New Media

Canada continued to get thrashed at the Copenhagen environment summit this week. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s not-so-green reputation preceded him and his political opposition have been quick to capitalize on the bad press. But Vancouver’s Mayor and successful green entrepreneur Gregor Robertson was also on the scene, a safe distance away.

Will we be best served by his separateness from the federal leadership at this summit when it comes time to ask for federal resources to fund our green schemes? Perhaps a more united front from the Canadian contingent would have worked better.

I expand on these ideas in my new Granville Online article, Mr. Happy Planet versus Darth Vader. Enjoy.

The Conservatives’ Top-Secret Plan for, um, Saving the Planet?

I’ll state for the record that I consider myself to be a “green”. I’m utterly convinced that human beings have thoroughly mismanaged their environment, much to the chagrin of every other species we’ve managed to wipe out or endanger in the process. Even in Vancouver, considered by some metrics to be the most sustainable city in North America, that’s still just a relative measure; we don’t have a sustainable society here on the coast and things get worse in virtually every big city away from here. I further believe that much can be done to create more sustainable societies at the local level, through something as simple as changing habits.

That said, I’m struck by the panicked reaction of world leaders, media and protesters of the Copenhagen summit. At this point, it’s not even about getting a good deal that makes sense for all stakeholders. It’s about getting a deal, any deal. That’s not democracy in action. That’s a farce.

Damn the torpedoes, or the strangeness of debt-choked developed nations handing over billions of dollars to the developing world, no strings attached, with which nations can in turn fund eco-friendly initiatives or machete-wielding armies that employ rape as a general policy against their enemies. (Instead of using the West as middle-men, wouldn’t it make more sense for these climate-change endangered nations to simply go directly to Saudi Arabia or China hat-in-hand?)

It’s certainly clear that people, particularly the youth, in a great number of countries are concerned about environmental degradation and the possible effects of climate change. Reducing carbon output seems to be the clear goal. So on that level, it would seem to make perfect sense for world leaders to meet and discuss general principles for meeting this challenge.

But there is no such general agreement on the specific solutions for lowering carbon emissions. Carbon caps on paper? Gasoline taxes? Subsidies and investment in bio-fuels? Electric cars? Tree-planting? Stowing of carbon underground? In concrete? Paying Third World villagers to sit around, not chopping down the lungs of the world? Shutting down the tar sands project by government fiat? All of these solutions have pluses and minuses.

Canada is not unique in hosting disagreement over what sorts of solutions would work best. Every country in the world is asking the same questions. While it might sound more manageable to just get world leaders in the same room to hammer out an agreement, it hasn’t worked in practice. World leaders can’t put forth concrete and robust proposals because they largely have not been able to work out these plans even towards their domestic audience. World leaders literally don’t know what they can offer at these summits.

Canadians were never asked for input on what the government would offer at Copenhagen. There were no town hall meetings. There was no referrendum. No intense national debate. You can’t even say that the Conservatives already had a mandate for specific environmental policies vis a vis Copenhagen from the last election. The summit certainly wasn’t on anyone’s radar back then. And even if Canadian voters had been aware of an upcoming summit, there’s no way they could have voted for a particular party on the basis of its support for specific proposals — even shortly before the end of this summit, there still aren’t any.

For Canada’s government — or any government, for that matter — to take a strong position on any of the Copenhagen proposals would be extremely challenging when these issues haven’t been resolved at home. They can’t represent their constituents when they don’t know what they’re representing.

This failing was not inevitable, by the way — if all national governments paid as much attention to defining environmental policy as they do with foreign policy and defense, leaders would be able to represent their nations with a mandate even to make policy based on strict guidelines on the fly. But that hasn’t happened. So governments at Copenhagen, even if they have strong popular support at home, can’t act democratically at this summit.

That said, the issues being discussed at Copenhagen are too dire to ignore.

Given the limitations of what can really happen at these summits, we ought to go back to using them to discuss general principles. When it comes to hard figures, technical solutions and economic intervention, these general principles can be a guide for bilateral or regional international solutions. That seems to be the best we can do for us and the planet.

Recommended Reading
The Copenhagen Shakedown Con
Copenhagen and ridiculousness
Bad Boy of Copenhagen

My thoughts on the world environmental summit known as the Copenhagen Summit in the Vancouver Sun. An excerpt:

Canadians are being singled out as premier environmental villains — for legally providing energy resources to an international market that is starved for new sources of energy. The critics might as well just come up with a list of the top ten oil and coal producers in the world and condemn all of them at the same time, while nations continue to purchase all that nasty stuff that makes their cars and factories work.

I also wrote about the real need to confront environmental disasters of our own making — not just what critics like to narrowly define as “climate change”, in Environmentalists Have Been Framed!

This is also interesting: Christ Banned From Copenhagen Global Climate Summit

Also read Why It’s Copendead

Sometimes, to really appreciate what we’ve got here in Vancouver, you have to go to some distant hell-hole to see how badly other human beings have really messed things up.

In my latest Cityview column for Granville Magazine, I decided to take the “shooting-ducks-in-a-barrel” approach and looked at the awful state of public transit in Los Angeles. As I noted on a recent trip, the car-clogged freeways of that part of the American nation are a testament to bad planning predicated on an unsustainable assumption (a lie, really) of long-term access to cheap energy.

Los Angeles has invested billions of dollars to pick away at the problem with subway lines and new clean-energy buses. But the fact is that despite these efforts, transit ridership on the whole hasn’t moved in decades.

One can no more fix Los Angeles’ traffic issues with transit than you could fix a badly infected broken arm with a band-aid. There’s just too much of a legacy of expensive road infrastructure to maintain and a persistent attitude among the locals that they are “entitled” to their cars — and the “loser cruiser” is for the poor (This attitude contrasts not just with Vancouver but L.A.’s polar opposite, New York City, where Wall Street traders in suits and briefcases rub shoulders with working class Joes on the packed subways).

My look at Los Angeles certainly wasn’t meant to slag our American cousins. We certainly have our own mutated versions of this unsustainable model: Calgary and most other prairie cities, have spread out in the absence of natural geographic limits to growth, taking on all the unfavorable characteristics of “Edge cities” — lacking distinct neighborhoods, utterly dependent on ring roads and freeways, and ineffective mass transit.

The question is what these cities will do with all of this legacy of expensive, unsustainable infrastructure. Will taxpayers simply keep on subsidizing these urban disasters? Will these urban wastelands just be abandoned (or at least vastly depopulated) a few decades from now? I expect both of these things to happen in succession. The only question is how much longer taxpayers are willing to put up with subsidizing failure.

Recommended reading: I’ve seen one possible future for Vancouver and it’s scary

Also: Calgary Transit Sucks

It’s long past time for environmentalists to confront a strategic problem that is partly of their own making. Ideological partisans who favor doing nothing to build our societies on a more sustainable foundation (out of irrational fear that such responsible action would constitute communist-style state interference) have done an excellent job in framing the entire environmental conservation movement within the contentious climate change debate. Perhaps owing to this, the latest Pew study showing Americans are less concerned about global warming than just a year ago (although a majority still does believe the USA should be joining other countries in setting climate change standards). This plays right into the obstructionists’ hands.

The science of climate change can never conclusively prove that humans are to blame for increasingly wacky weather and climate phenomena (ie. melting icecaps, increasing incidence of forest fires, floods, hurricanes and me shoveling the six feet of snow that built up on the roof of my Vancouver apartment building last winter). With so many variables affecting weather and climate, someone can always claim that climate change is really caused by all of the energy expelled in the production of climate change science reports. Without definitive proof, the climate change “debate” degenerates into PR battles that cherry-pick facts to prove… well, nothing. For climate-change “deniers”, that’s the point — lack of 100 per cent verifiability leads to indecision and lack of action. They win by default.

There’s no question that the green movement got its biggest boost in recent history with the screening of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Since then, the environmental movement has kept on using that film as a centerpiece of green evangelizing. This takes focus off of related environmental issues that seem to have a better chance of changing minds about the need for action at the state level, not just at the local level of those who already buy local, recycle, bike to work and so on. Just a few examples:

1. We’re running out of energy. Remember how high energy prices got before the economy took a nosedive? Back when the economy was humming, demand outpaced supply, driving up the cost of not just the stuff we put into our cars, but everything else. When the economy picks up, energy demand will rise once more, worse than before.

2. Desertification is spreading. When all the water and forests are gone, bad things happen. Look at the poorest, most messed-up countries in the world and you’ll notice that most of them don’t have any trees in them. The area we call the “Fertile Crescent” is practically devoid of forests (as the denizens of this ancient land chopped them down long ago) and is also the number-one flashpoint for violence and conflict in the world. Coincidence? Nope. It’s not all about religion and culture; environmental degradation has already been the cause of poverty, misery, riots, revolutions and interstate conflicts.

3. Pollution kills people. As an example, we have Bangladesh, where air pollution is blamed for taking the lives of 46,000 people per year. That’s fifteen 9/11-sized casualty counts, per year, for one country.

Climate change is important and is connected with all three of the issues mentioned above. But it’s not the only point of discussion. Environmentalists need to hit the obstructionists with the issues — all of the issues. The alternative is debating climate change until long after the environmental issues have become environmental disasters.