Month: August 2016

Sudbury Steve May: Lip Service from Neoliberals Won’t Help Climate Crisis

You’ve probably heard it said that we can have both a healthy environment and a healthy economy. Usually, these words are spoken by environmentalists in response to those that claims taking meaningful action to reduce the impacts of climate change are too costly.   Of course, the costs of inaction are much higher – an estimated drain of between 5% and 20% of the world’s GDP annually, according to the seminal Stern Reviewof on the Economics of Climate Change (October, 2006).  That’s literally tens of billions of dollars per year taken out of the global economy.

Presently, we have both a sick environment and a sick economy.  The sickness at the heart of our neoliberal economic system has disastrously endangered our natural environment, which in turn is taking us down the road of economic ruin.  There will be no clean planet without a healthy economic system to sustain it.  Or more accurately, human civilization will not continue to thrive on the planet without an economic system which makes a healthy environment its first priority.

We’ve known about the perils of climate change for decades.   And we’ve long known about what actions we will have to take if we are going to avoid the very worst impacts of a warming world.  There are many solutions, but only a few actions will deliver both the healthy environment and sustainable economy that the planet needs for human civilization to thrive. Finding the right balance is critical if we’re going to avoid collapse.  To strike that balance, we’ve got to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.

Along with being a necessity, there is no denying that the switch to a low-carbon economy represents a clear and present threat to our current economic system – or rather, to those who reap the majority of the benefits of that system.  But our political elites can’t any longer ignore the calls made by the people for climate action, or the warnings made by experts on the long-term costs of inaction.

What may be flying under the radar, however, are similar calls which are being made to restructure our neoliberal economic system.  These calls are coming from people’s movements which have taken on many forms, from anti-pipeline activism to Occupy Wall Street to those calling for Fair Trade. In Canada, the authors of the LeapManifesto (September, 2015) made the clear and compelling connection between action on the climate crisis and economic reform. Experts, like Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, are warning governments and corporations of the dangers of both wealth inequality and catastrophic climate change (see:“Bank of England governor Mark Carney says climate change is an economic problem,” CBC News, July 15, 2016). 
Calls for systemic economic restructuring are starting to resonate.  South of the border, both Republican and Democratic Party nominees support changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement (see:“Where Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump Stand on Economic Issues,” the Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2016 (updated July 27, 2016) . Both have said that they will not sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership (see:“Clinton’s TPP controversy: What you need to know,” CNN, July 27, 2016).
As with past climate change commitments, it’s difficult to take seriously statements made by the political elites who champion a neoliberal economic system completely at odds with ending inequality and slowing global warming.  Promises are made, but little action is taken – and what little is taken is largely ineffective.

The Leap Manifesto calls for an end to the economics of austerity, and for the emergence of the truly sustainable economic system that we need for a healthy planet.  But as long as political elites on both the left and the right continue to champion fossil fuel growth and neoliberal policies which enrich the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, we’ll have neither the social and climate justice necessary for all of humanity to thrive. 
Politicians need to read the writing on the wall, and understand that voters aren’t going to accept lip service in place of real action for much longer.

(opinions expressed in this blogpost are my own and should not be considered consistent with the policies and/or positions of the Green Parties of Canada and Ontario)

Originally published in the Sudbury Star as, “Neoliberal lip service won’t help climate crisis,” in print and online, July 30, 2016. 


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Suncor Opens Conversation about ‘Stranded Assets’ in Alberta’s Oilsands

Suncor Energy CEO Steve Williams rocked the oil industry boat Thursday when he announced a plan to leave some of the company’s oilsands reserves unrecovered during a conference call with investors.

Williams said the company is working to develop a plan with Alberta to “strand” its least economical reserves, a proposal that appears to align with the call of environmentalists to leave the high-cost and high-carbon fossil fuels in the ground to prevent catastrophic global warming.

Tweet: Whoa: ‘We’re advocating in a modest way to work with govt so we can strand some of the oil in the oilsands’ http://bit.ly/2aO78OU #ableg“We are advocating in a modest way to work with government so that we can strand some of the oil in the oilsands,” Williams said, as reported by The Canadian Press.

“Our regulation is written so that we take to a very high percentage the last piece of oil out. That tends to be the most expensive both economically and environmentally. What we would like to do is leave that last piece in (the ground),” he said.

“I’m very optimistic we are making some breakthroughs with government to do that.”

The proposal is about more than leaving some oil deposits undeveloped, according to Simon Dyer, director of the Pembina Institute.

“We’re talking about Alberta moving philosophically from maximizing production to optimizing value,” Dyer told DeSmog Canada.

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Things Are Good: Former Nuclear Disaster Site Could Become Solar Plant

One of the worst energy disaster in human history was the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It has left a giant chunk of land around Pripyat uninhabitable to humans (although the rest of nature has been thriving because humans aren’t there), now the Ukrainian government wants to reuse the land for a new source of electricity. […]

The post Former Nuclear Disaster Site Could Become Solar Plant appeared first on Things Are Good.

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