Disconnected from the need for maximum effort

 

In his book “A Good War”, Seth Klein demonstrates how wartime thinking and community efforts can be repurposed today for Canada's own Green New Deal.

 

He has found a politics of disconnect is hampering our progress in addressing the climate emergency.

 

"We elect governments that promise climate action, they deliver underwhelming and contradictory policies, and then get replaced by right-wing governments that undo what little progress we’ve seen."1

Damian Carrington, environment editor at the Guardian, reports that CO2 emissions hit a new record despite Covid-19 lockdowns. Scientists calculate that emissions must fall by half by 2030 to give a good chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C, beyond which hundreds of millions of people will face more heatwaves, droughts, floods and poverty.

WMO report on atmospheric CO2

 

Climate-heating gases have reached record levels in the atmosphere despite the global lockdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization has said.

“The lockdown-related fall in emissions is just a tiny blip on the long-term graph. We need a sustained flattening of the curve,” said Petteri Taalas, the WMO secretary-general. “We breached the global [annual] threshold of 400ppm in 2015 and, just four years later, we have crossed 410ppm. Such a rate of increase has never been seen in the history of our records… CO2 remains in the atmosphere for centuries. The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration was 3m-5m years ago, when the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now. But there weren’t 7.7 billion [human] inhabitants.”2

In August 2016, Bill McKibben wrote that we are under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.

 

War on climate change

For starters, it’s important to remember that a truly global mobilization to defeat climate change wouldn’t wreck our economy or throw coal miners out of work. Quite the contrary: Gearing up to stop global warming would provide a host of social and economic benefits, just as World War II did. It would save lives. (A worldwide switch to renewable energy would cut air pollution deaths by 4 to 7 million a year, according to the Stanford data.) It would produce an awful lot of jobs. (An estimated net gain of roughly two million in the United States alone.)3

Carbon and methane now represent the deadliest enemy of all time, the first force fully capable of harrying, scattering, and impoverishing our entire civilization.

 

References

 

1	Klein, Seth. (2020) A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency. Toronto, ON:ECW Press.
2	(2020, November 23). Climate crisis: CO2 hits new record despite Covid-19 lockdowns. Retrieved November 24, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/23/climate-crisis-co2-hits-new-record-despite-covid-19-lockdowns
3	(2016, August 15). We Need to Literally Declare War on Climate Change | The .... Retrieved November 17, 2020, from https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii