Will Canada Fight Climate Change the Way We Fought the Taliban?

Canada, like most ISAF member nations, did a lousy job in Afghanistan. Harper said we were in it to win. We would drive the Taliban out - for good. We would transform Afghanistan into a democratic nation where the rights of women and children would be respected. We would never cut and run.

How did that turn out? The Talibs never left, not on our watch, not since. They've been taking control of more territory in that country than ever before. Now the United States is negotiating with them privately, without the Kabul government. Afghanistan has never overcome the dual scourge of tribalism and warlordism so toxic to democracy. The women and children? Well...  And, yes, we cut and ran.

Now we seem to be doing something quite similar in our supposed fight against climate change. How so?

We're falling back on efforts that are plainly gestural. We're not in it to win.

In Afghanistan that meant never measuring the commitment, force levels and such, to the challenge. We foolishly took over the Kandahar mission with a minuscule force, it's numbers somewhere between 10 to 20 per cent of what was needed to defeat the Talibs given the population of Kandahar. We had no choice but to become a garrison force, ceding control of the province to the bad guys at night and much of the day time when we didn't put in an appearance outside the wire. We would mount missions. When we did the enemy would fade away and wait until we went back to base. Whack-a-Mole.  When you're fighting an insurgency and you can't protect the civilian population, you lose. No surprise, we lost.

On climate change 'gestural' means ineffective measures that are disconnected from the enormity and urgency of the threat. We don't talk about what's coming, how soon, and what we must do to avert the worst possible outcomes.

We don't talk about the inadequacy of our emissions targets or why we're in no position to meet them.  Why not? We point to a $30 per ton carbon tax but we never talk about how much or how little good that might do. Why not? We're really dropping the ball on the mitigation side just as we dropped the ball in Kandahar. We want a blue ribbon for participation just like what they give kids at preschool track day.

We never, ever, but never talk about the other side of the coin - adaptation. We're like the little pig in the straw house as the wolf draws ever closer. We don 't talk about what's coming or what we can still do to weather the storms. Why not? We have the longest coastlines of any nation but we're not doing much if anything to prepare for sea level rise. Why not? We have this worsening wildfire problem that's spreading black soot and small particulate matter, the PM 2.5 stuff that embeds carbon, sulfur, nitrogen and heavy metals in our lungs but we're not talking about it. Why not? We have ocean acidification and aquatic heatwaves that spawn algae blooms and dead zones that threaten our fisheries but we're not talking about it. Why not? We have a wide range of threats to our domestic food security from droughts to floods, severe heatwaves, pest and disease migration and proliferation. We're not talking about it. Why not? 

Then there's the big one - our outdated, inadequate and decaying infrastructure, the circulatory system of our economy; bridges, roads, railways, sea and airports, electrical grids.  A lot of that was built in my late father's time. It was designed and engineered and constructed for a time that is now past, a gentler time. It was never designed to withstand the demands of our new climate. Replacing, repairing and upgrading our existing critical infrastructure could be the greatest public works programme in our country's history, not that far off from European reconstruction in the immediate postwar years. We're not talking about it. Why not?

Our approach to climate change, both mitigation and adaptation, is every bit as half-assed as was our commitment to the men and women we sent on a hopeless mission to Kandahar.

Why aren't we talking about this, all of it, in meaningful detail? I expect that's because talking about these things would reveal just how much trouble we're really in and both the enormity and urgency of the threats and what is required to at least blunt them. That's a conversation our leaders would rather put off for a future government to handle.