Zero Carbon Canada: Facing up to the Climate Change Challenge

Editor’s note: ZeroCarbonCanada is a bold and brand new website for climate change activists who understand the urgency of getting excess carbon our of our atmosphere as quickly as possible. The first step will be not to put any more up there, in other words to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero as soon as we can. We have posted a link to the Zero Carbon Canada site on our Blog Roll and are proud to post the following article:

What Is The Next Generation of Environmentalism?

by Tzeporah Berman
http://www.zerocarboncanada.ca
March 05, 2009

I’m planning a series of posts on the state of play of “environmentalism” in Canada and to work through the thorny questions over what environmental “leadership” (icky term I know) means at this pivotal moment on Earth. I welcome your feedback and hope you will help me work out the answers to that most fundamental question: what should we be doing right now?

I have just returned from the biggest global warming protest in North America to date where I was privileged to join NASA’s James Hansen and a cast of thousands in shutting down the Capitol Coal Plant in D.C.. The fact that Bobby Kennedy joined us has me thinking a lot about the infamous Cape Wind controversy in the U.S. — when Greenpeace took to the zodiacs to protest the Kennedy family’s opposition to the offshore Cape Wind farm, it seems to me that environmentalism in North America turned a symbolic corner.

The scientists’ warnings about global warming had become abundantly clear. There was a difficult internal struggle because of the Kennedy family’s long service to environmental issues but in the end we decided it would no longer be acceptable to claim to heed the warnings while rejecting the solutions recommended by those same experts. It was a moment where we had to take stock and we decided our priorities had changed.

Today, the warnings are more urgent and dire. Global warming is accelerating much faster than predicted. The oceans are acidifying, ice is melting, forests are dying, and we are at the tipping point of releasing massive storehouses of polar carbon. We are already well beyond the “safe” threshold of heat trapping gases and accelerating rapidly in the wrong direction.

Our job is to be constantly evaluating the threats and designing our response accordingly. So, how do Canadians transition to the global warming era?

Let me say from the outset that I too came late to the recognition that times have changed and a true crisis is upon us. Global warming is enormous, its agents invisible, its schedule unaligned with daily human timeframes. In a sense, we are all still sleepwalking through denial, unable to grapple with the enormity of the problem and the massive scale of changes needed.

And so I am sympathetic to the difficulties in building a new generation of environmentalism.  But the laws of physics have no such sympathy. Either we make the change or we are on the sidelines while half the world’s species and countless of our fellow humans are sentenced to oblivion (many of you will remember that this is an echo of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s words in his opening speech in Bali).

To be fair, there are a great many environmentalists who have been fighting hard on climate for many years. More make the transition every day. And the youth movements certainly “get it.” As so often in the past, youth are forcing their elders to catch up with the times. But I think it is fair to say that, in Canada, the jury is still out on whether the bulk of traditional environmentalists will join the new generation.

What will the next generation look like? Well, I think one of our primary roles is to hold the climate imperative as the context for public dialogue. A common feature of jurisdictions that are having success is that civil society demanded it be done.

But we should be learning from the Van Jones/Obama playbook: we can do a much better job of leading with “green economy and green jobs” instead of talking to normal people about “climate policy.”

Green economy and climate policy are two sides of the same coin. We should be selling the sizzle. People should know that combating global warming quickly enough will bring very significant economic gains. Obama has done this masterfully: never losing sight of the “planet in peril” while simultaneously jazzing Americans about jobs in clean American energy, clean-tech manufacturing, smart grids, etc.

Having set the context, we need to focus governments on stopping the bad (emissions of heat-trapping gases) and starting the good (efficiency and clean energy production). If phase one was getting attention, that phase is largely over – most jurisdictions have some kind of plan purporting to reduce carbon emissions, increase efficiency and ramp up green energy.

In phase two, we need to move these tepid plans to a scale commensurate with the crisis. And so we must grapple with the backlash that comes even against the early steps in climate policy (oops, I mean the Green Economy). We knew we faced a long uphill struggle for stronger laws and we knew we would be fighting the deny-and-delay tobacco tactics of the climate deniers. But Cape Wind showed that we will also have to navigate backlash from friends and citizens’ groups – sometimes proxies in the fossil fuel industry’s tobacco strategy, sometimes simply well-meaning folks that have not yet come to terms with global warming. This backlash has arrived in Canada in a big way: public meetings are overflowing with vitriol as people protest wind farms and conservation pricing in Ontario, carbon taxes and green energy in BC, just to give 2 examples.

To be sure not every policy or clean energy project should get a green light. One way of avoiding backlash is ensuring we force government to address cumulative impacts, to ensure that projects are not sited in areas protected for biodiversity or allowed to trample the rights of First Nations.

It is critical that rich countries like Canada move through this phase very quickly if there is to be any hope for a global deal incorporating the giants of the developing world. Those countries quite rightly point out that global warming is a function of accumulated concentrations in the atmosphere – for which we industrialized nations are responsible and for which they should not be penalized.

The science says our task is to reduce global warming emissions to zero. Eliminate them quickly and entirely. To do so we will need to push back against those forces which obstruct or delay the green economy whether those forces be foot-dragging politicians, Exxon muddying the science or “environmentalists” opposing wind farms. To be successful at pointing the way forward, we will need to vigorously support companies and governments doing the right thing even in halting and partial steps.

Our hour has arrived and we need to make a difficult transition from being primarily critics to being leaders. This means we need to be as vocal about what we’re for as what we’re against. Let there be no doubt that this phase will be extremely messy and difficult: there are no easy answers, no silver bullets, everything we build or refuse has impacts and consequences. But the stories of success from around the world are inspiring. We are all story tellers and our stories should be about small places like Samso, and big countries leading the way on green energy, electric cars, clean-tech manufacturing. People need to hear how elegantly simple and profitable many of the solutions are.

The retail politics of climate are turning out to be more difficult than anticipated and it is our job to clear the way. Quite understandably, people do not appreciate paying more for energy, they do not like their views altered or natural areas opened to clean energy production. It is our job to communicate the imperative — the crisis is upon us and we have to err on the side of carbon (reductions that is); the stories of success; and the connections — Want the green economy? Well, electricity rates, carbon taxes, feed-in-tariffs are the mechanisms that drove efficiency and green technology in the success stories.

At the same time, the role for hard-edged protest is greater than ever. Transitioning from critic to leader doesn’t mean going soft – quite the opposite. As Cape Wind showed, we may have to protest the opponents of clean energy and green jobs. We certainly must protest coal plants and any expansion of the fossil fuel juggernaut. As we focus on articulating what we are “for,” there should be no doubt that we are for closing all coal plants as surely as we are for the clean economy to replace them.

I am happy to report that the Cape Wind project is moving ahead and in many important ways cleared a trail through the establishment for Barack Obama’s green jobs surge and battle against global warming. In fact, at the D.C. protest this week, Bobby Kennedy linked arms with his former adversaries, we all marched on the coal plant and the majority leader in Congress agreed to stop it from burning coal. But the Cape Wind fight was bitter. A very public civil war among environmentalists, the Daily Show skewering those opposing renewable energy (it’s a must watch) , television ads spoofing the opponents of green power, sign-on letters to the Kennedys, whole books have been written about the class and climate war that erupted.

The arguments against Cape Wind are becoming all too familiar to Canadian ears: we don’t really need the energy, it will raise electricity prices, it will privatize the commons, there are environmental impacts, it is all a conspiracy for crony capitalists to make money…. In that battle as in ours, it was not acceptable to deny global warming outright. That was done through more coded insinuations in which viewscapes or fishing spots (and other things that are almost certainly doomed by climate change) were deemed of higher importance.

The Europeans are well into this battle, as are the Americans. One of the consequences of Canada being such a climate laggard is that the backlash is brewing later here than elsewhere. But right now, there is a great window of opportunity with Obama picking the best scientists in the world for his team and Ottawa promising to keep up. Will the Canadian environmental movement prove able to capitalize on the Obama moment?

Next post: The Backlash Against Green Energy in British Columbia

Editor’s note: Please visit the ZeroCarbonCanada site to read the responses and post one of your own!