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The Conference of the Parties — COP to use the lingo — has had 28 get-togethers since its first in Berlin in 1995.
That first produced “a mandate to begin a process” to limit global warming. Ten years later in Paris 190 countries agreed to a target increase of 2 degrees Celsius, or preferably 1.5.
The most recent gathering, COP 28, was held in the sweltering desert city of Dubai, where some 85,000 delegates, “including more than 150 Heads of State and Government” and “representatives of national delegations, civil society, business, Indigenous Peoples, youth, philanthropy, and international organizations” jetted in to shelter in air-conditioned convention rooms and discuss the crisis for the 28th time. Lord knows how many limousines were required.
Seven months after that high-level session, as tracking agencies reported the hottest global temperature ever recorded, the residents of Jasper, Alberta watched in horror as flames devoured much of their community. Just 10 weeks earlier it had been the people of Fort MacMurray fleeing their homes as a wildfire closed in. Three summers ago the B.C. town of Lytton burned to the ground as residents fled for their lives.
If you’re one of the people who think summits in foreign capitals, lectures by peripatetic activists or tax hits on fossil fuels are what’s needed to save the planet, the devastation in Fort MacMurray, Jasper or Lytton is the tragic result of people failing to listen. On the other hand, three decades and trillions of dollars in expenditures have passed since that first gabfest, and homes are still burning, communities being flooded and people seeing their lives upended. Jasper evacuees can be forgiven for seeing their nightmare not as retribution by the climate gods but as an epic failure by a climate crusade committed to decades of moralizing, bad ideas and political posturing over practical remedies to predictable needs.
In 2018 the CBC quoted two veteran foresters warning that a major fire in Jasper was inevitable due to years of buildup of combustible tinder collecting on the forest floor. “You’ve got a major catastrophe on your hands if you get a match thrown into that,” said Ken Hodges, one of the two. Jasper’s mayor had issued a similar alarm a year earlier, warning that the pine beetle epidemic had left a swath of dead forest just waiting to ignite.
When flooding drove thousands from their homes in southern British Columbia in 2021, the disaster was blamed on heavy rains and overburdened infrastructure. A dike in Abbotsford collapsed, a possibility foreseen in a report several years earlier that deemed the dike “substandard” and in need of replacement, adding that 74 other dikes in the vicinity weren’t up to scratch.
And when a surprise downpour hit Toronto this month, closing highways, shutting down transit and leaving tens of thousands without power, city manager Paul Johnson observed: “I don’t even know why we continue to talk about 100-year storms anymore… We’ve had three of them in the last 11 years.” The response? Mayor Olivia Chow said she’d asked for briefings on a stormwater surcharge — quickly dubbed a “rain tax” — to get homeowners to use more water-absorbent materials.
At some point the activists, academics and politicians will have to accept that three decades of summits, briefings, demonstrations and photo ops haven’t got the job done. Too much of the world is too weighed down by poverty to be persuaded by moralizing. A quarter billion people living hand to mouth in India aren’t about to swear off “dirty” fuel because people in Toronto or New York or Paris have noticed the weather is becoming weirder. A more prosaic approach, like paying for flood control, wildfire prevention and infrastructure upgrades, might not bring down temperatures but would temper the impact.
Governments in Ottawa, Ontario and Quebec have dedicated tens of billions in tax breaks and subsidies to multinationals to build battery plants at a time demand for electric vehicles is waning. Umicore, a Belgian firm, said Friday it would halt a planned $2.8 billion Ontario plant because “customers’ demand projections for our battery materials have steeply declined.” Ford Motor Co. reversed a plan to build EVs at its assembly plant outside Toronto and will instead retool it to produce gas-guzzling Super Duty pickup trucks.
Yet while billions flow to help suburbanites buy Teslas, B.C. officials revealed in June that a $2 billion long-term flood mitigation plan developed in the wake of the 2021 floods had been “turned down flat” by Ottawa in its request for funding.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” Abbotsford Mayor Ross Siemens complained. Though Ottawa has $3.4 billion set aside in a disaster-prevention fund, communities are required to compete for the money, meaning “smaller municipalities and communities do not always have the resources needed to undertake the lengthy and sometimes costly process of preparing an application,” B.C. officials said.
Mayor Michael Goetz of Merritt, whose entire city was ordered evacuated during the floods, said federal authorities “told us this was the way to get” federal support, but has changed its tune.
“Honestly, if preventing an almost guaranteed future disaster with a project like this doesn’t make the cut, I can’t imagine what projects in Canada will.”
Canada takes a back seat to no one when it comes to sanctimonious moralizing, and we’re into our fifth year of a contentious carbon tax that vacuums up money from daily purchases, then sends it back in quarterly cheques. Maybe if more effort went into dikes, floodways, pumping stations, firebreaks, water mains, forest management and the like, fewer summits would be necessary and a measure of real progress would be visible.
National Post
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