Without the crutch of a PowerPoint presentation, Elizabeth May, former parliamentary leader of the Green Party in Canada, spoke for an hour with great force and fluency at a webinar hosted by World Federalists, her subject being A Global Climate Accountability Act. This webinar has been posted on YouTube, so you might want to skip reading this blog post and just listen to the recording, here:
I took notes while she led her audience through the arguments for creating new international legislation to hold nations to their promises, starting with the history of previous attempts.
In 1972 the first UN summit on the Environment was unsuccessful, boycotted by the poorer nations because their needs weren't being taken into account.
She described how the nations then came together to solve the problem of ozone depletion in the stratosphere. Like the scientific advice on climate change, the science relating to the ozone layer was initially disputed, especially by industries with a vested interest in ignoring it. CFCs were lauded as miracle chemicals (one company boasted of "better living through chemistry") that seemed not to pollute our atmosphere, but they ate dangerously fast into the ozone layer. The Vienna Convention, reinforced by the Montreal Protocol of 1987, came up with a "treaty that actually worked". Industrial nations were obliged to cut their CFC emissions by 50% whereas the poorer countries (who needed refrigerants) were allowed to increase their emissions, but by no more than 15%. This was seen as a fair compromise. How was the legislation enforced? By means of trade sanctions.
Maurice Strong, a Canadian oil and mineral businessman and diplomat, the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, chaired the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, at which the north-south divide in the world was once again acknowledged, although there was still a big gap between perception and commitment. The Kyoto agreement in 1997 was the first international protocol to protect the climate. Again, we had responsibilities in common, and the industrialized nations had to act first because they were the ones who had created the problem. However developing countries also had to pledge to reduce their emissions.
To most national governments, trade is more important than climate, peace or social justice, so we must bear that in mind. We need to adapt the tools we use for enabling international trade to the climate crisis. When the World Trade Organisation was launched in 1995, it created a Committee on Trade and the Environment, asking the question, do environmental agreements damage trade? The Montreal Protocol had been abandoned because nations dislike having sanctions imposed on them, but this mechanism did work, Ms. May points out, and needs to be resurrected. We have to dust off those proven tools for the sake of a survivable, sustainable future. The requisite "workbenches and skills" are still there and should be used.
At present, the only means of enforcement of the Paris Agreement of 2015 appears to be by "public shaming."
So a global stocktaking is required. It seems that President Biden and his team in the USA understand the climate emergency in a way the Canadian government does not. Biden realizes that climate change is a national security threat for the developed countries and that if we don't act immediately, then we're in an "uncontrolled global experiment" the only equivalent of which is nuclear war. To Ms. May's amazement and admiration Biden is taking the matter seriously, actually starting to fulfill the promises he made before his election. The world hasn't sufficiently protected itself against either the nuclear or the global warming threat, but we could protect ourselves against both if we had the political will to do so. We should be dismantling both our nuclear arsenals and our fossil fuel industries.
She is "not comfortable" with the length of runway that remains for us to land on, and yet we are still promoting profits to the detriment of human well-being and survival. With all due respect, she says the COVID-19 pandemic is "a walk in the park compared with the global climate emergency." Net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 is the acknowledged goal, but this won't save us unless we act within the next nine years. For a start, we should tighten our existing international agreements, as recognized in Kyoto and Paris: they were good, but they "had no teeth"! It is worth noticing how fast the nations can move if a security threat is perceived, as for example after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She thinks China must surely understand the threat. If China's inland plateau dries up then its eight major rivers will dry up too. She says that we're in a Book of Revelation situation and we need to "fight like hell" in response to it, abandoning our dependence on fossil fuels as fast as possible for the sake of a livable future.
As a result of the COVID alarm, Ms. May is hopeful that perceptions and attitudes have begun to change, shifting in favour of supporting the essential workers of this world. Canada's policies though are still all wrong. The C-12 bill is hopeless; its "uniquely Canadian approach" (ironic quotation) won't work. She described it as a public relations trick to make us think we're doing something positive about the climate when we aren't. She joked that P.M. Trudeau's head must be spinning so much with the contradictory opinions he appears to hold that he's surely suffering from vertigo! In fact Canada is dragging its feet and now emitting 20% more greenhouse gasses than in the 1990s; by Canada she means Alberta and Saskatchewan, primarily, with their oil sands and fracking enterprises. People don't appreciate that "natural gas" is collected by means of fracking. The so-called "unconventional" extraction of bitumen (asphalt) is also very expensive in terms of energy units. The oil industry no longer makes sense. It is a sunset industry, a dead industry. All the same, we're making it very hard for India to move to the use of solar power and we're preventing the import of solar panels from China. A related drawback is that Environment Canada in the 1980s used to be a stronger body than it is now.
Last month the International Energy Agency (IEA) published a report, stating that the world's fossil fuels must be phased out as from now, in an orderly fashion. (It seems that the G7 Climate and Environment Summit delegates, this month, did take some notice of this.) Ms. May emphasized that Canada must commit to a just transition for its fossil fuel workers and that a proper schedule is needed for this process. They are kind, smart, decent human beings in the Trudeau Cabinet, but what is wrong with them? She wishes they would follow the example of the UK and New Zealand in making the climate laws work.
"We are in a race," she said. "Let's see which country can move the fastest."
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