Recent articles and books have proposed strategies and action plans to use the past Canadian experience in innovation and war time productivity to begin an emergency plan to address the existential threat of climate change.
Less GHG from power plants
Bill Gates is about to release a book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need.” Canada and the U.S. must take the lead because all the other countries look to us," Gates told The Current's Matt Galloway, "Unless the U.S. and Canada do their part, the rest of the world won't."
It's a cause he's invested in in recent years. In 2015, he spearheaded an initiative to fund clean energy technologies, and in 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation poured hundreds of millions of dollars into helping farmers in developing nations adapt to the impacts of climate change. As the world starts to allocate funding toward the pandemic recovery, Gates says, it's the perfect time to think about long-term climate challenges. "The pandemic reminds people we count on government to look ahead [to] avoid terrible things happening," he said. "And amazingly, young people are more interested in climate than ever. No matter what their political affiliation is, certainly in Canada, the U.S., Europe, we see a lot of energy around this. And of course, we've got this goal to get to zero [emissions] by 2050."1
Seth Klein spent the last year writing a book about Canada’s experience in the Second World War, searching for lessons on how to confront another equally dire emergency – the climate crisis – and how we can quickly transition off fossil fuels (A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, ECW Press).
Emergency action by government
He has frequently been asked in interviews, “How do you know when a government gets the emergency?”
Here are my four markers for when you know that a government has shifted into emergency mode:
1) It spends what it takes to win;
2) It creates new economic institutions to get the job done;
3) It shifts from voluntary and incentive-based policies to mandatory measures;
4) It tells the truth about the severity of the crisis and communicates a sense of urgency about the measures necessary to combat it.
During the Second World War, the Canadian government did all those things. Likewise, in response to the pandemic, the Trudeau government has passed all four markers. But with respect to the climate emergency – thus far at least – our current federal and provincial governments are failing on all four counts.2
The Economist reports that Britain has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other rich country. The elimination of power stations that burn coal has helped Britain cut its carbon emissions. They are down by 44%, according to data collected by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) during a period when the economy grew by two-thirds.
Britain’s success has given it prominence in the global debate on climate change. This year it will co-host COP26 in Glasgow, the world’s largest and most important climate gathering. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, is attracted to the futuristic whizbangery of clean energy and is deploying “climate diplomacy” to help define post-Brexit Britain’s place in the world. In November he presented a “ten point plan for a green industrial revolution” that included spending £12bn ($17bn) on clean energy gubbins. But examining Britain’s decarbonisation shows that much of its success was circumstantial, and that the country’s hardest problems are ahead of it. After a decade of meeting its own legally binding decarbonisation targets, Britain is now veering off course.3
The recent mobilization of resources by government to combat the Covid19 pandemic, the success of innovation in developed countries and political action in Britain point to a strategy for meeting or exceeding the climate goals Western countries have adopted in accord with the IPCC mission to reduce GHG emissions and limit global temperature rise.
References
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