The Point

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Going the distance









'Stringent mitigation will cost the world no more than 3 percent of global GDP in 2030.' - Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist R K Pachauri (link to BBC interview)

I just received my semi-annual newsletter from CO2RE, Edmonton's lacklustre (but well-intentioned) attempt to push ways to reduce individual carbon dioxide emissions. They're offering a furnace retrofit rebate of 500 bucks, and up to 2000 for low-income households. You can even get a coupon for a free first month from our residential green power supplier, bullfrog power. It's a step.

But it's not enough, for a lot of reasons. The most important:
1. It's too gentle. Edmontonians don't need to be gently led by the hand, they need to be pushed.
2. Its stated goals of 20 percent reductions in the city by 2020 are probably not enough to do any major damage one way or another.
3. It only addresses individual greenhouse gas emissions, not systemic problems like a coal and natural gas-dependent energy infrastructure or an economy fueled by Athabasca bitumen.

It's been said time and time again, but it still makes a lot of us uncomfortable (sometimes angrily so), so I'll say it again: addressing climate change is going to require changing the way we live. Yet it seems as though a relatively small amount of action will help head off the worst crises, and save us time, money, and lives in the effort. So why aren't we taking those steps?

Somewhat mysteriously, our local rag the Peterborough Examiner, not exactly a bastion of earth-shattering journalism these days (though, incredibly, it was once edited by Robertson Davies), carries a semi-regular column by David Suzuki. A couple weeks ago, he was discussing our continuing, daily failure to really step up to the plate right now and take action that will move us away from a carbon-intensive society to a carbon-neutral one. Dion and the Green Party's carbon tax proposals are one strategy, and one that's been proven effective in Scandinavian countries. Refusing to allow new projects in the tar sands up in Athabasca is another. Moving immediately away from fossil-fuel dependent methods of growing crops (corn-based ethanol, anyone?) would be a modicum closer to good sense, I think.

So, Grandpa Suzuki says, why not act now? Why not take demonstrative, immediate action to reduce our GHG emissions? It's true that the scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are only 90% sure that humans are responsible for the rapid global climate shifts we're seeing right now. If a nurse told us it was 90% certain that something we were eating could kill us, would we still take the risk?

This is the question Harper and the other leaders of the G8 have failed to answer adequately at this week's summit in Japan. Committing to an unambitious long-term goal of 50% GHG emission reductions by 2050 with no short-term commitments and no binding agreements - should we be surprised that the 'developing' countries like China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa that joined the summit yesterday laughed them off? And what was the year from which they wanted to reduce those emissions anyway? It's true that in Canada our overall percentage of global carbon emissions is only a few percent; while wildly high for our proportion of the global population, yes, you can make this ludicrous argument that our individual reductions in emissions will not put much of a dent in the global picture. As Raj Patel says, China just ate that for breakfast. India just ate that for lunch.

But without demonstrating leadership on our own behalf, and making real, bold commitments to help countries with much much fewer economic resources to make shifts toward sustainable societies, why should we be at all surprised that the big emitters - the US, China, India, and on and on - don't take us seriously anymore when we say we want to help address the problems? It's time to pony up. And it's time to have a more serious debate than we've shown we're up to. And moreover, as R K Pachauri says in the interview above, it's time to move from discussions to decisions.

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posted by Christopher at 11:05 p.m.

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