In the battle between environmentalists and the pro-pipeline contingent in British Columbia, the argument often boils down (as so many “leftish” versus “rightish” battles do) to a few slender talking points.
The pro-environment people argue that the risk to our coastline just isn’t worth the potential gains, while the pro-energy people argue that the environmentalists simply don’t understand that tankers and pipelines will be good for the economy, and will therefore benefit us all.
I’ve written before about how the environment-versus-the-economy dichotomy is a false one. Surely, in a healthy society, we need both to flourish, and surely, considering that the environment is the thing that sustains us on our planet, its health should trump short-term plans for economic gains.
But I think this is worth repeating in the light of a new report released by the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change.
The report, which draws its information from more than 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies and has been approved by more than 100 national governments, lays out the types of wide-ranging risks that we’re facing.
“Things are worse than we had predicted,” said Saleemul Huq, one of the authors of the report and director of Bangladesh’s International Centre for Climate Change and Development. Environmental disasters that are either caused by or exacerbated by global warming have been ramping up, and will continue to hit us harder and faster.
As David Suzuki said, we’re already feeling the effects of climate change, and it has already advanced beyond our ability to stop it.
Climate change is real, and it has been drastically influenced by human behaviour. These are facts that the scientific community is no longer debating. Indeed, the scientific community has been unanimous about this for years, despite what the lobbyists are (still!) attempting to argue.
Indeed, the few “dissenting voices” in the climate-change debate aren’t arguing that it isn’t real or isn’t man-made, but that our current estimates about its dangers are too conservative. The question we now face is how to minimize its effects and deal with its inevitable results.
And yet, staggeringly, whenever we bring climate change into an economic or political arena, the urgency of creating sustainable solutions seems — magically — to fade into the background, as one concern among many. In B.C., the debate is being couched, as usual, as a matter of balancing environmental needs with economic needs, but this is a false equivalency.
In a world where climate change is real, supporting an energy policy that is not forward-thinking and not focused on renewable resources is a bad plan. Supporting the kinds of systems that are actively contributing to global warming is a bad plan. There’s no getting around that, and no amount of short-term economic gain will make it “worth it.”
We’re still hearing ads on the radio, talking about how pipeline proponents are putting safety systems in place to prevent large oil spills on our coasts, but that’s only a minor part of the larger issue. We’re worried about oil spills, absolutely, but we’re more worried about the bigger problem.
As we saw with our fisheries, muzzling our scientists or refusing to take their suggestions into account damages not only our environmental resources, but our long-term profits. Nobody wants to buy licey salmon, but that’s what we got when we didn’t farm them responsibly.
Promoting bad science (or in the case of climate change, simply flat-out ignoring the implications of what the scientific community is telling us) can result in short-term profits, but it’s an incredibly terrible long-term economic policy.
Climate change will exacerbate social problems on a global scale, as poorer regions will struggle to deal with the effects of natural disasters, but it will also impede the healthy flourishing of more affluent societies, argues the report.
Anyone who cares about the long-term economic health of our province should be focused on its environmental health.
It’s time to scrap the idea that being an environmentalist is in any way a fringe thing.
At this point, it’s barely even a leftist thing, because most of us can see the way the wind is blowing.
It’s not just good sense to care about the environment, it’s stupid not to.
