As the international community prepares for December’s historic climate change summit in Copenhagen, Canadians are facing an identity crisis.
Are we green or are we mean?
Have we accepted the dire consequences of global warming – the flooding of coastal wetlands, the acidification of oceans, desertification and drought, higher extinction rates, more severe storms – as the price the planet should have to pay for the success of our current national economic program?
Within a decade, summers in the North Pole will be dramatically different: no ice and just an open sea. That is the prediction released Oct. 14 by explorers who have hiked through the area. Here, research vessels on an unrelated expedition break through ice near the North Pole in 2004.
Or are we the tree-huggers we always thought we were, prepared to adapt our companies and ourselves to new environmental standards in order to mitigate those disastrous outcomes?
According to the Climate Confidence Monitor, 55 per cent of Canadians, a slim majority, agree that a new treaty to limit emissions is important or extremely important.
In other words, just over half of Canadians wants action in Copenhagen. The other half doesn’t.
Deadlock.
The truth is, Canada has always been one part green, one part mean. And today, perhaps more than ever, our measure of mean is having its day.
First of all, Canada has let its greenhouse gas emission rate creep skyward, so that today they are 35 per cent above 1990 levels. By contrast, during the same period, Europe cut emissions by eight per cent.
More recently, Canada balked at the first-ever comprehensive proposal to seriously curb emissions, the Green Shift. We continued to throw our support behind the largest and dirtiest energy venture on the planet, Alberta’s oil sands, abandoning the Kyoto Protocol and undermining international efforts to move forward on climate change.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a swirling vortex of marine debris in the central North Pacific Ocean. The exact size of the patch is unknown, but estimates put it at between 700,000-15 million sq.km, and containing over 100 million tonnes of debris. The patch is composed of high concentrations of floating plastic and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific.
Thick crude oil washes up on Evans Island in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on April 11, 1989. The Exxon-Valdez tanker oil spill on March 24, 1989, blackened hundreds of miles of coastline. In 2002, the Prestige oil tanker sank off the Galician coast, gradually spilling 74,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil into the sea. More than half of the 1,000 beaches along the Spanish and French Atlantic coast were affected, and at least 100,000 birds perished.
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Relatives and friends carry a body for cremation, Dec. 5, 1984, in the Indian city of Bhopal. On Dec. 3, 1984, poisonous gas leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide factory, exposing more than 500,000 people to toxic gases and killing 16,000. The factory, which caused the world's worst poisonous gas disaster, is pictured in the background.
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Rescuers work near a blocked tunnel in the Crandall Canyon Mine, northwest of Huntington, Utah, where six coal miners were trapped Aug. 8, 2007. The collapse occurred just under three miles from the surface. Each year, thousands of miners die as a result of lax safety regulations and work-related illnesses. Most of the deaths occur in developing countries, particularly China.
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A Chinese white dolphin jumps out of the water off of Hong Kong, Sept. 15, 2000. The Yangtze River Dolphin, known in Chinese as the "goddess of the sea", is the first mammal to be declared functionally extinct since the 1950s, as well as the first mammal whose extinction was directly attributable to human influence. The last uncontested sighting of a Yangzte River Dolphin was in 2002.
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Mark Zanatian, one of the children endangered by Love Canal Chemicals, waves a banner in protest during a neighbourhood meeting Friday, Aug. 5, 1978. Love Canal, a neighbourhood in Niagara Falls, New York, became the subject of international attention following the discovery of 21,000 tonnes of toxic waste buried beneath the area. Exposure to the toxic chemicals resulted in birth defects, miscarriages and cancers for local residents.
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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a swirling vortex of marine debris in the central North Pacific Ocean. The exact size of the patch is unknown, but estimates put it at between 700,000-15 million sq.km, and containing over 100 million tonnes of debris. The patch is composed of high concentrations of floating plastic and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific.
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This aerial photo was taken two days after the April 1986 explosion and fire. On April 26, 1986, Reactor #4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the town of Pripyat, Ukraine, exploded. Four workers were killed instantly, approximately 15,000 people died of radiation poisoning, and 50,000 were left disabled. Four days later the residents of Pripyat were ordered to evacuate, and to this day the town remains largely uninhabited.
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An iceberg melts in Kulusuk Bay, eastern Greenland, July 17, 2007. Rapid melting of the polar ice caps, widespread global warming, means rising sea levels and temperatures, as less sun is reflected away from the earth. Broader effects are expected to include glacial retreat, Arctic shrinkage, and worldwide sea level rise. Other effects may include changes in crop yields, species extinctions, and changes in the range and virulence of diseases.
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In 1923, over 60 percent of Haiti's land was forested, by 2006 less than 2 percent was. Unsound agricultural processes, logging and rapid population growth all contributed to the deforestation, which in turn was accelerated by frequent hurricanes. A 15-year Environment Action Plan was adopted in 1999 to stop deforestation by developing alternative fuel sources, but political instability and a lack of funding have greatly limited its impact.
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Agent Orange is the code name for a herbicide and defoliant used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. An estimated 21 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed across South and Central Vietnam as part of the U.S.'s Herbicidal Warfare program. Exposure to the chemical resulted in approximately 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and some 500,000 children born with birth defects in the country. To this day, vast swathes of the Vietnamese Highlands remain barren and toxic.
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In the meantime, we’ve found a lot of excuses to justify our laissez-faire approach and to keep our critics at bay. We are a big, cold, resource-based economy. We need to keep the oil-rich provinces happy. The U.S. wants our crude.
But recent events are finally bringing our identity crisis to the surface. In brief:
-About 200 protesters stormed Question Period to demand that Parliament implement the NDP's Climate Change Accountability Act, Bill C-311
-A report by the David Suzuki Foundation and Pembina Institute estimated the costs involved in meeting the government’s emissions-reduction targets. Environment Minister Jim Prentice called the report “irresponsible.” Alberta premier Ed Stelmach vowed to fight carbon taxes aimed at the oilsands
-HSBC released its annual Climate Confidence Monitor study, which suggested the recession has slightly eroded Canadians’ concern about climate change. It also found 69 per cent of respondents worldwide saw addressing climate change as at least as important as supporting their national economies
-One hundred world leaders gathered in Barcelona to discuss climate change. With no plan to speak of, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was a no-show
-Prince Charles told a Newfoundland audience that Canada must show “leadership” on climate change
-Speaking in Ottawa, director-general of the World Trade Organization Pascal Lamy called the climate crisis “the single biggest challenge to civilization as we know it.” In his lecture titled “Climate first, trade second,” Lamy said the WTO would “greet with open arms a new international climate accord"
While some mix of economic and environmental imperatives is sure to drive the climate change mandate in the long run, we have no shortage of cautionary tales about the dire consequences of laissez-faire environmental policy. I am thinking for example of the Lubicon Cree, a small band in northern Alberta that has been fighting logging and oil interests there since at least the 1970s.
Left out of a 1899 treaty that would have granted it land rights, the Lubicon Lake Indian Nation has seen its ancestral hunting and fishing grounds criss-crossed with 2,000 kilometres of road, 32,000 km of seismic lines and 2,000 oil and gas sites. Despite censures from the United Nations Human Rights Committee and Amnesty International, the Alberta and federal governments have continued to allow companies to carry out massively disruptive projects on Lubicon land.
Today, Amnesty reports that the economy, health, way of life and culture of the Lubicon have been “devastated” by these developments.
Canadians have a choice. Are we strictly capitalists, as the governments and corporations showed themselves to be in the Lubicon case? Or are we stewards of the environment, as the Lubicon are attempting to be?
Prime Minister Stephen Harper holds a case of Yuengling beer presented to him outside his home by U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson. The beer was part of a wager the PM had with President Obama on the outcome of the Olympic gold medal hockey game which Canada won.
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