Canada’s climate change record

I have rarely seen such a concise and numerically-backed summary of Canada’s climate change policy outcomes than this one from Steve Easterbrook’s blog in 2016:

Several things jump out at me from this chart. First, the complete failure to implement policies that would have allowed us to meet any of these targets. The dip in emissions from 2008-2010, which looked promising for a while, was due to the financial crisis and economic downturn, rather than any actual climate policy. Second, the similar slope of the line to each target, which represents the expected rate of decline from when the target was proposed to when it ought to be attained. At no point has there been any attempt to make up lost ground after each failed target. Finally, in terms of absolute greenhouse gas emissions, each target is worse than the previous ones. Shifting the baseline from 1990 to 2005 masks much of this, and shows that successive governments are more interested in optics than serious action on climate change.

At no point has Canada ever adopted science-based targets capable of delivering on its commitment to keep warming below 2°C.

In my July 2021 letter to Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson I defined the term “gapology” as: “the process going back to the Chrétien era of setting a GHG reduction target for political reasons and then performing economic analyses to compare potential mitigation measures and the GHG reductions expected to accompany them against the political target, always finding a gap in which some further action would be required.”

Trudeau’s net zero promise is an extension and reiteration of the gapology strategy: safely pushing accountability for meeting the target to long beyond his own time in office.

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Framing chapter hand edit complete

Today I continued making progress with finishing the shortened and reorganized versions of my four core dissertation chapters. Specifically, I finished my hand edit of the framing chapter, chiefly intended to split out my own prescriptive normative conclusions from analysis of the divestment movement and scholarship about it.

This is a particularly challenging task because as initially written this chapter was meant to be the normative culmination of the text, with the conclusion largely given over to wrapping up and the niceties of academic writing such as identifying areas for further work.

While it has been labourious and often dispiriting to try to re-sequence the document at this stage, I am growing confident that in the end I will be able to do it in a way that not only meets the requirements set by my committee members but which actually lays things out in a clearer and more organized way for ordinary readers.

Tomorrow I will move on to making the edits to the Word version of the framing chapter, pulling out chunks that belong in the new prescriptive conclusions chapter. It will take another effort to sequence and connect the normative chunks that have been pulled from the political opportunities, mobilizing structures, repertoires, and framing chapters, but at least that can happen after I have sent the four core analytical chapters back to the committee for their re-examination.

Open thread: Identity politics

Back in September, The Economist devoted a week’s letters page to responses to their article “How did American ‘wokeness’ jump from elite schools to everyday life?“.

A couple make particularly interesting points:

Your warning on the dangers of wokeism would leave many of the old thinkers on the left turning in their graves. The stunt pulled by the illiberal left is their assertion that they are the champions of the marginalised. I do not doubt many are sincere, just as the leaders of the Catholic church were sincere in the Inquisition. Religious fundamentalists of all sorts are sincere. But thinking you know best does not qualify for making a better world. Unless you are willing to debate your ideas openly, you are by definition an authoritarian conservative.

The modern-day book-banners, no-platformers, deniers of free speech and opponents of universalism in the name of identity politics are not of the left, the liberal left or even the New Left of the 1960s. As a student in the 1960s, I marched to demand free speech, the end of the war on Vietnam and civil rights. We were condemned as communists and beaten if unlucky to be near a police baton. Voltaire and John Stuart Mill inspired us. This is what Eric Hobsbawm, a British Marxist, had to say on identity politics:

The political project of the left is universalist, it is for all human beings… It isn’t liberty for shareholders or blacks, but for everybody… It is not fraternity only for old Etonians or gays, but for everybody. And identity politics is essentially not for everybody but for members of a specific group.

The Economist has got the ball rolling in the right direction.

Tor Hundloe

Emeritus professor

University of Queensland

Brisbane, Australia

I would quibble that people unwilling to publicly debate ideas could have any non-pluralistic political ideology, from authoritarian conservatism to authoritarian communism.

The second touches on something I have personally experienced in activist meetings:

One thinks of Michael Macy’s sociology experiments illustrating how, when faced with an illogical group consensus, individuals tend to publicly agree and even condemn dissenters, while privately expressing concern.

Unsupported theories, such as those of the illiberal left, that have taken root in societies require brave individuals to break the cycle and express their disagreement, regardless of the condemnation. But someone else can go first.

Anonymous

New York

I have the sense that most people make most decisions impulsively or intuitively, and the in-the-moment feeling of going along with consensus seems like it will always be more agreeable than the feeling of friction or tension with those around you. The trouble with decisions made intuitively is that they are often based on superficial consideration of a small amount of readily available and emotive data.

Political coalition building and Canada’s antivax blockades

Emma Jackson has an interesting article on the mega-libertarian “Freedom Convoy” protests and what they reveal about coalition building:

Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a lot that the anti-mandate movement is getting right from an organizing and movement-building perspective.

For starters, in stark contrast to the Left, the past few days have revealed how much better the Right is at meeting people where they’re at.

Instead of building an insular movement restricted to people who agree with each other 93 per cent of the time, the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views. It’s why the Freedom Convoy isn’t just being ardently defended by white supremacists on Rebel News, but also by anti-vaccine Green Party supporters in the inboxes of mainstream environmental organizations.

…

Insularity has prevented the left from reaching the mainstream. We have an opportunity to examine our tendency to build organizations that feel more like exclusive clubs for the “already woke,” than they do welcoming spaces for political education and transformation where people feel deeply valued and needed.

Jonathan Smucker reminds us: “Politics is not a clubhouse. Politics is messy. It is meeting everyday people where they are. It’s not an enclave. It’s not being the enlightened, ‘super‑woke’ people together, learning a special vocabulary, shaking our heads and wagging our finger at all these backward other people. That is a manifestation of the same social elitism that is actively structured by neoliberal society. Instead, politics needs to be woven into the fabric of all of our lives.”

Jackson is aspiring to a populist progressive movement that advances the whole left-wing agenda of economic redistribution, racial justice, further corporate regulation, and so on. I am more interested in the politics of building a consensus around fossil fuel abolition to avoid catastrophic climate change, in which agreement on other issues isn’t a prerequisite for legitimate participation. I think that will have to be comprised of people who broadly disagree about many political issues, but who nonetheless accept that maintaining the planetary stability which is the foundation of all political projects must be prioritized. A fired-up, more inclusive movement which still advocates for the entire progressive shopping list won’t do that, and arguably feeds polarization with the idea that only a new progressive society can fight climate change. Instead, it needs to become an issue where the voters who elect the mainstream centre-right and cente-left parties that form governments will demand rapid and substantial action, and not be placated about promises that someone else will solve the problem by a ‘net zero’ 2050.

Restoring and sustaining a democratic politics that can confront the challenge of climate change requires cultivating a politically influence branch of the conservative movement which respects empirical evidence instead of choosing what to believe based on their ideology. I don’t think anyone can see the path from here to there (and events like these trucker blockades are strengthening the fantasist wing), but I think it must involve a retreat from maximilist positions and arguments that one group’s entire political agenda must be implemented as the only way forward.

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