Well, We Know How They Feel About Trump

Donald Trump has nations a bit on edge, even America's friends.

Take the Swedes for example. Sweden is a country with Cold War memories. During those dark years when the Soviet Union vied with the United States, Sweden constructed 65,000 nuclear bomb shelters. That's a lot.

Today, of course, the Soviet Union is gone. So too is the United States, at least in the sense that we once knew it. Today it's Putingrad and Trumpville. And that's got the Swedes on edge all over again. They're taking this pretty seriously, even to the point of planning to expand that already extensive network of nuclear fallout shelters.

Swedish authorities figure the existing 65,000 shelters will suffice for a population of seven million only, today, that still leaves three million with not much better than "duck and cover." Officials are now looking to construct new shelters to protect the overage. Swedish shelters are intended to provide protection against the gamut of WMDs - nuclear, biological and chemical.

If you find the Swedes extreme, the Swiss are way ahead of their Scandinavian counterparts. The Swiss have an abundance of shelters, more than enough to house their entire population.

Whereas confidence among Europeans that President Barack Obama would “do the right thing regarding world affairs” ranged between 70 and 90 percent in a number of surveyed nations during his term, those numbers plummeted after Trump’s inauguration and have only gone down since. Only 7 percent in Spain and 11 percent in Germany now say they have confidence in Trump. Top officials in Germany have also directly contradictedTrump’s North Korea policies, and have voiced concerns that the White House may overreact to nuclear provocations and escalate the war rhetoric being exchanged with North Korea.

Europeans are similarly worried that decades-long nonproliferation efforts could be dismantled virtually overnight, leading to a new arms race. In 2009, the Obama administration negotiated a treaty with Russia in which both countries agreed to cap the number of deployed warheads. Trump reportedly called the agreement a bad deal in his first phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year, although administration officials have since backtracked.

Sweden’s new shelter locations indicate that at least some of the concerns are connected to Russia. One of the regions where most new shelters are expected to be constructed in the coming years is the island of Gotland, where military defenses were recently expanded with the declared aim of stopping a possible Russian invasion.

What If Gerson Is Right? What If Government No Longer Works?

I can be pretty hard on Justin Trudeau. He does deserve credit for the good things he's done but that comes with responsibility for his lapses and willful failures. I prefer Trudeau by a country mile over the Tory party and their leadership, past and present, but that's still not enough to make me think the Liberal prime minister is doing a good job. He's not. He's doing a less worse job than I'm sure we would be getting from his Conservative adversary but that's about it.

Is it Trudeau's fault or is it a systemic failure of our politics? Probably it's some measure of both.

The final paragraph in Michael Gerson's op-ed in today's Washington Post resonates in my mind.

"It is quite possible that moderate conservatism and moderate liberalism are inadequate to explain and tame the convulsive economic and social changes of our time. Which places America’s future — uncertain, maybe unknowable — on the other side of an earthquake."

Could that hold true for Canada? Are moderate conservatism and moderate liberalism no longer adequate to the challenges that we face, "the convulsive economic and social changes of our time"? Is the future of Canada and generations to come consigned to uncertainty "on the other side of an earthquake"? In several ways that seems to be the case and that perception grows stronger with the passage of time as we see Canada, like every other nation, being overtaken by some rather dire events.

What can you say for a government in denial? Trudeau's government certainly fits that bill.  Take climate change, generally accepted as the gravest threat facing mankind.  As nations go, Canada has a much better than average chance of avoiding the very worst impacts. It's not that we're better or brighter or wiser. We're simply latitudinally blessed. We're more distant from the equator than most countries, the one with which we share a border in particular. Our land reaches further beyond the polar circle than most. We have a population density advantage. We have a natural resources advantage. So what is our government doing to ensure we maximize the benefit of our natural advantages to avert or reduce the impacts we will otherwise sustain?

A carbon tax. Really, that's it? A carbon tax. Is that the best they can do? Earlier this week I posted an item about Swedish bomb shelters. The Swedes have a network of 65,000 bomb shelters but they think they need more in this Age of Trump, enough to shelter an additional 3 million people. At first it sounded a bit funny, 65,000 bomb shelters. How many do you imagine our government built during the Cold War? A couple of dozen, maybe? But then humour gave way to wonder at the resolve the Swedish government must have had to build all those shelters in the first place. Plainly they recognized a peril and identified a response and, despite the magnitude, they went ahead and built 65,000 shelters.  Bravo Sweden.

Is the threat we're facing from climate change somehow less certain, less dire than the threat the Swedes perceived faced their people during the Cold War?  Yet little Sweden, about a third the size of our population, mustered the resources and resolve to tackle this Herculean chore. So what have we don't to address an even graver threat that remotely approaches what Sweden did to protect its citizens against Cold War threats? Obviously we haven't done much so far but what are we planning to do? Anything, nothing? No, not nothing, a carbon tax.

There is so much that can be done right now. We can assess what Canada will be like in 20, 30 and 40 years from now, new areas that may open up, low lying coastal areas that might have to be abandoned, populations displaced and needing relocation, especially in the north. We can evaluate what we may need by way of essential infrastructure, communications, transportation and power grids, that sort of thing. We can explore how the future may change ways we're governed and how we're organized and how we'll interact.   We should be identifying all of our options and opportunities and their relative merits.

These are indicative of what Gerson calls the "convulsive economic and social changes of our time" and yet it's becoming increasingly obvious that moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism are inadequate to rise to these challenges.

The worst part is that I suspect Trudeau and Scheer and Singh know they're not up to these challenges. They know that our political apparatus isn't sufficiently robust to meet our uncertain, unknowable future which could also leave us on the "other side of an earthquake."

Climate Change Resilience? Maybe I Was Too Hard on Government.

I was wrong. Our governments aren't ignoring all climate change impacts and the need for adaptation strategies. Infrastructure - power grids, roads, bridges, basic utilities, ports, that sort of thing - sure they're ignoring that. But there are climate change impacts they're getting ready for. Ask companies such as General Dynamics or Raytheon.

Militaries around the world have identified climate change as a major national security threat. It's not that they're just pushing on an open door, a way to remain relevant, needed - although that's part of it. It's just that mass carnage on a scale never experienced by mankind is coming.

Some experts contend that, if we're lucky, there could still be upwards of a billion of us on Earth by 2100. Well, we're expected to hit nine billion by 2030-2035, so that's a lot of billions who are going to be gone, most of them prematurely, in the following half century.

The environmentalists fell in with the militarists as handy backup in their battles against the climate change denialist crowd and the fossil fuelers. Now they're having second thoughts, worrying that climate change has taken on too much of a national security focus.

The Pentagon in 2003 was the first to talk about climate security, framing climate change as a “threat multiplier” that would exacerbate conflict, terrorism, mass migration and social instability. In 2008, the EU concurred saying that global temperature increases of more than 2 degrees (current predictions suggest we are heading for more than 3 degrees) would “lead to unprecedented security scenarios”. 

Security is a modern day weasel word – who can be against security? The question rarely asked is whose security are we talking about - security of what, for whom and from whom? The US, EU and now Australian strategies, though, clearly state they are talking about the security of their respective nations in the face of “threats” usually coming from the consequences of climate change in neighbouring countries.

...The image they paint is a dystopian one, which assumes that climate change disruptions will lead to a dog-eat-dog world, causing conflicts and wars, and prompting millions to migrate – and this will require the military to deal with the ensuing chaos. 

The effect of this approach is to turn the victims of climate change into potential threats and to make a militarised response to the impact of climate change the default response.

...But by blurring the distinction between the military’s ideas of security and other “human security” approaches, it embraces and reinforces a military response to climate change.

This is all true, no question. But it shines a harsh light on the flawed thinking of most of the environmental crowd. Very, very few among them see climate change as one component of a much greater, vastly more powerful problem that is not being addressed. You have to take all of the existential threats we're facing (do you think it matters if the bullet enters your brain from behind or the side or even the top?) and look for the common threads that run through them and bind them so that you simply cannot solve even one of them unless you solve them all.

These threats run the gamut from climate change to overpopulation, over-consumption, ocean acidification, the freshwater crisis, our broken hydrologic cycle and more. These are global threats although they're not experienced in the same way, to the same extent, at the same pace everywhere. They're not uniform. They can vary from one region to another. Some places shall burn to the ground first, others shall burn to the ground later.

They're still global problems but because they arrive at different times in differing degrees we don't favour global responses, the only approach that will ever work. Why not? Ask Justin Trudeau why he has a bitumen pipeline fetish in 2018 while some parts of the world are catching on fire? We don't do it because we're just too selfish and too greedy - too greedy, perhaps, even to survive. Read Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail." There's a whole chapter on how humans have made utterly nihilistic decisions for short term gain. We just keep doing it. We just keep blowing up. Only, this time, it's on a global basis.

For years I posted regular "Arms Race Updates." I stopped when the rearmament developments became a blur. If the small nations of Asia Pacific have deployed or on order 200 modern submarines, does it matter if Vietnam is buying six modern Russian U-boats to defend itself against Chinese aggression? Yet a lot of this rearmament frenzy comes down to nations suspicious of their neighbours and their immediate region. Folks are starting to get antsy. Around the world, people are going for their guns.  Even peaceful Sweden has the jitters. They're building thousands of new bomb shelters because the 65,000 Cold War shelters can't handle the extra three million Swedes they've added since the 80s. Last week the Swedes issued a "be prepared for war" pamphlet to the entire population.

I do understand the environmentalists' desire not to see their issue hijacked by the generals but that horse has already left the barn. There's no global mechanism in place to solve these tightly woven threats because there's no global will to resolve them. It would mean equity, sharing, fairness on an unbelievable scale and those, the haves, who would have to share with the have-nots won't hear of it.

The Next Front in the New Cold War? Canada's Back Yard.

Vlad Putin is shrewd when it comes to exploiting weakness or carelessness in others.  When he looks to the Arctic, that's exactly what he sees.

The climate crisis is intensifying a new military buildup in the Arctic, diplomats and analysts said this week, as regional powers attempt to secure northern borders that were until recently reinforced by a continental-sized division of ice. 

That so-called unpaid sentry is now literally melting away, opening up shipping lanes and geo-security challenges, said delegates at the Arctic Frontiers conference, the polar circle’s biggest talking shop, who debated a series of recent escalations. 

Russia is reopening and strengthening cold war bases on the Kola peninsula in the far north-west of the country. Norway is beefing up its military presence in the high Arctic.

Sweden, which already has 65,000 nuclear bomb shelters, is planning to add thousands more to protect the extra three million Swedes it has acquired since the height of Cold War I.

“Right now, the reasons we are seeing more military activity is that countries are worried by the spectre of open water,” one of the speakers, Klaus Dodds, a professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, told the Guardian. “The unique Arctic security architecture has shape and form that come from natural extremities. If the Arctic becomes just another ocean, this breaks down. It’s elemental.”

As noted in the previous post, the Barents Sea is expected to go from an Arctic sea to an Atlantic sea over the next decade and that is predicted to spread to other Arctic regional seas.

The Arctic’s unique characteristics are under attack from all sides. Below, the once-frozen ocean is now mixed with warmer, more saline Atlantic waters. In the skies above, the polar vortex above is weakening, allowing intrusions of balmy air currents from the south. 

Sea ice is being lost at a rate of more than 10,000 tonnes per second, according to Tore Furevik, a professor at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Bergen. “We’re heading for a new and uncertain Arctic with ramifications for nature and politics,” he said. “We should strive to be less suspicious, less hostile and more open-minded if we are to deal with a problem that we have so recklessly created.”