are migrating ever poleward as the southern oceans continue to heat. Salmon are unable to spawn in rivers that are now too hot to permit reproduction.  In California the beaches are again littered with the bodies of baby seals that succumb to starvation as their mothers have to swim ever further out to sea to find food, preventing them from nourishing their young. To the east, the Atlantic Conveyor, the regulator of temperatures for much of Europe and eastern America, is grinding to a halt. 

I don't know if you read Andrew Potter's recent op-ed in the Globe. Here are a few lines:

"One of the more alarming features of our current moment is how a lot of serious things seem to be going wrong at the same time."

"What these and other looming crises have in common is that they are marked by a failure of some combination of political conviction, state capacity and collective action."

"When governments were moved to action, they found themselves hamstrung by a population riven by tribalistic responses (such as mask mandates) and magical thinking (such as with anti-vax beliefs). We are, increasingly, a society unable to confront and rationally address the problems we face." 

Opinion: The COVID-19 pandemic. Climate change. Culture wars. For the West, the party is over - The Globe and Mail

Canada's prairies are facing a near-record crop failure thanks to megadrought and a plague of grasshoppers. Prices are already marching upward in our grocery stores and there's more of that to come.

Potter is right, "the party is over."  Now, what are we doing about it.  Polls show the climate crisis is the top concern of the voting public.  Yet where is there a credible climate action plan from the New Dems, the Liberals, the Conservatives, even the Greens?  Nowhere to be seen.

Why aren't the leaders jumping all over this? Because we have reached the point where adaptation and mitigation would stand our neoliberal economy on its head. 

Winston Churchill understood emergencies. He said that "Sometimes it is not enough that we do our best.  Sometimes we must do what is required."

What is required is not even up for discussion in our political ranks. We don't want to talk about it because we know the public doesn't want to hear it.

A week after Potter's op-ed, Cambridge political economist, John Rapely, wrote:

"As Canadians head to the polls, they might want to contemplate the existential choice they now face. Either we can continue living in the style to which we've grown accustomed, or we can bequeath a planet to our descendants that is habitable. Those of us who have children in our lives might consider having that conversation - of telling them, openly and frankly, which option we've decided on."

Opinion: Tesla owners have no reason to gloat about saving the environment - The Globe and Mail

So what is the smart choice in this election? There is none. Not Liberal, not Conservative, not New Democrat, and, sadly, not Green either.  We've got billions to spend on pipelines and, according to those raving leftists at the International Monetary Fund, tens of billions annually in direct and indirect subsidies to lavish on the fossil fuel giants, but precious little to defend the habitability of Canada for future generations.

As Jared Diamond explains in his book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," there is a rich history of societies that have chosen, quite knowingly, their own failure. It usually entails a current generation pursuing policies that doom future generations. That's what brought down Mesopotamia. The "fertile crescent" between the Tigris and Euphrates relied on river water needed to irrigate the fields. In the proximity of the Gulf those rivers were slightly brackish.  Over decades the salt accumulated until it rendered the soil barren.  They knew what was coming but they chose to kick that problem down the road for future generations. 

One feature of these failures, is that collapse comes on very suddenly right when the doomed society reaches its zenith. It's like inflating a party balloon for a kid's birthday. It expands and expands and then - boom.

We're at a Thelma & Louise moment, Peter. We're at the cliff edge. We might even be over it.

We have this conceit of being "progressives." How so? Theodore Roosevelt, even Edmund Burke, recognized the obligation of each generation to leave the land better than we received it. To Burke it mattered not that you had title to the land. You were ultimately just its tenant.  Roosevelt said it was a poor farmer who "skins the land" and leaves what remains to his children.  In our time we are relentlessly skinning the land - and the air we breathe and the water that sustains all life on Earth. This is not just an ideology, it's madness. 

You and I, Peter, may escape the worst of this but I fear greatly for my children and my eldest is nearing 40.

The engines drone overhead as the bombs fall on Piccadilly and we're debating affordable housing and daycare. Inside I scream "deal with our real problems, save our children" but I keep it to myself lest I be seen as one of those cartoon characters waving a sign "The End is Nigh."

It is almost impossible to believe this is happening yet here we are.