Blog - Politics

By Bill Henderson

Four years ago, I naively wrote my Sunshine Coast Regional District directors with these predictions:

• Oil will spike over $100 a barrel, perhaps $200 a barrel;

• Companies in key industries (airlines, tourism, distribution, et cetera) will go bankrupt and the resulting deflation will pound existing speculative bubbles (real estate, stock markets), which will burst. As deflation accelerates, lack of demand, plus increased energy costs for production and distribution, plus strikes and fuel-price protests, will rapidly paralyse existing trade.

• The Sunshine Coast will be forced to become largely self-reliant with little support from provincial and federal governments overwhelmed by widespread demand for disaster assistance while revenues plummet and governmental agencies and resources atrophy.

• Our local pulp mill and other forest industry employers will cease production. Tourism will die. Pensions and investment income will fade away. Present imports of food and other commodities, including medicines, perhaps energy, information, et cetera, will be seriously disrupted. Local governments will be besieged by desperate constituents as a drastic relocalization of the economy is forced within a very short time frame.

(I later published an edited version of my letter, “Enforced Relocalization”, in Energy Bulletin.)

I tried to be clear that this was just one possible future but that preparation was needed just in case: “Is this scenario going to happen? Probably not—hopefully not.”

I wrote advocating a little emergency-preparedness planning by a local citizens committee: food, maintaining order, inventories, et cetera. But, of course, I only received a confused, noncommittal response. I was too much a doomsayer. I hadn’t learned yet that people in government cannot and will not look outside the blinders of conventional wisdom and cannot, even for a moment, heretically imagine a world where our present business as usual doesn’t exist.

I tried again several years later, when peak oil had become at least an above-ground possibility. But, again, my message was a heresy not worth responding to. Now, after the first phase of bubble popping, with the next downturn and possible severe dislocation awaiting the next price spike (which is already stalking the stimulus-induced recovery), I should message again, but it’s getting a little late for economic disaster and relocalization planning.

But have I learned the central lesson about how politicians and reasonable people perceive our world? How limited is their capacity for action? Have I learned what is possible from government?

No. I’ve been messaging Premier Gordon Campbell trying to get him to cancel the Olympics as a signal to the world about how serious climate change really is—how sinister the humanity-threatening danger is and how urgently we need effective mitigation—and how B.C. must lead in order to catalyze an effective global deal at Copenhagen.

Over the last four years of watching economic dislocation approach, I’ve been reading all of the emerging climate-change science. Science papers and commentary explaining:

• The non-linear history of small forcings causing wild climatic swings as recorded in the ice core and other (tree ring, ocean sediments, et cetera) data;

• How a small rise in global temperature caused by the greenhouse effect from gases released from burning fossil fuels could release carbon presently safely stored in permafrost, under the oceans, and in soils and forests as positive feedbacks leading to runaway, uncontrollable, dangerous climate change threatening most species presently living with us on this small blue planet;

• How our emissions today will effect climate for a millennium;

• How our emissions must be reduced immediately and not just by 2050 so that their building, cumulative greenhouse effect doesn’t trigger those latent positive feedbacks.

No, silly me. In over 40 Net op-eds, I’ve tried to alert the public and leaders about this building danger, suggesting possible effective but presently too radical (meaning outside of business as usual) action. Canadian intransigence has been one topic—those in the developed world who have put most of the greenhouse gases up into the atmosphere and have benefited incredibly economically must show leadership in global action while there is still time. And I’ve stressed how we lie to ourselves like addicts about clean coal and green energy, puny carbon taxes, and leaky cap and trade, restricting our vision of effective action to only what is narrowly possible economically and politically today.

I can see a world a short few decades away when my kids and my grandchildren will have to live knowing that it is now too late to stop runaway climate change and everybody is sick with fear and there is no way out from unthinkable tragedy.

So silly me—I still think it possible to leverage leadership to get us out of business as usual so that we can scramble back from the tipping point of a melting Arctic, back to under 350 parts per million, to a world getting cooler instead of hotter and extinction.

As well as messaging the premier, I’ve written a speech for Mr. Campbell cancelling the Olympics. (Is there a rad video producer out there interested in making a short one-hander starring an actor that looks like a silvery politician with fat developer cheeks?)

I explained to the premier that the Olympics is big news worldwide. It gets attention. The Olympics is also a good microcosm of the real problems we have to solve if we are going to begin mitigation on a scale necessary to get back under 350 ppm in time:

• The 2010 Olympics is a multi-billion dollar project (like most major business ventures) and already a decade in planning and now almost built;

• All the big brands are contracted and there are contracted tie-ins from virtually every major global entity;

• The Olympics are already a key date on millions of people’s schedules globally including the masses expecting to watch on TV;

• And the B.C. economy, presently spiraling down, expects a significant boost next year from Olympics-related spending.

In short, cancelling the Olympics is impossible.

But, Mr. Premier, because climate change really is that humanity-threatening emergency requiring urgent and massive systemic change so that we don’t go over that tipping point to runaway climate change, cancelling the Olympics is really small potatoes, a luxury we can no longer afford and can dispense with quite easily.

I told the premier: “You can send a message Premier Campbell—a message that could catalyze a radical change of plan between now and December. It’s time to alter course Premier Campbell—I think you should know why and how.”

Now I know that most of you will find my windmill-tilting silly and naive, but David Suzuki has written wisely about our special secret—foresight: “Foresight, I believe, was one of the most important abilities that enabled us to survive and flourish, and continues to underlie our explosive success as a species.”

Foresight is the capacity to see, learn, and change. Silly me for believing that foresight is important and that the people we elect can have foresight and can even act in heretical ways when they perceive humanity-threatening danger.

Bill Henderson is an activist who lives in Gibsons.