The more threatening facts are, the less we want to believe them. This is a human trait that even pre-dates the travails of Galileo Galieli, the 17th century “Father of Modern Science.”
You will remember he was tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy,” forced to recant and sentenced to spend the rest of his life under house arrest until he died. His sin was holding the scientific opinion that the Earth revolves around the sun, which was deemed to be contrary to Holy Scripture.
Today’s scientists spreading facts about climate change are often equally maligned in the court of public opinion, not so much because they’re wrong, but because believing them and acting on what they’re telling us will require us, like the Pope in Galileo’s time, to so radically change our lives and worldviews that we don’t even want to go there. So our life and business practices are aligned by default to the 2% of scientists who disagree that humans are causing the planet to heat up.
We continue to act in a way that makes us part of what UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calls a “global suicide pact.”
We find ourselves saying exactly what people would have been saying about Galileo’s discovery that the Earth rotates around the sun: “Even if it is true, I’m not going to believe it.”
As SFU professor and international climate consultant Mark Jaccard points out, only with immediate action will we achieve a 65% to 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in less than four decades. Without that action, he and the world’s leading climatologists predict that global temperature will increase more than two degrees Celsius, resulting in what Jaccard calls “cataclysmic effects” on the ecosystems on which we depend.
Jaccard likes to quote Upton Sinclair: “It is hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
He was talking about the investors in Canada’s oilsands and the politicians who benefit from that project’s huge short-term revenues (which take no account of the ecosystem costs). The current beneficiaries desperately want to distract people from the connection between oilsands expansion tripling production in the next 20 years and Canada’s resulting failure to ever achieve our 2020 national greenhouse gas reduction targets.
Yet abandoning those targets in Canada and elsewhere in the world condemns our children to a future far more horrific than any bitumen spill in a river or in the ocean. The OECD’s recent warning of “irreversible changes that could endanger two centuries of rising living standards” is just a start.
The Pembina Institute is one of many organizations struggling to make the case for investing strategically to reject our global suicide pact. It’s urging B.C. businesses to support the extension of the province’s carbon tax.
Pricing GHG emissions is, according to the OECD, “an essential element of any comprehensive [emission reduction] strategy.” It gets the market working in a life-saving direction.
Do we have the courage to face the realities of our time? One of those realities is the disruption of the revenue sources many of us depend on. Equally real are the myriad business opportunities coming from investing in a future that will nourish, not kill, our children.
One small step you can take to show your “courage to face the realities of our time” is to join the 94 business leaders calling on the provincial government to reaffirm and strengthen its leadership on climate change. Sign up at www.pembina.org/pub/2300.
(Due to unexpected privacy and legal concerns, the conclusion to last week’s column on the CRA/RCMP raid on Angus McAllister’s home and office has been postponed to a future issue.) •
