Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Justin Trudeau’s depressing perspective on the oil sands

Now running for the leadership of the Liberal Party, Justin Trudeau said something especially depressing today:

“There’s not a country in the world that would find 170 billion barrels of oil under the ground and leave them there. There is not a province in this country that would find 170 billion barrels of oil and leave it in the ground.”

Days after Thomas Mulcair expressed support for an east-west oil sands pipeline, Trudeau’s comments demonstrate how virtually the entire spectrum of Canadian political opinion favours imposing dangerous and potentially catastrophic climate change on future generations, because today’s politicians cannot bear to forego the short-term profits associated with oil sands extraction. At a time when climate science is making it increasingly clear that we are putting humanity’s very existence at risk, our politicians lack the courage or the imagination to propose much other than the status quo: banking fossil fuel profits while ignoring the long-term consequences of our choices.

2012 climate change fast

Back in 2007, I participated in a climate change fast. It seems an appropriate sort of moral gesture to make in response to the problem, given that it is highly likely that climate change will disrupt agricultural patterns and lead at least some people to suffer from hunger as a result.

This year, between September 21st and October 2nd, another fast is being held in response to climate change: A Fast and Vigil for Climate Justice. The main twelve-day fast will be happening on Parliament Hill. The organizers are calling on people to contact their elected representatives, asking them to take action on climate change and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. They also encourage people to write letters to the editors of newspapers, and to participate in one day of the fast themselves.

There is a website where people can pledge their support for the event.

I was also sent this program for the event by one of the organizers.

Runaway climate change as an investment risk

In a worst-case scenario, climate change could put the survival of the human species into doubt. Along with the tremendous human suffering that would involve, it would also eliminate the value of all investments, including real estate, stocks, bonds, holdings of precious metals, etc.

Perhaps if climate change were understood as a possible 100% loss in the value of all investments, people would be willing to spend more and take more action to reduce its seriousness.

Gardiner on climate ethics and moral corruption

In A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, Stephen Gardiner addresses the argument that a green energy revolution could be an exciting opportunity that benefits the lives of those who are alive today as well as those in future generations.

He characterizes this perspective as potentially interesting empirically, but largely unimportant ethically. It would be good if we could solve climate change while benefitting ourselves, but we have a moral obligation to address it even if doing so requires sacrificing things that we value in our own lives.

Generally speaking, Gardiner’s strongest point is that we are strongly psychologically disinclined to take responsibility for our contribution or to do anything about it. Because we have an intense desire to persist in climate-altering behaviours, we are willing to accept logically weak arguments for why we ought not to do anything, why we have already done enough, why the problem will solve itself, etc. He refers to this as “moral corruption”. In my experience, this self-justifying and self-deceptive behaviour is especially evident when people try to justify activities that (a) contribute very substantially to their personal carbon footprint, and which are (b) basically entirely voluntary and recreational.

Even without growth, climate change is a problem

Over at Forbes, Tim Worstall has written something rather silly about climate change:

“This might look like very bad news, that economic growth has pretty much come to an end as an important phenomenon. On the other hand we could regard it as pretty good news as well: for it means that we no longer have to worry about climate change.”

When we talk about economic growth, we are talking about gross domestic product: the sum of all the transactions that happen in an economy in a year.

Climate change isn’t caused by GDP directly, but rather through the burning of fossil fuels. What matters is how much fossil fuel gets burned, not what the size of the economy is. Even with a shrinking economy, climate change is a huge problem if we continue to get the bulk of our energy from oil, gas, and coal. Conversely, a strongly-growing economy built on nuclear or renewable sources of energy could see rising GDP with falling greenhouse gas pollution.

In The Bridge At the Edge of the World James Gustave Speth summarizes our predicament:

“How serious is the threat to the environment? Here is one measure of the problem: all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world for our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy.”

Our challenge is to find a way to leave most of the Earth’s remaining fossil fuels underground. Reducing our emphasis on economic growth may help with that, but it is not sufficient. It may not even be necessary, if we are successful at building prosperous economies based on zero-carbon sources of energy.

Air conditioning, energy, and climate change

Here’s a statement liable to make a person think about ethics, international relations, climate change, and energy:

As Stan Cox points out in his book, “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World“, America uses more energy for air conditioning than Africa uses for everything.

While it certainly illustrates some of the injustice that now exists between countries, it also touches upon the ways in which our present choices can be an injustice toward future generations, as well as how climate change can beget more climate change. As people get richer and the world gets hotter, more energy is likely to be used for air conditioning. Since much of that energy will come from fossil fuels, that will in turn cause more climate change.

Recruiting for 350

Yesterday evening, I was out trying to collect email addresses for Toronto 350’s events email list.

I wasn’t being pushy – mostly just wandering around with a clipboard and a 350 t-shirt saying ‘good evening’ to people and then trying to engage the ones who responded in a discussion about climate change and the group. Over the course of two hours, I got 10 email addresses – one of them totally illegible. Many of the people who I spoke to yesterday declined to give me their email because they were already inundated with similar messages from other environmental groups. A few others explained that they didn’t see climate change as the environmental issue on which we should be concentrating our attention.

It’s a slow business: trying to build up a group run by a handful of volunteers, without any resources or connections to influential people in the city. My hope is that once I start at the University of Toronto it will become a lot easier to recruit members who will be willing to organize and participate in events. Then perhaps we can begin to engage effectively with the question of how to motivate interested members of the general public to take useful action on climate change.

That challenge of motivating people may be the central problem of climate change. There is a small group that has a huge interest in maintaining the fossil fuel status quo, and they are doing an effective job of pushing that agenda. The majority of people probably do support the transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy in a general sense, but they aren’t willing to push for it or to accept the sacrifices that it is likely to involve.

Organizing and analysis

During the last couple of months, I have been involved with establishing a local chapter of the climate change organization 350.org. Since the organization has no money, it relies upon the work of volunteers during their spare time. This is good in many ways, since it means the group consists of people who have a personal conviction that it is necessary to take action on climate change and that they are willing to devote their talents to the project.

All told, the process of organizing differs substantially from the kind of analysis that happens in government and academia. Indeed, I wonder how much the skills required for good organizing and good analysis overlap. The key requirement for organizing seems to be an ability to motivate people to take action. For that action to be effective, it is obviously necessary to have a big-picture understanding about the science and politics of climate change. At the same time, an active awareness of the scale of the problem may hamper effective organizing. It is impossible to honestly claim that any single action or campaign will make a major difference in the trajectory of Canada’s emissions, much less those of the world as a whole. Motivation requires the hope that one person’s actions will make a difference; analysis often suggests that the actions will have no perceptible effect.

Climate change is a problem without precedent. That means we cannot know in advance which strategies could succeed in curbing it. Given how threatening and urgent it is, I think we need to try everything simultaneously: technological development, political lobbying, grassroots organizing, and all the rest. If nothing else, organizing 350.org is a way of getting in touch with people who are serious about the problem. Together, we can do a better job of evaluating our efforts, spotting opportunities, and correcting mistakes.

P.S. If you are in Toronto and interested in helping to prevent dangerous climate change, I would appreciate if you would join the 350 Toronto mailing list. If you really want to make a difference, please get in touch with me about joining our organizing team.

Working on climate change

I was out all day today with volunteers devoting their time to sharing the message about climate change and encouraging others to take action.

If the science is right, this is a critical time. These are the years in which humanity will either choose to abandon fossil fuels or choose to commit itself to catastrophic climate change. As such, there may be no more important topic to be working on.

That’s even more likely given how few people are actually doing it. Compare the amount of effort devoted to addressing humanity’s most important problem with the amount of effort devoted to putting up advertising, fancy hairdos, driving dirt bikes, or watching television. The fight for the future of the planet is being waged between a handful of activists and a set of massively profitable fossil fuel companies, while a largely apathetic mass of people mostly ignores it.