VIEWPOINT
NO PLANET B
With the consequences of climate change upon us, young people are demanding a response By Adam Lemieux
On March 15, just a few months after 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg began a solo campaign to walk out of school every Friday afternoon, an estimated 1.4 million students, in more than 2,000 towns and cities across 128 countries, went on strike. The #FridaysForFuture gatherings have been exciting to see, not least for the creative signage. But make no mistake: underlying the movement is a heartbreaking sense of anger, frustration, and fear. Today’s young people will suffer the brunt of the well-known consequences of climate change, yet they continue to watch their elders fail to address the problem. With limited political power, they are turning to one of the only social tools available to them: shame. Climate change is “the biggest crisis humanity ever has faced, and still it has been ignored for decades by those that have known about it,” Thunberg has said. “And you know who you are, you that have ignored this and are most guilty of this.” With the dangers becoming ever more clear and present, and our children calling us out, are we finally ready to take bold action? Unfortunately, especially right here in Ontario, our political institutions still appear incapable of rising to the task. The political challenge
The evidence on climate change is overwhelming. In October 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report, based on 6,000 academic studies, showing that we have about 12 years to slow the increase in global temperatures; otherwise, we face near-certain environmental and social catastrophe.
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Floods, droughts, extreme heat, and other natural disasters will become commonplace, with poverty and disease sure to spread. The situation in Canada is especially dire. According to a federal government report released earlier this month, this country is, on average, experiencing warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, with significantly larger increases in Northern Canada. The report says the warming, in which “the human factor is dominant,” is already causing increases in precipitation in winter, water supply shortages in summer, and heightened risks of fires and coastal flooding. Just as there is no doubt as to the realities of climate change, there is no longer room for debate about its causes or solutions. Carbon emissions are the leading culprit, so any meaningful action plan must move our society away from carbon-intensive production and modes of transportation. However, things get complicated when individual countries, or even provinces or cities, are left to implement policies toward this goal. In places like Canada, politicians who must continually fight for re-election have been reluctant to enact policies that would demand sacrifices from voters in the short term, with uncertain benefits only to be realized over the long term. Many also argue that the actions of individual jurisdictions are bound to fail without concerted global efforts, and it would be foolish to put ourselves at a competitive economic disadvantage by trying to lead the way. Another complicating factor is that most of those in power will have passed on from this world before the final invoice
arrives. While there have been some polite philosophical musings over the past few decades about the duty of care owed to our ancestors, the real stakes have rarely been acknowledged, and anyone who has called for immediate action has been labelled as radical or naïve. These attitudes have been stoked by multi-billion dollar disinformation campaigns by those who stand to profit from a continuing dependence on fossil fuels. Even modest, seemingly common sense attempts to shift behaviour, including widely recommended market-based measures such as carbon taxes, have been met with resistance. To our children, who have grown up on feel-good Earth Day platitudes about environmentalism and doing the right thing, this must appear nothing short of ridiculous. Ontario: yours to plunder
The political challenge is nowhere more apparent than in Ontario. While the Progressive Conservative campaign platform was flimsy at best, one of their few explicit policy positions was staunch opposition to efforts to fight climate change. Having been elected to a strong majority government, they believe they have a mandate to halt progress on climate action.