Canada was never a climate leader.
Sure, we had a tiny carbon tax, but any honest assessment of the facts would include the billions spent on fossil infrastructure at the same time.
Carney has merely done away with Trudeau’s pretence of climate responsibility. If we wanted action on climate, we wouldn’t elect Liberals.
It’s an American website. Their standards are lower than the temperature in Nunavut in February.
I wonder who the climate leaders were, by the metric of countries with significant oil reserves, then.
Costa Rica is kind of famous for getting to carbon neutrality first, but they had the opposite helping hand from geography.
We’re not grading on a curve, and simply having reserves doesn’t obligate us to burn them.
You can’t call yourself a “leader” on the climate when you’re routinely winning “Fossil of the Day” awards during international climate talks. That’s not a champion of the climate, it’s a villain.
Being the best of a list of villains (and we’re not even that) doesn’t make you the good guy. We’re burning the world. We’re the bad guys. The only area we’ve been leaders is in obstruction of progress, though we often have to fight for this title with the US.
Villains belong in stories; real life is shades of gray.
There’s no grey in the science. We’re burning the world, and attempts to sound enlightened with platitudes doesn’t change that.
Sure there is good and evil in all of us, but the point of living in a global society is to integrate the feedback received from others and hopefully become less evil in whatever we have done bad in.
Ignoring the feedback is at the very least behaving like the villain - if we want to shy away from ascribing such potentially reductive labels.
Thanks for sharing - this is an excellent overview of…gestures broadly to the state of things.
The climate leading legislation was some of the most unpopular in recent memory and nearly put in a Conservative government with half as many guardrails as the current Liberal government.
It’s a pluralistic society with many people who have differing opinions.
The question is why it’s unpopular. Canadians are some of the most drastically affected people by current climate trends in the developed world, and yet, any action to mitigate it is seen as more dangerous than our homes burning down, our crops failing, and our elders and children dying from heat stroke. Why is the messaging not resonating with Canadian’s lived experience? Differing opinions are all well and good, but believing something that is demonstrably false isn’t an “opinion”, it’s a delusion. I find it hard to believe we’re suffering from an epidemic of psychosis for no discernible reason, so where is it coming from and how do we mitigate it.
It’s a lack of education combined with willful ignorance. No one wants to accept that the Canadian way of life: monster trucks connecting suburbs masquerading as cities, massive energy waste combined with fossil fuel underpinning the economy – is in direct contradiction to a habitable planet… so they pretend it’s not a problem.
Source: my whole family lives in the Okanagan. They all think like this, regardless of their political spectrum.
I mean, the Canadian Way of LifeTM is a construct, not even a particularly old one at this point, and far from universal. I feel your frustration, I’m in deep blue Alberta, so I can relate to being surrounded by the deeply deluded, but there are ways to break the machine that’s keeping them fed a steady diet of lies and fantasies. We can’t have a real conversation until we’re all living in the same reality.
This reminds me of an excellent video I saw about “AI” the other day: “We are so deeply steeped in bullshit that we have forgotten that there used to be such a thing as ‘truth’”. It’s long, but maybe you’ll like it too.
I’d suggest there a bunch of reasons:
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Tragedy of the commons. Any one country opting for painful costs doesn’t meaningfully change the global calculus. In the meantime, that country’s businesses and people suffer in the name of the greater good. (If the last half dozen years have demonstrated anything, it’s that people really dislike price increases.)
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Meaningful action is painful. People like being able to drive around, eating meat, flying for vacations etc. A serious conversation about climate change by definition increases the cost associated with those.
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Any actual gains from slowing climate change would take decades to feel. In the meantime, from talking to a lot of folks with whom I disagree on the subject, the sense seems to be some miracle solution is more likely to come along (fusion etc) first.
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A lot of people work in the affected industries (not just oil and gas directly, jut think of the spinoffs and other dirty industries like making concrete etc.) There’s that old Sinclair quote:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Ok, glad to have some valid engagement. So here’s the problems I see with this analysis.
- There’s lots of countries now that have made huge headway in the transition. The cost of the tech is almost negligible at this point and the returns are starting to mount for early adopters. If we don’t move soon, we’re going to be the third world backwater burning animal dung for fuel by comparison. Tragedy of the Commons was applicable 20 years ago. Anyone with an accurate understanding of the current situation should be well into the “Fear of Missing Out” stage.
- See 1, the cost of not transitioning and throwing good money after bad to try and save the buggy whip makers is making us all poorer.
- At this point in the conversation, even leaving out the impossibility of undoing the damage we’ve already done to our grandchildren, there’s plenty of good reason to start making changes. We don’t even need “Miracle Solutions” we just need to leverage our own strengths (see 4).
- We already had a deep-bore geothermal prototype running near Kindersley Saskatchewan and a plan in place to try building a full scale power plant near Regina. Alberta has more experience drilling holes than almost any other place on earth, we have the tools, talent and training to build baseline green energy. With the new microwave-waveguide drilling techniques currently being explored we could bore deeper than we’ve ever gone in history too. We have some of the worlds largest uranium and thorium reserves in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and the expertise to make use of them. No one needs to lose their jobs. We don’t need to send our rig pigs to coding bootcamp, we need to move the rig a bit and change what we’re drilling for. This isn’t magic. This is going to create jobs, good jobs with futures.
The Carbon Tax cost Albertans less than the taxes that keep the highways paved, and if Dani hadn’t decided to snatch our rebates to help offset the cost, most of us would have been making money on it. My question is why am I the only one that seems to know any of that? Who is feeding people bad narratives and why, and how do we fix that.
This seems very optimistic and also missing the point in a few ways.
For any individual nation, the choice isn’t a binary transition or not. While Canada is allowing more pipelines, plans referred to the major office include nuclear and multiple hydro plants, major electrification etc.
Yes, China has made great strides but among peers or the OECD, we’re sitting pretty even. (There is a reason the extra cost of oil because of Iran has caused such significant problems elsewhere.)
To the original points:
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You seem to misunderstand the tragedy. The climate is a global good but the profits/benefits are not. So, for pipelines etc, the true long term cost is borne by 8 jillion or so people but the profits spread to basically Canada.
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No idea what bad money we’re throwing at the problem having planes, meat etc.
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I can’t see the point you’re making here. Again, any change takes decades to materialise while the costs are now. Sure, there are good reasons but for an average person you’re asking current sacrifices for a possible future that might not end up being entirely necessary.
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Yeah, but having the possibilities of other jobs doesn’t mean the current jobs don’t exist. Again, in an all of the above strategy with global costs and local profits, the rational strategy would instead be to pursue both. (No reason you can’t have oil workers and uranium miners.)
To your larger question about narratives, I’d argue it’s stuff like this. We’ve chosen a highly progressive alternative social media on which we only see stuff that fits our narrative. Most folks have chosen similar echo chambers and news sources and are convinced that the others are ignorant or naive.
Let me clarify a bit, I glossed over some bits in my reply.
- I understand the principal of tragedy of the commons, and it was very relevant in the past, but the cost of moving to new energy paradigms hasn’t stood still. There’s still a cost involved but it’s not the insurmountable obstacle it once was given the significant uptake , not only in China, but in Europe and even emerging markets. Furthermore, in terms of longer term success we are losing ground to other OECD peers who already have both near and long term plans to deploy new energy infrastructure. Plans that will only accelerate with the pressure of instability in the middle east.
- By throwing good money after bad, I’m referring to the enormous amount of wasted subsidies we’ve spent on our foreign owned oil companies that could and should have gone to expanding other sectors. Canadian taxpayers are already deeply in the hole on at least one pipeline, and now it seems quite likely we’ll be spending on several more in the coming years. Money that could be going to putting Canadians to work in other productive industries that would be just as effective as putting “meat on the table” and have better long term prospects. This isn’t a question of short term pain or not, were going to hurt any way we move forward, the question is which industries are worth the cost.
- I think you’re overestimating just how big a transition we’re talking about, this isn’t multi-decade long timelines, this is maybe, a decade if we’re estimating conservatively. We don’t need to wait for far flung future tech or massive reskilling the tools are here, the skills are here, the opportunity is shovel-ready and could be generating revenue in time scales that aren’t a significant burden. All we’re missing is the investment capital, which would be easy to find if we took our thumb off the scales.
- I’m not asking us to shut down the patch and outlaw gasoline. I’m talking about spending taxpayers on an industry that is making phenomenal levels of profit and is set to have an unfathomably good few years ahead, or taking advantage of a period where they will be more than capable of taking care of themselves, or investing in infrastructure that will keep us going indefinitely.
One final note, you seem to believe this is all a fantastical progressive pipe dream. You didn’t say it, but it was subtly implied. I’m a 40 year old Albertan, a father in a nuclear family, who enjoys going shooting and taking the RV out on the weekends, and I work in the oil patch. These information silos aren’t inevitable. They’re engineered. Hope is not a socialist conspiracy. Wanting a country my son and daughter can live in and be proud to be part of in 50 years is not ivory tower nonsense, and this information ecosystem isn’t the natural product of free choice. People are being manipulated, and I don’t believe that it’s inevitable that there is no other way it could be.
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Except the carbon tax was proposed by the Conservatives initially because actually guard rails were being proposed.
Poilievre has repeatedly railed against the industrial carbon tax as well as the consumer one.
Yeah, he was doing that during his leadership bid as well against the other Con candidates.
So what on Earth are you trying to say?
The idea came from the Cons. The party existed before PP was leader if you didn’t know.
And this matters because?
Clearly he almost won for something else other than him saying how much he hates conservative legislation.
People seem to miss this point but it is valid. If the Liberals had tried to continue the Trudeau climate policies they would have basically ceded government to the Conservatives who are pretty much Maple flavoured MAGA these days. I have no doubts that that would’ve been a worse outcome for all.
It was a minority of Canadians who supported the conservatives but thanks to first-past-the-post they could’ve had more than half of the seats.
And under a PR system, being the party with the most support would allow the Conservatives to partner with an even more radical party (consider Israel, or the Czech’s far right Motorist’s party) while avoiding accountability.
Under fptp, we might dislike the government but blame generally apportions to a party, enabling accountability and meaningful political change.
even more radical party (consider Israel, or the Czech’s far right Motorist’s party) while avoiding accountability.
A mainstream party can get hijacked by extremists and govern with a minority vote share under first-past-the-post. The threshold for far-right politics under our electoral system is much lower.
And under an fptp system, that party is entirely responsible for their actions under said extremist hijacking and can thus be punished at the ballot booth accordingly.
Again, there is not really an equivalent mechanism under PR. Who is to blame for any particular decision in a 4 way coalition?
thus be punished at the ballot booth accordingly.
Not when FPTP has unpredictable results and could actually end up rewarding the questionable party with more seats even if the public reduced their ballot support.
Governments should be elected on the will of the majority not minority.
Again, there is not really an equivalent mechanism under PR. Who is to blame for any particular decision in a 4 way coalition?
People can see who pushed for certain parts of an agreement then not vote for them again extinguishing their political power. That’s why we have journalists investigating the inner-workings of parliament.
A proportional system reflects the views of the people much sooner than first-past-the-post.
People can see who pushed for certain parts of an agreement then not vote for them again extinguishing their political power. That’s why we have journalists investigating the inner-workings of parliament.
That’s not at all how politics or investigative journalism work? Those would be closed door negotiations. If you read news from PR systems (DW, any reporting from Israel) you’ll learn that while parties broadcast their broad positions, the specific horse trading is quite secretive.
actually end up rewarding the questionable party with more seats even if the public reduced their ballot support
As also happens in PR. Say last election happened under a PR system with the Conservatives and Bloc being thr party with thr most seats and a partner to push them into majority territory. You’d then have what I presume you’d categorize as an extremist party combined with a purely regional party making decisions for everyone.
This is why Netanyahu, despite being wildly unpopular, still has a pretty good chance of winning elections; small dogmatic parties can combine with several moderately popular ones to control a country. It’s a horrifying situation with zero accountability, whereas we know exactly whom to blame and punish accordingly.
You do not have any accountability with a political party who has a minority of vote winning most of the seats. Stop being anti-democratic.
The article delves into the government’s motives, and in my opinion is at least somewhat sympathetic to them.
I agree that jettisoning the consumer carbon tax may have been a necessary move to kneecap the Conservatives…but that doesn’t mean there won’t also be negative consequences to doing so.
On a similar note, the Liberals are getting loads of justified criticism for the Alberta pipeline “deal”…but few people are talking about the whole thing requiring a private company that’s willing to step up and build the thing, which…I don’t think I’d bet money on that.
All of which is to say…it’s a mess, at best. I have a bunch of conflicting thoughts and feelings about it.
Honestly, my big hope is that Carney is playing a fairly simple game with Alberta. Alberta etc generally blames the Federal government as the one stopping them from more pipelines etc.
I kind of love Carney saying “hey, the Feds will back off. Good luck.” While knowing full well that BC Indigenous groups will never allow it. (And frankly, if the bands do say yes, I’m not sure I have the moral standing to disagree.) But Carney has taken away the biggest and best attack lines the Conservatives have. If the BC bands reject the pipelines, the Conservatives will have to defend the significantly less popular position of “over ride the Indigenous rights for oil!”
I think that’s the most generous interpretation of it, not that I think it will help tamp down the crazies.
Oh for sure, crazies gonna crazy on all sides.
Crazy Conservatives gonna still blame the Feds for not pipelining, crazy Progressives gonna blame Carney for not forbidding any and all resource development.
But, I do have faith in that moderate middle. I’ve met more than a few Conservatives who are becoming fans, especially those who’ve felt their party bending to the crazies.
