The War on Global Warming

It would be great to be sitting in on a political science or an economics course this year. Those students are going to be discussing - what else - global warming, especially the broader implications of how it will effect and be affected by our system of capitalist democracy.

Stephen Harper wasn't entirely wrong when, a few years back, he called the Kyoto protocol a "money sucking socialist scheme." It wasn't a scheme, that paranoia belongs to the lunatics. However fighting global warming is going to cost money, it will necessitate some shifts in resource allocation and, although there is no way of predicting this right now, it may usher in real changes in our social and political structures.

The "War on Global Warming" (hey, I just gave it a name) or "WGW" (as I now like to refer to it) and its bigger dimension, the Global War on Global Warming or GWGW, is something we're only beginning to get a glimpse of, sort of like when the first rays of sunshine pop up over the horizon.

The thing about global warming is that, unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, this is a fight we have to win. We can't walk away from it. It's also a fight that we're going to be waging, really waging in the sense of voluntary as well as mandated restrictive sacrifices, for many centuries. Now, of course, you and I aren't going to be waging it so much as generations to come will be because those generations, if they are to be at all, will have to be born into the war. Anybody remember the carefree 60s? If you do, be grateful for the memories because that era is gone, for good, never to return.

WGW is antithetical to free market capitalism. It supercedes supply and demand curves. Free market capitalism was never as pure a concept as its proponents claimed. It was myopic and ultimately self-destructive but it was the model that we followed in getting into the predicament we find ourselves in today. We shouldn't scrap free market capitalism because we would lose all or at least many of its beneficial effects but we may have to change the equations, changing "supply and demand" to something along the lines of "supply and demand and necessity."

Think of "necessity" as posterity, the new factor in our equations for, after all, WGW is all about posterity. It'll be vaguely like tithing, that little bit you set aside to put in the collection plate. We'll be setting a little bit aside, holding a bit back for the sole purpose of sustaining the hope that, in centuries to come, the planet will be restored, rehabilitated.

Rights will be offset by responsibilities enforced in a much more muscular manner than ever before. Again the necessity factor will inevitably come into play particularly when the acceptable level of supply of something falls far short of demand.

Will technological "fixes" emerge? Perhaps. The incentive will clearly be there to come up with something to reduce the GW impacts, possibly even to scrub GHGs out of the air. Will that finally take us off the hook? Don't count on it.

As I wrote a few days ago, global warming is one of several challenges we're going to have to face. For example, you can add soil and water pollution, resource depletion and exhaustion, overpopulation, desertification and several other issues. You can wipe all the GHGs out of the atmosphere tomorrow but you'll still be left with these other challenges and they too are multi-generational in dimension.

What to do, what to do? That will be the vexing question we'll struggle to answer in the months and years to come. There are options, some of them more palatable than others. If you think there isn't going to be a political dimension to this, think again.

It may be possible for all parties, even for our society overall to identify and accept the danger and the target we need to reach but there will be plenty of views on how to get there. There will be a conservative outlook on this and a liberal outlook on this and, certainly, a socialist outlook on this. Some have speculated that this issue will rise above partisan politics. In some ways that's true but in other aspects, where the options come into play, global warming may more sharply define political differences than anything we've experienced.

How much sacrifice are you willing to bear? Can you even weigh that question without asking how much someone else should bear? What is a "fair share"? Talk about the ultimate question of the ages (at least since universal suffrage). Should the individual sacrifice be progressive? Should the rich, who have always been the biggest consumers, share proportionately more of the burden? Should we be imposing surcharges on luxuries such as SUVs, big houses, and overseas holidays?

How are we to handle regional disparities? No two provinces have the same, per capita, carbon footprint. Some are much worse than others. Do we set a national standard? Do we implement coercive taxes and levies together with carbon caps?

If you think these questions aren't grist for the mill of politics, think again.

Then there's the world scene. What should we expect of the emerging industrial giants, China, India and Brazil? It's inherently unjust that we sacrifice and they don't. The arguments about what happened in the past and letting the Third World "catch up" just don't work anymore.

Fortunately, the GWGW issue arrives at a time when these emerging economic giants are just that, "emerging." That allows us a degree of influence or leverage that we might never have had otherwise. Our leverage is in our markets. Without access to our markets, these economic miracles will fizzle. If we frame the issue on that basis I suspect you'll find a surprising amount of co-operation even in places that don't have a terrific history of co-operation.

There are no guarantees that we're going to rally to the war on global warming. Sure it's a big deal now, the foremost issue to Canadian voters, but that passion is in for a real beating when the reality of the costs and sacrifices required actually arrives.

The last generation of Canadians that truly had to sacrifice and struggle through a national emergency is now nearly all dead. My generation and the two that follow me have no tradition, no experience of sacrifice and struggle. We're going to want the solutions to global warming to be pretty much the same as we want war these days - bloodless (at least for us). I suspect we're always going to be willing to do less than we really must and I suspect the parties will all be falling over each other to present the most painless solutions which may be more pandering than solution.

Changes are coming. Let's hope we have the wisdom to really think them through and the courage to stand up for posterity.