We’re supposed to be upset because Justin Trudeau’s to-do list in Nanaimo doesn’t include climate change.
“How,” social media demands to know, “can Trudeau and his cabinet ignore global warming even while choking on the smoke from B.C.’s wildfires?”
To which the obvious answer is this: The fact that people on Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Island and Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»have been wheezing in the apocalyptic gloom for a few days doesn’t make the global climate threat any more grave than it was when we were blissfully basking in the summer sunshine. Fretting about climate change only when your eyes are watering is like thinking of grocery shopping only when you’re hungry.
As it is, the agenda at the two-day federal cabinet might include discussion of carbon pricing, but it’s mixed in with gun crime, immigration, NAFTA and other subjects of more immediate concern, or at least more immediate if you’re worried about winning seats in Toronto and Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»in a federal election that’s just 14 months away.
That’s the reality of politics, and of human nature. We don’t worry about problems until they’re right on us. We wait until the day after the Big One (or at least the Little One) before buying earthquake kits. We don’t line up at the tire shop until slip-sliding on four inches (or, as Victorians like to call it, three feet) of snow. We don’t perk up about climate change until spooked by a noon-day sky torn from the pages of Dune.
It’s hard to maintain the requisite level of panic when the crisis outlasts the typical news cycle, though. (Day 1 headline: Climate Change Is Upon Us. Day 2 headline: Climate Change Still Here. Day 3: How About That Pesky Climate Change? Day 4: Vic West Boy Wins Trip To Esquimalt.) Our internal flame tends to flicker until rekindled by the next fire/flood/fiasco.
B.C. Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver knows how this works. Whenever Victoria gets parched by drought so severe that the city has to replace the hanging-basket flowers with cacti, or gets slammed by a Sharknado-level storm so powerful that it sends panhandlers pinwheeling down Douglas Street, the media call him to ask: “Is this a sign of global warming?”
Weaver, a University of Victoria climatologist in his pre-politics days, then replies that no single weather event can be blamed on climate change, but climate change does cause extreme weather to occur more frequently.
Except this time Weaver will add that he has been forecasting more forest fires for decades, spelling out the predictions in an often-cited 2004 paper he co-authored. At this latitude, he says, global warming means more extremes: more precipitation, including big dumps of snow in winter, followed in summer by long droughts like the one we’re experiencing right now. Those droughts mean more fuel getting drier and drier, just waiting for a spark to set the forests burning. The fires might not be human-caused, but the conditions that made them possible are. As proof that this is no longer just theory, check the cost of your house insurance premiums, driven up by disaster-related claims.
Yet governments seem only half-serious — like buying that earthquake kit, but then using its flashlight batteries in the TV remote. B.C.’s lofty goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 to 40 per cent by 2030 sounds suspiciously like your New Year’s resolution to lose 10 pounds by summer — a super idea on Jan. 1 but maybe not so much when it’s June and ice cream is on sale or there’s a liquefied natural gas plant that needs building.
No way B.C. can add an LNG plant and hit those already-tough targets, Weaver figures. Likewise, he was left sputtering Wednesday when federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna repeated Trudeau’s defence of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion as a crucial part of Ottawa’s climate plan. “Who is she kidding?”
“To say that I’m somewhat frustrated by the cognitive dissonance is an understatement,” Weaver says. He talks about lemmings running over a cliff, the difference between people and lemmings being that the lemmings don’t know the cliff is coming.
The smoke will be gone soon. Climate change won’t.
