No time left for climate-change dithering

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/08/2021 (1487 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Food security is always an important part of the sustainability-related courses I teach.

Everybody’s got to eat, after all, and once people starting checking to see where their food comes from, food security pretty quickly becomes a serious issue.

When students realize most of their daily food intake travels a long way to get to their stomachs, I then ask: “What happens if the trucks stop?” Such a problem immediately gets their attention.

So, encouraging students to source, cook and eat local food is an easy pitch, even if (in practice) it is more difficult than it first appears. (Preferring the “Hundred Mile Diet” sounds good in theory, until you ask them the last time they travelled 100 miles for their lunch!)

It is harder for students to understand just how fragile water security can be, even here in Manitoba. When I talk about water security close to home, their disbelief is apparent – I immediately become more “Doomer” than “Boomer,” and their attention drifts elsewhere. I can bring them back into focus by discussing water security in developing countries, where women and girls spend most of their days on the water walk, carrying buckets.

The importance of a local, safe and secure water supply can then be tied to increased economic activity and education for females, and we are back on the sustainability track – just not here.

As we watch major rivers and streams go dry, however, I might get a different audience response this year to concern about water security. Certainly, anyone from a First Nations community (especially with place names that include “bay,” “river,” or “lake”) that is still under a boil-water advisory already gets the point: just because there was always enough water before doesn’t mean that situation will continue, nor does it mean the water will be safe to drink.

So we need to stop talking about “climate change” as some distant possibility, open for discussion and debate, and instead do something about the “climate crisis” that is happening around us right now. Nice words don’t stop a forest fire, or make the rain fall. But there are things we can do right now to buy some time for practical solutions to become possible.

Manitoba’s carbon tax – derailed by politics, perversity and Premier Brian Pallister – would have generated several hundred million extra dollars a year. That money could have been dedicated to developing resilience to the effects of a changing climate in our communities (such as what to do if the local water supply goes dry) and creating alternatives to greenhouse-gas emissions (including subsidizing EVs and charging stations).

It could have gone to enhancing watershed resilience, against both low and high water levels, instead of leaving it up to individual farmers to do it themselves – and watching their hayfields wither and livestock die. It could have funded local co-operatives for rural municipalities, not just to create a sustainability plan, but to support its immediate implementation.

The International Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report on Aug. 9 – ominously, on Nagasaki Day – that lays out the science behind suggestions like mine, and the urgency to do something right away.

Don’t take my word for it; read the report for yourself (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/). Then judge the bumpf and bargle of our politicians against what the science tells us is happening now, and what we can expect to happen in the near future. Essentially, we have until 2030 to make major changes to reduce our generation of greenhouse gases, especially our use of fossil fuels.

If we don’t do this – everyone, everywhere – the extreme weather we have witnessed the last couple of years will seem like a picnic compared to what lies ahead.

We are facing a federal election this fall, as well as a mayoral election in Winnipeg and other municipalities. (Sadly, the next provincial election is 2023.) Reducing carbon emissions is not a political act – it is about our own survival. Judge the parties and the candidates on what they actually will accomplish before 2030. Challenge the do-little political green-washers, and for heaven’s sake don’t vote for any of them!

The IPCC assessment (based on a review of current scientific studies) reaches conservative conclusions, based on the science about which everyone agrees. Even at that, there is a grim future ahead of us – one that will quickly become a nightmare if individuals, communities, businesses and especially governments don’t smarten up and act.

The pandemic has forced a pause on what life-as-usual used to be. Hopefully, it has also made people think critically about the way they lived before, and clarified some of the different choices we all can make together.

All of us are literally choosing the future, for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren, every single day. When that future gets here, it will be far too late to say “oops” and wish we had made better choices. There are no do-overs.

Peter Denton is an activist, writer and scholar who works from home in rural Manitoba – and is masked when he isn’t.