Whither climate change now?

The year 2006 has been quite remarkable for the unrelenting crescendo of interest and advocacy in matters environmental:
- The energy debate in Ontario,
- The hounding of Minister Ambrose at COP in Germany,
- The release of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth",
- Brian Mulroney's Corporate Knights award,
- The success of the Green Party National Convention,
- The election of Elizabeth May as GPC Leader and the quantum leap in media profile and GPC membership,
- Governor Schwarzenegger's signature of California emissions legislation and a deal to trade emissions credits with the RGGI and with Tony Blair,
- The testimony of Green Party Senior Deputy Leader David Chernushenko before the House Standing Committee considering Bill C-16 (fixed election dates), among many other notable events.

And now finally the Harper government has poked a long pointy stick into Minister Ambrose and hoisted her up and waved her and her Clean Air Act around over the trenches, and everyone has scrabbled around for all the ammo they could find and duly loosed it off in her general direction. So now they'll reel her back in, dust her off, and find her another plank to walk.

So I'm sensing that after such a protracted dialogue on a single topic, there could now be a collapse in general public interest around climate change. The only remaining events to stoke the fires this year are the by-election in London-North-Centre, Canadian municipal elections, the midterm elections south of the border, and the Liberal convention in December. The Christmas break is a hurdle that brings down a lot of political issues.

How do we keep the dialogue alive? I anticipate there will be a period of respite, and we all take a breather, and then we must marshall the arguments for the next passage.

We must not be distracted by the details of the Harper Clean Air Act. It seems clear now that it will fail, and was designed to fail as far the immediate bill before the House is concerned. So, looking beyond the immediate garish parade of C-30, what were the Conservatives' real intentions? Let's try a few guesses. One motive might be to re-establish the Conservatives back in the political centre as The Friend Of Business, further displacing the Liberals who had been doing a pretty good job as TFOB what with debt reduction, inflation control, the Clarity Act, income trusts, trade missions, and so on. Another motive might be to dispel lingering memories of the Preston Manning days, of grassroots politics, the David Orchard deal, wild men on jetskis, etc. and re-establish credentials for party discipline, viz. Rona's badly frayed flak jacket and Garth's ouster. Yet another objective might be to manage expectations downward, which will make it harder for the next government to accelerate emissions reductions. And obviously it's good optics south of the border and across the Pacific, and may buy wiggle room on other international files.

One of the cleverer aspects of the last few weeks is that the Harper government has kept the media talking about controls and regulation and innovation and targets, and has not allowed any airtime for popular conservation. Business likes this because it doesn't erode the mindset that we are all perfectly entitled to all the cheap energy we can devour, and everything that goes with that mentality, and maybe all we have to do is clean it up a little bit. If Canadians were to suddenly decide to buy the climate change argument and begin to conserve in a big way, the energy patch would be in a much worse pickle than they are now with C-30 regulations.

So popular attention is soon going to tire of this year's slogans - climate change, emissions, Kyoto, targets. In order to keep the dialogue alive perhaps now is a time to go beyond the climate change argument, and ask what other social ills attend voracious energy consumption?
- The obesity issue seems like a natural; we drive everywhere and don't exercise, because we have cars handy and we can't afford the time to walk. This goes hand-in-hand with type II diabetes and other chronic conditions.
- The neighbourhood argument seems like another: as Elizabeth May said, "Let's have neighbourhoods designed for our children, not our cars". I recently spent some time in the 905 belt of Toronto and saw nothing but chain hotels, chain restaurants, chain stores, six-lane arterial roads, and low-rise light industrial buildings out to the horizon. Residential areas were completely segregated, with only freeway linkages. A pedestrian or bicycle lifestyle will never stand a chance in that region.
- We iconize detached homes as the ideal urban dwelling model, which leads to cancerous urban sprawl, because people want privacy and space for their stuff. But why do we want to cocoon? Well, because despite sharing the same DNA, sometimes people aren't actually all that nice to each other, and stuff is more fun than people and we can get it cheap from China, and the guy who dies with the most stuff wins. And so we overlook many wonderful people in our cities because we stay at home with our stuff - and instead of enjoying the variety of all our local actors, musicians, comedians, writers and artists, which is what humanity evolved toward originally, we hop hundreds of channels of predictable content fabricated in centralized cloning factories. But if you were to ask Canadians to live in cities with the density of Manhattan or London or Tokyo, they would look at you funny.
- The true cost of private vehicle ownership is not clear, because it is dispersed across different account books, but what would we see if we were to draw together all the externalities into one ledger and count up not just the vehicle cost, but the insurance, the fuel, the maintenance, the deaths and injuries, the hospitalizations and quadriplegics, the rise in asthma among children living close to major arterials, the cultural activities foregone because the journey is not safe and travel is nevertheless still damned inconvenient despite the universal roads and cars because of parking and narrow sidewalks impassable with snow and ice, to say nothing of all those working lives shackled to road construction and maintenance? If you handed every Canadian a winning lottery ticket for say $5,000 each, year after year, they would say great! If you told them they could get them by climbing out of their cars, they would give you another funny look.

So perhaps this is the evil twin of cheap energy - the loss of social cohesion, poor health, the wasteful tyranny of fashionable stuff, and the withering of our local culture and industry? And these ills are in some ways more tangible than emissions, but in some ways less because because most of us have enjoyed electricity, cars, homes, nice stuff, and a spacious lifestyle throughout living memory.

Another more radical thought occurred to me recently. The last time an entire nation had to be disconnected from a form of cheap energy was the American civil war, which brought an end to slavery in the South. Six hundred thousand men under arms died in that conflict, the majority due to disease, not wounds, and thanks to the assassination of President Lincoln the rehabilitation of African-American peoples suffered a setback that has still not ended. What is the chance that in our present situation we can make an even greater transition peaceably?

Is now the time to starting thinking about the arguments and questions to fuel debate in 2007, very possibly the next national election year? Certainly those emissions will cause some warming...