Category: Politics

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

Canada’s message to the world

Yesterday I photographed two rallies outside Toronto-area offices of Members of Parliament and Ministers of Finance and Foreign Affairs Bill Morneau and Chrystia Freeland.

With Freeland we asked if Canada was now going to withdraw our signature from the Paris Agreement. The sentiment was crafted to be possible to express in one photograph, but the issues are nonetheless closely related. The Paris Agreement’s central operative clause is an aspiration to: “Hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”.

I say “aspiration” because the agreement says little about implementation. This is a treaty negotiated with the participation of every country on Earth and there are many who would have objected to explaining what those temperature targets mean in terms of greenhouse gasses, fossil fuels, and public policy. There are some who hope a magical technology will let us burn all these fossil fuels without dangerously warming the planet, but there are good reasons to question the efficacy and ethics of both geoengineering and carbon sequestration. As for a marvellous new energy technology so much better than both climate-safe options like nuclear fission and renewables and fossil fuel options, I don’t see that happening during the critical window of only a couple of decades where we will decide if the Paris targets can ever be attained or not.

The Paris Agreement is ambitious in its ultimate objective but frighteningly imprecise about the means of getting there. That means that for the decades ahead the locus of diplomacy will have to be convincing countries facing major problems of poverty and regional insecurity to commit fully to decarbonization as well. To achieve that, countries which have historically used the largest amounts of fossil fuel and where emissions per person continue to be the highest will need to be seen to be doing their part, cheerfully and in a spirit of global cooperation.

The clearest signals we’re sending are the big energy choices we make. A new pipeline says that the bitumen sands can continue to grow and that we expect fossil fuel use to remain as high as it is now for decades to come. It says that we’re not serious about Paris or avoiding dangerous climate change.

Canadian politicians want an easy answer that can satisfy Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the oil industry while also showing that sort of global leadership. That isn’t possible. At some point all of Canada needs to have a hard conversation about shutting down the oil sands industry, and that process needs to begin now by definitively stopping expansion.

To some degree the fights over Keystone XL, the Northern Gateway pipeline, and Energy East have already sent important signals to industry. If you want a big fossil fuel project now, it is going to be a fight. That message is actually reinforced by the Trudeau government’s decision to buy the Trans Mountain project. They think they’re telling industry that the federal government will step in to get things done, but they’re also suggesting that projects like this aren’t viable without exceptional government support. Even if Trudeau welds the last section of pipe personally, and the government’s dream of recovering taxpayer funds by selling the pipeline to the private sector is fulfilled, there will be big questions about how much sense any further bitumen sands expansion will make.

What if someone breaks the nuclear weapon taboo?

Many problems in nuclear strategy are unpleasant or even horrifying to contemplate. As the number of nuclear-armed nations grows, the chances that one will be put in a desperate situation and choose to use one more more nuclear weapons likely rises.

An article by Vince Manzo and John Warden considers potential American responses to the use of a nuclear weapon by a hostile power, including four scenarios involving North Korea and Russia.

Among all the international norms under threat, the norm of non-use of nuclear weapons is among the most valuable. If at all possible, it should be reinforced even if one state does use nuclear weapons. As the article illustrates, however, that will be one among many strategic considerations, and no option offers the kind of certainty that would be desirable.

The climate case against Trans Mountain

Writing in The Globe and Mail Thomas Homer-Dixon and Yonatan Strauch have a solid explanation for the incompatibility between the Trans Mountain pipeline and the climate commitments Canada has chosen for itself:

For these [pipeline] opponents, further massive investment in the extraction and export of some of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel on Earth is nonsensical – idiotic, even. In a dangerously warming world, we should be investing in a clean-energy future, not entrenching Canada more deeply in the economic past.

Continued investment in the oil sands generally, and in the Trans Mountain pipeline specifically, means Canada is doubling down on a no-win bet. We’re betting that the world will fail to meet the reduction targets in the Paris Climate Agreement, thus needing more and more oil, including our expensive and polluting bitumen. We’re betting, in other words, on climate disaster. If, however, the world finally gets its act together and significantly cuts emissions, then Canada will lose much of its investment in the oil sands and the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, because the first oil to be cut will be higher-cost oil such as ours.

There are more sophisticated analyses of the situation which are necessary, concerning global budgets and international negotiations, but it’s fair and accurate to say that Canada’s progress toward decarbonization depends on not making heavy new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. If the Trudeau government or any other keeps pushing in that direction, Canada seems likely to end up the poorer while the world will be further imperilled both by the emissions we generate and the diplomatic consequences of putting fossil fuel profits before collective action to avert planetary disaster.

Open thread: ballistic missile defence

An episode involving missile defence* from the West Wing holds up very well today. The craggy old American chief of staff is in favour, out of fear of what rogue regimes might do to America. The British ambassador is opposed because it’s impractical, violates international law, and risks worsening the global nuclear weapons situation.

I can see why people like the idea of being able to stop a few missiles launched by North Korea or Iran, or by a rogue commander somewhere. At the same time, I think the dangers of a nuclear arms race make the development and deployment of such a system unwise, even if the major technological hurdles could be overcome. It’s the classic security dilemma: you build something meant to make you safer, potential opponents interpret it as making them less safe (by reducing the credibility of their deterrent) so they build expensive countermeasures. In the end, everyone has wasted money on the race and everyone ends up less safe. It could also tempt decision-makers into recklessness, based on false confidence that the system will nullify any response to their aggression.

We should be working to de-alert and dismantle the nuclear arsenals of the authorized nuclear powers under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Against that backdrop, resisting proliferation to new nuclear states would be more plausible.

* I don’t mean defending things like aircraft carriers from ballistic missiles. I mean systems to protect domestically-located military facilities and population centres from ballistic missile attack, probably with nuclear weapons.

Open thread: decolonization in Canada

Supposedly, Canada is in the midst of a national effort at moving toward reconciliation after centuries of exploiting and oppressing its Indigenous populations. Signs include efforts to protect and investigate crimes against Indigenous women and girls; the renaming of buildings and monuments to people who played a role in Canada’s troubling past; and supposedly efforts to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) – though here, as in so many other areas, there is good cause to question the sincerity of the Trudeau government.

Of course, there has been resistance from white supremacists and others.

It’s encouraging to see Halifax taking down Cornwallis monuments (put a bounty on the Mi’kmaq in 1749) and the Langevin block in Ottawa renamed (helped set up Canada’s genocidal residential schools). I would like to see everything named after Columbus renamed, though ultimately renaming is a small and symbolic part of what decolonization will need to include.

In the long term, Canada needs to recognize that its sovereignty has always been illegitimate – based on coerced treaties that Canada has routinely violated or the naked use of force. The path toward reconciliation can’t be seen from beginning to end in advance, but some of the actions we ought to be taking seem pretty clear, starting with providing services in Indigenous communities comparable to those in the rest of Canada, helping Indigenous peoples built toward self-government, and no longer imposing economic and resource projects on them despite their political and legal opposition.

Ellsberg’s broad conclusion

Yet what seems to be beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put the trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being – anyone, not just this one man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons – is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.

Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Bloomsbury; New York. 2017. p. 332 (italics in original)

The women’s rights and temperance movements

Americans probably drank more in the nineteenth century than they had in the preceding century, and drunkenness was widespread. In reaction, by midcentury the temperance movement had become strong, much more pervasive than the movements for either blacks’ or women’s rights. Many advocates of temperance did not support blacks’ or women’s rights, but both abolitionists and feminists usually supported temperance. Advocates of women’s rights usually regarded drunkenness as a male practice which victimized women, subjecting them to cruel abuse. Because divorce was virtually impossible, a woman married to an abusive, alcoholic husband had little protection for herself or her children. Therefore, to advocates of women’s rights, the temperance movement was another radical reform, like women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery, for the protection and emancipation of women.

Mabee, Carleton. Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. New York University Press, 1993. p. 194