Climate-change myopia delivers brief political boost on the way to global catastrophe

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/12/2024 (324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you want to know just how far we are from a solution to climate change, one need only look at Ontario.

A recent report by the Independent Electricity System Operator, the Crown corporation that oversees electricity generation in Ontario, concluded that it would cost $35 billion to build new clean, green generating capacity to meet the province’s growing energy needs while still maintaining progress toward Ottawa’s net-zero emission target for 2050.

Ontario’s energy minister, Stephen Lecce, said even with tens of billions of dollars in incentives from the federal government, the future costs of doing that are unacceptable, given his government’s pledge to ensure that any carbon-reduction initiatives have “no impacts on Ontario ratepayers.”

That raises an interesting question: what are those future costs for an individual ratepayer?

According to the IESO report, it would add an extra $168 per year — or $14 per month — on the average electricity bill in Ontario. Or, only slightly more than the cost of a single fill-up of one full-sized pickup truck.

It’s hard to believe that at the same time weather is becoming more unpredictable and severe, ocean levels are rising precipitously and the entire continent is covered in wildfire smoke for parts of each summer, a political leader from the largest province in the country would be debating the cost-benefit analysis of an extra $14 each month to help slow climate change.

But in 2024, that is the kind of perverse politics undermining the urgent need to change to the way we live and use energy.

And not just in Ontario.

The Alberta government is spending millions of dollars on advertisements to convince Canadians that emissions targets and other demands being made on fossil-fuel industries will make life unaffordable. Meanwhile, various premiers from various provinces representing various parties are rushing to disown Ottawa’s botched carbon tax, which has become an enormous political albatross.

In Manitoba, the highest-profile accomplishment delivered in the first year of a New Democratic Party government was to forgo roughly $300 million in revenue by suspending the provincial gasoline tax. Premier Wab Kinew characterized this policy as an affordability measure; the true impact was giving people with enormous vehicles an incentive to burn more gasoline.

All this backsliding on carbon-cutting initiatives has left us in a precarious position. According to the most-recent report from the United Nations Environment Programme — despite lots of talk and numerous global summits — greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to increase and are now at an all-time high.

UNEP executive director Inger Andersen said in late October the world’s nations must mobilize and act to reduce carbon emissions on a scale and pace never before seen.

“Climate crunch time is here,” Andersen said.

The UNEP report is tracking the gap between current trends in global carbon emissions and the commitments that countries made at the COP16, the global conference held in 2016 where nations pledged to meet certain emission-reduction targets. Right now, UNEP calculates that all nations must commit to cutting 42 per cent of emissions by 2030 and 57 per cent by 2035.

Without immediate action, UNEP has forecast that the world will see a 3.1 degree Celsius rise in temperatures, a state that will produce catastrophic environmental consequences and be largely irreversible.

The consequences include deadly and devastating severe weather events, global crop failures and pandemic-level deaths from extreme heat.

You don’t need to be a climate scientist to understand that the gap between what informed sources such as UNEP are saying about climate change and what nations are doing about it is largely due to the unwillingness of political leaders all over the world to take up the challenge to slow the warming of the planet.

In other words, we could do it, we just don’t want to.

Politicians will give you all kinds of alternate explanations, of course. But most of those are half-baked, half-truths based on fallacious reasoning.

For example, Alberta’s advertising campaign — the one where they warn Canadians that emissions targets will jack up the cost of living — seems to ignore the fact that without urgent action, the price of food will be astronomical because it will be so difficult to grow anything. The one thing worse than the price of steak these days is the prospect of future food shortages.

There’s another good example involving Ontario and the IESO report, which argues that the cost of creating additional no-carbon energy generation is too onerous. Left out of that argument is the economic benefits of moving quickly and aggressively into clean energy. Imagine the generational economic impact of a $35-billion investment in clean-energy generation. That’s a whole lot of jobs and economic activity that is not part of the IESO analysis.

When the time comes — and it just might — that we’ve lost all the opportunities to reverse climate change, we’ll be left in the dark, with no food and no air conditioning, breathing smoky air and praying that spring floods don’t wash our houses away.

And I bet we’ll all be wishing we’d paid an extra $14 per month.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com