Climate change: Somebody ought to do something about that

For a while there, we could all write about climate change as if it were still coming and might possibly be avoided if people were exhorted sufficiently to do x, y and z to reduce their carbon footprint and governments were urged to own up to their policy paralysis.

I miss those days. Now it all feels just so much more right-now, a black cloud of fear and dread carried on waves of intense media coverage of weird weather events everywhere in the world. How does an average writer contribute helpfully to the dialogue once things have reached this state?

“What solutions would you propose?” a Facebook connection asked me recently after a post I did on the crappy legacy we Boomers are leaving behind for coming generations.

Well, isn’t that just the million-dollar question? Who DOES have the solutions for the gigantic issues of these times? And how will they ever be enacted in a world that seems incapable of taking collective action even as existential crisis looms?

We have wasted so much time already, first debating whether climate change even existed and then splintering into our various belief camps as to who was the most to blame and how they should be made to atone. As usual, we have let politicians use our longing for solutions that don’t require anything of us to take us down a number of garden paths during these years of finger-pointing.

The cost of inaction is staggering. Ben Parfitt and Marc Lee write that in 2021 alone, heat, fire and floods cost the BC economy at least $10.6 billion, and possibly almost double that. 

At this point, does it even matter how we got here, other than to give us context for prioritizing action? Sure, rich countries are rightly going to have to be on the hook for more money into the communal pot after enjoying decades of guilt-free emissions that fueled our economic dominance, but let’s just presume that and get going. What we really need to talk about is how we’re going to stop this train wreck.

I take heart from the scientists, because they’ve been studying this one for years even while the rest of us were still arguing about whether climate change even existed.

Devin Todd, Researcher in Residence at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at the University of Victoria, wrote in the Globe and Mail recently of the need to keep the pressure on around reducing emissions from fossil fuels while also figuring out a plan for emerging “negative emission” technologies that can remove and neutralize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The technologies are fascinating: machines that suck carbon dioxide from the air with chemical sponges; changing ocean chemistry so it draws down more C02; direct-air capture with the C02 then stored deep underground.

I read about what the scientists are coming up with and feel hope, sort of like you do at that part in the epic disaster movie where the brave astronaut-physicist-miracle person is heading into space to stop the asteroid from striking the Earth and destroying every living thing. Please save us, heroic scientists.

But then I look at the glacial pace of climate action at the hands of so many of the world’s governments and the deeply compromised agendas of pretty much everyone, and wonder how the fraught and fragile democracies of the 21^st century will ever get it together to make any plan, let alone execute it.

Not that it’s all on government. This historic period of climate change is about us, the eight billion people who divide up into people who buy stuff, people who make stuff, and people eagerly awaiting a day when they can do either of those things if they can only get out of poverty.

Those of us with money and those of us with cheap labour have entangled our needs and wants through unfettered trade. As Crawford Kilian noted in a recent Tyee column, Canada’s coal fuels China’s manufacturing, which then comes back as imports of all the stuff that Canadians can’t stop buying. Think of all the emissions that vicious circle of want costs the world.

So here we are, collectively entangled in the climate crisis, hooked on economic growth, wishing with all our hearts that someone’s going to pull a rabbit out of the hat and we’ll all get back to normal. Except when everybody’s wishing and nobody’s acting, not much gets done.  

Are we even capable of acting collectively? It’s not a hopeful sign when our countries can’t even come out of a global climate meeting with a few cheery accomplishments to lift our spirits. Perhaps poor countries think it was a win to extract a vague promise from rich countries to give them more money as climate change tears everything apart, but that is hardly a climate-change solution.

How do we come together as a world when so much sets us apart? It’s the question for these times. But if we’re still thinking that somebody else is prepping a hero for the big save and the rest of us are fine to cruise along like always, best to give that one up.

The world will do what it does, and I guess we’ll see if that’s anything at all. But what will YOU do?