Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Greta Thunberg to the British Parliament

I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big; I could become whatever I wanted to. I could live wherever I wanted to. People like me had everything we needed and more. Things our grandparents could not even dream of. We had everything we could ever wish for and yet now we may have nothing.

Now we probably don’t even have a future any more.

Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once.

You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard.

Is my microphone on? Can you hear me?

Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.

And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale, inventions that are supposed to clear the atmosphere of astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide.

Furthermore, these calculations do not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost.

Nor do these scientific calculations include already locked-in warming hidden by toxic air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity – or climate justice – clearly stated throughout the Paris agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale.

We must also bear in mind that these are just calculations. Estimations. That means that these “points of no return” may occur a bit sooner or later than 2030. No one can know for sure. We can, however, be certain that they will occur approximately in these timeframes, because these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses.

These projections are backed up by scientific facts, concluded by all nations through the IPCC. Nearly every single major national scientific body around the world unreservedly supports the work and findings of the IPCC.

Did you hear what I just said? Is my English OK? Is the microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.

She’s right. Even among advocates of climate action there has been a deep and long-running unwillingness to be honest about what controlling climate change requires and the suffering that will arise if it isn’t done.

I think all the political leaders from this time (the carbon tax advocates and the clueless climate deniers) will be remembered as failures who had all the necessary information and technology but who still plunged humanity into the abyss because they were too controlled by the status quo to do otherwise.

Whether that abyss will just be a great amplification of the climate change effects we have already seen or something that challenges or destroys human civilization will depend on how quickly we can disempower the leaders holding us back and listen to people like Greta.

Alberta’s 2019 election

The election playing out in Alberta seems to have a lot in common with what has been happening with the federal Liberals, at least for those who see the urgency of decarbonizing to control climate change. There is a semi-progressive government that thinks that it has strong climate credentials because it has a long term plan. At the same time, neither the Alberta NDP nor the federal Liberals properly appreciate the scale and seriousness of climate change, which is why they are willing to keep backing new fossil fuel projects.

One Calgary Herald article today had an interesting comment:

Kenney says that if he takes office after next week’s vote, he’ll abolish the carbon tax and scrap the NDP’s 100 megatonne cap on oilsands emissions.

Federal sources note that the loss of the provincial carbon tax isn’t a big problem to them because Ottawa would simply impose its own tax.

But the emissions cap is a huge deal for the Trudeau Liberals.

They say removal of that cap could take Canada out of compliance with the Paris Agreement on climate change.

This is a reminder for the other perennial Liberal/NDP line on climate change: whatever the faults of our approach, the Conservatives will be worse. There is truth to that, and it provides the second prong of the dilemma for voters in Canada who think rapid decarbonization is urgent and essential.

2050 Post-Carbon conference, McKibben, and conservatives on climate

Today I was at a conference on “Building a Post-Carbon Future” by 2050. It was certainly not bad, but I felt there was a huge disjoint between the Paris Agreement targets frequently referenced (to keep global warming to less than 1.5–2.0 ˚C above pre-industrial levels) and the scale and ambition of the policies and actions actually proposed to get us there. Say what you like about the people who argue that climate change is fundamentally a symptom of capitalism, and that we need to get rid of the latter to solve the former, but at least they have a plan.

One frequent line of discussion in my one-on-one talks with today’s attendees was about what we need to say to get the general public to act in the right way and solve the problem. I’m very skeptical about this kind of approach. In everyday life, I think presenting selective or misleading information to try to manipulate behaviour is generally a bad plan, primarily because of the overconfidence it demonstrates about what explains a person’s current behaviour and how to alter it. Think of the arrogance of deciding based on the observable behaviours a person has shown you that you understand the deep workings of their mind (workings it would probably take them a considerable effort to think through and explain) so well that you can craft a tailored intervention that will shift that whole cognitive machine onto the track you want. Also, taking this approach throws away the opportunity to use that person’s judgment and knowledge to try to solve your problem: you’re taking it all on yourself because you’re assuming you’re smarter, or you know what ought to be done, or that the other person will never act in the right way based on complete and accurate information.

Anyhow, I am skeptical about political arguments like: “You need to give people hope or they won’t act” or: “If you tell people the true seriousness of climate change they will become apathetic”. We have never solved a problem like this before, so nobody can be really confident about the long-term consequences of any approach.

This evening’s keynote address was by Bill McKibben. To me it was passionate and well spoken and also all quite familiar: summaries of where 350.org came from, their pipeline resistance campaign, and their involvement with divestment. It was certainly well-delivered and got a solid response from the sold-out audience.

After the talk I spoke with McKibben briefly. He recognized the t-shirt I wore from the summer 2011 Keystone XL arrests in Washington D.C. Prompted by my concern about risks in trying the fight against climate change so closely to a collection of other left-progressive causes, I asked him how we can enact climate change policies that can survive changes of government, and how we can get conservatives on board.

He said that in the short term he thinks we can’t get conservatives on board, and that the priority task needs to be breaking the power of the fossil fuel industry. Without that, policies like the Green New Deal can’t succeed. He told me: “This is why we need movements”. He also pointed out that there have been climate policies which have been helpful and which have survived changes of government, like the B.C. carbon tax.

I don’t know how satisfying an answer I find that. The fossil fuel industry certainly hasn’t only sought to influence or bribe the politicians of the right. I feel like the problem is more ideological — related to some of what I discussed in my paper on resource inequality and have discussed in the ‘why is this important’ sections of many justifications of my PhD work. Humanity’s new ability to dramatically affect all life on the planet is a sort of shock that all political philosophies need to incorporate. Those like liberalism and socialism which from the beginning have incorporated some conception of interdependence among people who aren’t kin are perhaps more straightforwardly equipped to start incorporating a species-level or an Earth-level ethic. By contrast, individualistic conservatism founded in a (false) notion that people can somehow go it on their own is profoundly undermined by a problem where the unintended consequences of one person’s actions anywhere in the world are felt by everyone else for centuries. Resolving that contradiction in a genuine way seems to require jettisoning a lot of the emphasis on personal autonomy which is dear to conservatives, which perhaps helps explain why so many have been willing to just deny that the problem exists.

I would love to see a longer account from McKibben about how reducing the power of the fossil fuel industry solves the problem of each new government facing the temptation to scrap unpopular taxes and restrictions meant to protect the climate, or to tap any fossil fuel reserves which we have left unused for the greater good. Likewise, it would be good to see a theory for winning conservative support for climate stabilization policies, over any kind of plausible timescale. There are too many people who hold such views and support such parties for us to reject the need to appeal to them, even if activists are more comfortable dealing with people who they broadly agree with on other issues, and even if they have crafted their movement to be progressive and diverse in the ways they value.

Queen’s Park climate strike

I ducked out of my public policy workshop today to get some photos of the climate strike at Queen’s Park.

There are amazing photos and videos from other cities around the world, with turnouts of tens of hundreds of thousands in European cities. The rally in Montreal also seems to have been huge, for reasons I am very curious about. I would love to know what went into organizing it, and into bringing so many people out.

Alberta’s Energy Policy Simulator

The Pembina Institute has released a new interactive tool that lets anybody test out alternative approaches to setting energy policy for Alberta, in sectors including transport, buildings, electricity generation, and agriculture.

It doesn’t allow a huge amount of ambition. For instance, the only bitumen sands policy option is the 100 megatonne cap which the Alberta government has proposed, which you can tweak to be implemented more clearly. Still, it does a nice job of illustrating the relative impact of different approaches, from a faster phase-out of coal in electricity generation to various policies targeting vehicles, methane emissions, cement production, and sector-specific carbon taxes up to $350 per tonne.

Even with the most aggressive coal phase-out options, the bitumen sands cap, and $350 carbon taxes in all sectors, projected emissions only fall from a current level around 275 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent to around 100 megatonnes in 2045:

Even if every jurisdiction in the world achieved cuts at that rate, it wouldn’t be fast enough to produce a sub-2 ˚C warming scenario as called for in the Paris Agreement, and any politically plausible global pathway would see countries with very high per capita and historical emissions like Canada cut deeper and faster than the average.

I have previously posted about climate change games/simulations from the BBC and Chevron.

Middlebury fossil fuel divesment

At the end of January, Middlebury College (home institution of 350.org founder Bill McKibben) committed to fossil fuel divestment as part of a four-part response to climate change.

As far as I know, this is the first university which had formally said no to a divestment campaign and has since been brought around to saying yes.

Today Laurie Patton, the President of the college, published an editorial in Inside Higher Ed: Every Campus Should Address Climate Risk.

Israel’s trilemma

The Economist created a graphic illustrating how Israel must choose between three objectives, without being able to achieve all three at once and with objectionable features arising from choosing one pair over the other options:

They need to make some choice between giving up occupied land, ceasing to have a Jewish electoral majority, and being a fully democratic state.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent comment that Israel is the homeland “only of the Jewish people” suggests that this government at least is willing to prioritize continued occupation and a Jewish majority over equal treatment of all citizens.