Written by Richard
Fidler and first published at Life
on the Left Blog
The following is a slightly edited
text of a presentation I made to open a discussion on this topic at the Free
Transit Ottawa membership meeting March 6, 2019. It is now posted on FTO’s
Facebook page. – Richard Fidler
Climate
change is the most visible, most threatening expression of a larger, planetary ecological
crisis, the result of an economic system (capitalism) with an inherent growth
and profit dynamic which ensures that the exploitation of natural resources
(both renewable and non-renewable) exceeds the carrying capacity of nature. You
have read the almost-daily scientific reports, each more alarming than the ones
before, on the scope of the crisis. I won’t belabour the point.
Our approach
must be informed by, and congruent with, the challenge that crisis poses to the
way society must be organized if we are to halt and reverse the ecological
catastrophe toward which we are now hurtling.
The Trudeau government’s approach
At Paris in
2015, the prime minister pledged to limit Canada’s share of increased climate
warming to no more than 1.5 degrees. That translates into a 30% reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) below 2005 levels. The First Ministers agreed
to this in 2016.
The federal
policy is set out in what they call the Pan-Canadian Framework on Green Growth
and Climate Change. It has “four main pillars: pricing carbon pollution;
complementary measures to further reduce emissions across the economy; measures
to adapt to the impacts of climate change and build resilience; and actions to
accelerate innovation, support clean technology, and create jobs.”
Carbon
pricing is the key “pillar” and it takes two forms:
1. A carbon
tax, gradually increased over time to encourage households and industries to
reduce carbon consumption. All revenues revert to the provinces, 90% going to
households. A levy on large industrial polluters took effect January 1, and one
on fossil fuels will begin in April, initially at $20 a tonne, to increase to
$50 a tonne in 2022. Major exemptions are provided for strategic industries,
including oil and gas, to protect “competitiveness.”
In fact,
carbon taxes will always be limited to ensure that Canadian businesses are not
disadvantaged by competitors’ prices and to avoid economic disruption that
would motivate greater market intervention. But they are largely ineffective in
reducing GHG emissions.
Both the UN
Environment Program and the OECD have noted the inadequacy of Canada’s
emissions reduction targets.
2. Carbon
offset schemes. Businesses invest in environmental projects around the world to
balance their own carbon footprints. These projects are usually based in
underdeveloped countries, and are designed to reduce future emissions through
introducing clean energy technologies or, for example, to offset pollution in
the North through promoting reforestation in the South.
An example is
“cap-and-trade.” The government sets a cap (limit) on the amount of GHG
emissions various industries can emit into the atmosphere. The limit is
gradually reduced over time to decrease total pollution levels.
That’s the
theory. What it amounts to is issuing permits to pollute, which can be traded
on carbon markets like stocks on the stock market. The market sets the price.
These schemes essentially give companies (with enough money) a right to
pollute, rather than forcing them to reduce pollution.
The system
makes pollution a commodity through credits and offsets that allow for
financial corporations to profit from polluting industries. Some provinces have
adopted similar plans.
Others are challenging carbon taxes in the courts. The
Ford government cancelled Ontario’s cap-and-trade program along with hundreds
of renewable energy projects (wind, solar, thermal) already under way.
The fundamental flaw
As James Wilt
noted in the Briarpatch article posted to our list,[1] carbon pricing doesn’t
regulate emissions, it just puts a price on them based on an arbitrary
calculation, the “social cost of carbon,” that tends to ignore the
“externalities” — the cumulative emissions, feedback loops, and
disproportionate impacts of climate change on countries in the Global South.
These are not encompassed in corporate cost-benefit analysis. For business,
they are just a cost of doing business.
Wilt
describes the carbon tax as “a deeply neoliberal and individualistic” approach
that “often excludes or minimizes impacts on fossil fuel corporations while
downloading moral and financial responsibility on households that burn fossil
fuels for transportation or heating. Perhaps most concerning of all is the way
it serves to create resentment for – and siphon energy from – far more
ambitious climate policy that would rapidly cut emissions, guarantee jobs, and
improve public services for all.”
However,
Canadian authorities, far from passively relying on market mechanisms, are
quite capable of aggressive action to implement their goals where these are
integral to their strategic profit and growth concerns. Missing from the
Pan-Canadian Framework is the other, more important component of the Trudeau
government’s climate approach: promoting further oil and gas exploitation and export,
especially through building pipeline and rail capacity. This endeavour totally
conflicts with its carbon-reduction promises.
In 2018
alone, the federal government announced $19 billion in new investments in dirty
oil.[2] $4.5 billion went to the purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline. (The
Parliamentary budget director says the government paid one billion too much.)
The new pipeline will triple the quantity of oil transported, at a cost to
taxpayers of $9.7 billion. Once operational, it will increase the number of
supertankers in the Vancouver harbour from 40 to 600 per year. As the owner of
this major pipeline, but also its regulatory authority, the government has
placed itself in a huge conflict-of-interest situation.[3]
Bill C-69,
now in the Senate, will abolish the National Energy Board (NEB), substitute the
Canadian Energy Regulator and establish a separate Impact Assessment Agency
with a priority to “foster sustainability.” But as the pipeline owner, Ottawa
has a fiduciary obligation to maximize future oil shipments and revenues,
accelerate approvals and construction, curtail protests from the public and
First Nations, and even counter judicial opposition from the B.C. government.
And that’s
not all. Last fall, Finance Minister Morneau announced $2.7 billion in support
for investments to encourage oil companies to invest and produce more. In
January, Trudeau announced $1.7 billion more in credit lines to the oil
industry. And Alberta, frustrated by the delays in the Trans Mountain project,
will lease 4,400 railway cars which it says will move up to 120,00 barrels of
oil per day by rail by 2020.
Trudeau has
of course come out in support of the $40 billion LNG Canada project in northern
British Columbia, the largest infrastructure project in Canadian history. LNG
Canada is a carbon hog, its construction and operation being incompatible with
the B.C. NDP government’s own carbon-reduction targets as well as Ottawa’s.
These
subsidies, in total, rule out any possibility of achieving the government’s
vaunted carbon reduction goals.
And then
there are costs of restoring the tar sands lands, estimated by Alberta’s oil
regulator at $260 billion.
Imagine if
these amounts had instead been invested in sustainable development and
renewable energies.
Since the last
election, in 2015, tar sands production has increased by 24%. In November 2018
the NEB forecasted that domestic oil production will grow by 58% and natural
gas production will grow by 29 percent between now and 2040. The forecast
assumes the feds will implement the carbon tax as planned and that new
pipelines will be built to accommodate rising production. Just days ago, the
NEB gave its go-ahead to Trans Mountain for the second time, pursuant to the
review dictated by the Federal Court of Appeal’s overturn of its initial
approval last August.
The
government itself acknowledges the failure of its approaches. In a report
issued in December the federal department of Environment and Climate Change
said the policies currently in place will deliver only three-quarters of the
emission reductions required to meet Canada’s Paris target. But the minister
Catherine McKenna maintains Canada is on track: she says she is counting on
investment in public transit and the adoption of new technologies such as the
electric car over the next 12 years to close the gap.
New technologies?
This is a
common hope, frequently encountered on the left as well. But it’s an illusion.
In an article previously circulated on our list, ecosocialist Ian Angus
exploded the myth that geoengineering, nuclear power, carbon storage and other
techno-fixes — all of them promoted by the US socialist magazine Jacobin — can
be viewed as solutions to climate change.[4]
By way of
comparison, a recent study by Robert Gross of the Imperial College of London
concludes that the average period required for the adoption of the four most
recent leading electrical production technologies — nuclear, gas turbines,
photovoltaic (solar) cells, and wind turbines —was 43 years. Adoption was
defined as being well established but not yet dominant.[5]
Which means
that if we want to avert catastrophic climate change by 2050, we are
essentially reduced to using existing technologies.
Putting aside
Canadian governments’ commitment to expanding reliance on fossil fuel
production and export, which is completely irrational in view of the scientific
evidence on the source and pace of climate change, the parallel reliance on
market mechanisms to compensate for emissions through carbon credits and
technologies (not to mention nuclear) is equally deficient. The central error
is the attempt to respond to the climate challenge without challenging the
sacred cow of growth and competition for profit of a capitalist system that is
85% reliant on fossil fuels.
Yet the core
plank of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is the belief that capitalist
growth can be fundamentally “green.”
This illusion
is now being challenged even in some unexpected places. Consider, for example,
this article in the Fall 2018 edition of Foreign Policy magazine, a prestigious
US publication that exists, as it proclaims, “to serve decision-makers in
business, finance and government.”[6]
The author,
Jason Hickel, argues that the absolute decoupling of GDP from resource use is
impossible on global scale. There are physical limits to how efficiently we can
use resources. Once those limits are reached, any economic growth drives
resource use back up.
“Preventing
that outcome will require a whole new paradigm. High taxes and technological
innovation will help, but they’re not going to be enough. The only realistic
shot humanity has at averting ecological collapse is to impose hard caps on
resource use…. Such caps, enforced by national governments or by international
treaties, could ensure that we do not extract more from the land and the seas
than the Earth can safely regenerate. We could also ditch GDP as an indicator
of economic success and adopt a more balanced measure like the genuine progress
indicator (GPI), which accounts for pollution and natural asset depletion.
Using GPI would help us maximize socially good outcomes while minimizing
ecologically bad ones.
“But there’s
no escaping the obvious conclusion. Ultimately, bringing our civilization back
within planetary boundaries is going to require that we liberate ourselves from
our dependence on economic growth—starting with rich nations.”
He continues:
“This might
sound scarier than it really is. Ending growth doesn’t mean shutting down
economic activity—it simply means that next year we can’t produce and consume
more than we are doing this year. It might also mean shrinking certain sectors
that are particularly damaging to our ecology and that are unnecessary for
human flourishing, such as advertising, commuting, and single-use products.”
Alternative approaches
This brings
us to alternative strategies and approaches to climate change. Here I think we
need to bear in mind three principles in articulating alternatives:
1. The
precautionary principle: There must be no deployment of possibly dangerous
technologies (e.g. geoengineering).
2. The
importance of differentiated responsibilities: The Global North bears primary
responsibility for climate crisis, and must contribute disproportionately to
efforts to remediate in the Global South, the primary victims. As well, we need
to incorporate “grey emissions” (resulting from production in the South for
things consumed in the North) in national scenarios. Neither of these
principles are present in the Paris Accord of 2015, on which Trudeau claims to
base his approach. And I would add a third principle:
3. Social justice.
Workers should not have to pay the costs of transitioning from a problem they
did not create, and of which they are victims. This means no loss of jobs,
income, social protection or labour rights.
In my opinion
it is misleading to think that converting all existing energy sources from
non-renewable to renewable sources — summed up in the slogan “100% renewable
energy by (say) 2050”— will procure the energy needed to maintain existing
activities, let alone more extensive ones. Eliminating use of non-renewable
energy sources necessitates a complex of immense efforts; fossil fuel accounts
for 85% of energy production today.
Furthermore, the transition itself is a
source of supplementary emissions, that must be offset if the carbon budget is
not to explode. (Think of the energy required in building electric-powered
vehicles to replace the existing vehicle fleet, no matter how composed.)
How are we to
offset these expanded energy needs? In a productivist system any gain in
efficiency is used to increase production. So we need to reduce global energy
consumption, that is, reduce productive and/or transport activities. This means
challenging the capitalist growth imperative.
Does this
mean de-growth? Some production or services should not degrow but be suppressed,
ASAP: coal facilities and mines, oil extraction, weapons production, the
advertising industry, glyphosate, pesticides, etc. But others should grow –
such as renewable energies, organic agriculture, and essential services
(education, health and culture).
Obvious
measures: Here are just a few of the options (you can add many more):
Rapidly phase
out oil, gas, and coal extraction and stop subsidizing fossil fuels
Develop a
massive program of public investment in solar, wind, thermal energy
Initiate a
massive green housing program focused on energy-efficient social housing for
low-income residents, and retrofit existing buildings with electric heat pumps,
efficient appliances, and added insulation
Fund public
transportation, including urban, rural, and intercity options; construct a
pan-Canadian network of electrified passenger and freight trains
Employ people
to clean up abandoned wells, tailings lakes, and mining waste to prepare land
for return to Indigenous peoples
Break with
agribusiness, promote ecological agriculture and work with farmers to reduce
agricultural emissions
End
production of useless and dangerous things (start with weapons!)
Localize
production to the maximum, fight planned obsolescence
Redistribute
wealth, refinance the public education and care sectors
Develop new
ecologically sound industries to employ workers displaced by suppression of
non-renewable resource exploitation – while maintaining incomes and social
benefits.
Financing –
Major tax reforms, increased high marginal tax rates. And cut useless
expenditures, beginning with all military not converted to a home defense
militia.
Local action
– Yes, but also global measures. And go beyond capitalism. Draw on indigenous
buen vivir concepts. And build alliances, anticapitalist coalitions of workers,
unemployed homemakers, farmers, indigenous communities, racialized minorities,
students, youth, poor against the entrenched fossil oligarchy. Link
decarbonization with opposition to capitalist austerity.
In particular
industries, unions can develop plans for alternative climate-friendly
approaches.
A good example is the Canadian Union of Postal Workers campaign,
“Delivering Community Power.” Establish postal banking, create a renewable
energy postal fleet, make post offices solar-powered community hubs for ditigal
access, provide charging stations for electric vehicles, etc. Integrate letter
carrier services with support to enable the ageing and disabled to live
independently.[7]
Green New Deal
– The proposal by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a Democrat in the US Congress
and member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), sets out a series of
objectives that are quite radical incorporating many of the above demands,
albeit within a general framework of “green capitalism.” It has attracted
support in Canada. Avi Lewis, an author of the Leap Manifesto, describes it as
“the Leap Manifesto, with increased altitude and velocity.”
The DSA’s
Ecosocialist Working Group released a statement recently supporting the Green
New Deal “while recognizing that its resolutions are conversation starters –
not complete and adequate blueprints.” The Group proposes improvements such as
setting firm target dates (“Decarbonize the economy fully by 2030”), democratizing
control over major energy systems and resources, etc.[8]
Also, we need
to center the working class in a just transition: Decommodify survival by
guaranteeing living wages, healthcare, childcare, housing, food, water, energy,
public transit etc.
Demilitarize,
decolonize and strive for a future of international solidarity and cooperation.
Ultimately,
we need a different kind of government with the political will to lead,
coordinate and consolidate the transition, a government based on the support
and protagonism of the victims of climate change, not its perpetrators.
_______________________________
These
comments borrow heavily from many authors more informed than I am on this
topic. In particular, my thanks go to those listed in the footnotes, as well as
Daniel Tanuro and Michael Löwy. Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed
are mine and do not necessarily engage Free Transit Ottawa. – Richard Fidler
