The Art of the Possible. Is It Enough? Not Anymore.


We're in a crisis. Any doubt of that was erased by the summer's killer heat domes, worsening wildfires, and prairie droughts. It's also manifest in our warming and acidifying seas, sea level rise, disease and pest migration, the pace of species extinction and biodiversity loss, the rapid warming of the Arctic, on and on.

Our challenge is not only global - mitigation, slashing greenhouse gas emissions - but also domestic - adaptation, implementing measures so that we can better withstand these worsening impacts.

At the moment both fall within the bailiwick of our ministry of Environment and Climate Change. That's plainly not enough.

Flash back to 2015 when our new prime minister proudly circulated the mandate letters he had given each member of his cabinet. Mr. Trudeau proclaimed that, in his government, each minister would have a dual mandate - to boost the economy and whatever their designated ministry was normally supposed to handle. Even his first environment minister, Catherine McKenna, was quick to get the message. Environmentalism was fine so long as it didn't create problems for economic expansion.

That was 2015. Now we're in the closing months of 2021. What is now inarguably Mr. Trudeau's Canada is the bad boy of the G7 on greenhouse gas emissions and way short of its own modest targets. This prime minister has taken it upon himself to push through a bitumen pipeline that the private sector, perhaps realizing that bitumen is a soon to be stranded asset, refused to touch. He says all the right things and then does the wrong things. 

Giving Steven Guilbeault the environment portfolio was a good thing but it's far from enough. We need more than a rookie cabinet minister whose heart is in the right place. Guilbeault needs muscle, the powers that a prime minister might be unwilling to entrust to an unproven minister.

Trudeau could begin by issuing new mandate letters to his cabinet. He should be giving each minister a dual mandate that puts climate change and defending the environment on a co-equal footing with his or her other responsibility. This is a whole-of-government challenge. It is a Herculean chore that cannot be fairly dumped on the shoulders of a rookie.

This is a dual jurisdiction challenge, provincial and federal. The feds will have to herd the provincial cats to reach some national consensus on how to fight this battle across our disparate regions. It's akin to wartime. Everyone must shoulder the load, even recalcitrant premiers. You can't dump that responsibility on one, newly-minted environment minister and expect to get very far. 

For once we have a challenge, an existential threat, that does not lend itself to the political sop about "the art of the possible." Churchill knew that there are times when it is not enough that we do our best. Sometimes we must do what is required.  Canada is not a "post-national state." It's time Mr. Trudeau rose to the occasion.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more