Leaping
Back
from the Environmental Precipice
September 2015
Click square for index
If the wars and conflicts producing
unprecedented numbers of refugees and
appalling security issues on the ground for
Syrians were not enough, my reading on
climate change and inaction were just as
depressing.
Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything:
Capitalism vs the Climate, Vintage Canada
Edition, 2015, shifts her critical eye onto
the climate change situation but draws on
her earlier insights into the implications
of international trade agreements. At 532
pages it is a sizeable book with themes
based on site visits and interviews of
people involved rather than desk research.
Basically, her bad news is that the
atmospheric garbage can is already full of
CO2. Tinkering with a few gadgets is not
what is called for. Humanity has to pull
back from pumping out and burning fossil
fuels. Swift changes to survive require a
revolution in the way everything is done:
regulation, corporate freedoms, economy and
finance.
Klein’s introduction notes that “we” and
“our leaders” refuse to face climate change
for the crisis that it is – even as droughts
and floods and winds do unprecedented
damage. Delays and denials in the climate
change crisis went hand in hand with an
extraordinary growth of the corporate
globalization process, with more and more
free trade deals and free trade zones. The
pillars of our time of market fundamentalism
are: privatization of the public sphere;
deregulation of the corporate sector; and
lower corporate taxation. These have
“systematically sabotaged our collective
response to climate change.” The
stranglehold of market logic over public
life made direct and obvious responses to
climate change, such as regulating, “seem
politically heretical.”
Klein sees a choice: allow climate change to
drastically change and possibly destroy our
world; or, change everything about “our”
economy. Indeed, the first chapter, “The
Right is Right,” develops the notion that
actions to address climate change are a
threat to the economic status quo. It
explores the history of climate change
denial as ‘funded and promoted by big oil’
(my words). It notes how free trade deals
provide for legal dispute mechanisms so that
corporations must be compensated should the
public sector undermine profits by, for
example, producing solar panels that
supposedly unfairly compete – as happened in
Ontario. Corporations are not held
accountable for components produced
overseas. Then there is a fairness issue
when rich polluting countries tell countries
that begin to enjoy electricity for the
first time to pull back to avoid climate
change.
An even more depressing book is Elizabeth
Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe,
Bloomsbury, 2015. This is a collection of
articles written for the New Yorker in which
the author describes visits to places that
reveal a special dimension of climate change
– like disappearing glaciers, the ocean
currents that depend on arctic ocean warming
-- or scientific projects exploring arctic
ice, or temperatures over millennia via
cores of permafrost, or migration of species
of tree or plant or butterfly in eras of
very different temperatures. Chapter by
chapter another nail in our collective
coffin is identified and possibilities of
dramatic uncontrollable changes in the
previously steady features of the climate of
our world are unveiled.
Basically there is the same urgency that
Naomi Klein conveys – climate change is
already well under way. A whole ancient
civilization ended in Akkad on account of an
extraordinary period of drought. Its story
speaks to us. The era of more extreme
climate events that we are in is serious
news for all human settlements. Delays have
cost. Time has been lost. All may not yet be
lost, but there has to be urgent action.
Some partial comfort is the last chapter of
Kolberg’s book. First, in the late 1990s the
small Danish Island of Samsø was the site of
a social movement, where a traditional
farming community formed energy cooperatives
and held seminars on wind power. They
removed furnaces and replaced them with heat
pumps. Fossil fuel use was halved by 2001.
By 2005, the island was producing more
energy from renewable resources than it was
using. Although one tiny community, this
island transformed its energy system in less
than a decade.
Secondly, scientists linked to the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology figured the
sustainable level of energy use for the
world – 2000 watts per person per year. Then
they started a project – the 2000 Watt
Society – to lower use to this level of
consumption. On this measure India is a 1000
watt society, China a 1500 watt society,
European states 6000 watt societies and
Canada and the US 12000 watt societies. The
Society claims the 2000 watt per person is
do-able with known technologies now. To me
it seems difficult. One long air flight in a
year almost guarantees that a person’s 2000
watt target will be passed. Even an
automobile makes it hard. Kolbert found only
one of the scientists able to meet the
2000kw limit comfortably. He is happily
using a well-insulated house, some green
technology, public transport, no car and no
air travel.
Getting a society to do that seems to me not
realistic as of 30 September 2015. There has
to be urgent action from somewhere to move
us to the kind of deep change that Samsø
made. The Pope, on his, visit to the USA
near the end of September made a call to
respond to the urgent environmental issues
and – more remarkably – on 29 September the
head of the Bank of England warned that
unless the environment is given its proper
due, a lot of investments are at risk of a
shock. This is presumably a warning to the
fossil fuel industry in line with Naomi
Klein’s analysis. So some calls for serious
action are now reaching people. And a
remarkable Manifesto appeared.
On September 15th the Globe and Mail
published the Leap Manifesto, a remarkable
declaration signed by Naomi Klein and a
number of notable Canadians as well as
Oxfam, Greenpeace, Black Lives Matter. It
calls for recognition of the treaties with
the Aboriginal Peoples, 100% renewable
energy, communities controlling the new
energy systems to light homes and to
redistribute wealth, training to allow
workers from extraction industries to
participate in the new energy industries, a
move to more localized agriculture,
regulation of corporations and stopping
damaging extractive projects, a progressive
carbon tax, cuts to military spending, and
town hall meetings to discuss the switch in
economy.
The next day the Globe Editorial did a
patronizing put down of the Leap Manifesto
along the lines of “the lefties coming out
of the woodwork”. Just what Mulcair
needs when he’s trying to show Canadians the
left isn’t really so bad.
As it happens, the book group we belong to
had just read a biography of Tommy Douglas
which included the production of the CCF
manifesto back in the 1930s. After hearing
about that time, I found the details of the
Leap Manifesto rather apt and timely.
September 2015 is a time that calls for a
dramatic rethinking of economic priorities.
At the time of writing, Alberta oil is as a
matter of fact no longer the main basis for
the future of Canada’s economy. I don’t
regard myself as particularly left and I
found the Manifesto reasonable. I remember
participating in town hall meetings about a
Charlottetown Accord to renew Canada’s
Constitution. It was a project of the
Mulroney Conservative government. The Leap
Manifesto’s suggestion of town hall meetings
about the economic shifts needed and how to
make them is a reasonable and tested one.
Perhaps the worst thing about these
depressing insights into climate change and
economic priorities is that individual
action is moved to an unrealistic level.
That is fine, but it seemed to me that by
changing our car, my wife and I were able to
enjoy our cottage using half the gas. By
using the subway around town from our condo
we helped a bit more. The LED bulbs are
everywhere at the cottage and at the condo.
But we will participate in pumping out more
CO2 than our 2000 watts allowance by air
travel to our niece’s wedding in Ecuador. So
we’re doing something but not enough. It
feels rather like the early days of
recycling when we had to drag our bottles
and plastic and newspapers to bins at the
dusty back parking lot of an
environment-friendly food supermarket. What
we need is the leap – a leap to the
equivalent of the city recycling system.
That system came with blue bins, green bins
and minimized trashcans for weekly pick up
by the city. Now the city does serious
recycling. A city trash crisis passed with
that leap.
In my view real change will require a new
economic component focused on green energy
that is take-over-proof and
free-trade-agreement-proof. Something that
can promote, educate, engage, manufacture
and maintain to make green energy. Perhaps
this could include some form of cooperative
so lots of little Canadians can invest
directly, have a stake, enjoy dividends if
successful and not require the big profit
alone approach that big shareholders demand.
Things were tried in the “Petrocan” model.
That kind of approach needs reworking to
create something that engages a lot of
Canadians in green energy.
