An elder comments.

If there was ever a person worthy of being called an Elder of the environmental movement it is Bill McKibben, who I heard speak at the Bader Theatre in Toronto more than a year ago to a packed house.  In his 60th year he has been writing about climate change for thirty of them. As well as teaching at Middlebury College in New York, he writes regularly for the New Yorker Newsletter and here are some excerpts leading up to the US Election.  Did people listen?

 “Authorities told all forty million people in California to be prepared to evacuate—indeed, they told them to park their cars facing out of the driveway, in case they had to leave in seconds. But the pandemic has made evacuation more complicated, because heading to a shelter might carry its own dangers, and it has left California’s firefighting force depleted, because the state relies on prison inmates, a group that has been hit especially hard by covid-19, to fill out its ranks. And that’s just California. The flooding crisis in China intensified again last week, as record amounts of water poured into the reservoir behind Three Gorges Dam.”    (August 28, 2020)

 “. . . we need people fully committed to the task of building out solar and wind power as fast as possible. Those technologies are much cheaper now than they were thirty years ago, which helps change the game. (Indeed, news came last week that ExxonMobil, not long ago the most valuable corporation in the world, now had a market cap smaller than a big solar-and-wind company.) As the credit-rating agency Moody’s pointed out in an analysis released last week, natural-gas pipelines are now an unwise financial bet, partly because activists have become adept at blocking them. The pincers created by the confluence of cheap clean tech and a stronger environmental movement should give Biden the opportunity to move far more nimbly than any President before him. “  (October 7, 2020)

 “Heat waves widen the achievement gap between students of color and white students, mostly because the latter are far more likely to be in buildings with air-conditioning.” (Oct 14, 2020)

 “It is clear, first, that regulation is going to be essential to bring greenhouse gases under control, and, second, that it’s going to have to happen fast. The world’s climate scientists have stated plainly that the next decade represents the critical time frame: without fundamental transformation by 2030, the chances of meeting the Paris accord’s climate targets are nil. Given Barrett’s performance at her hearings, it seems doubtful that she’ll let America play its role—if you’re not even clear that climate change is real, how much latitude will you give government agencies to attack it? As with so many things about climate change, the problem is ultimately mathematical. Joe Biden, should he be elected, acting not out of anger but out of sorrow at Republican gamesmanship, could make sure that the will of the people, not just the will of Charles Koch, is represented on the bench. The composition of the Supreme Court has varied over time from five Justices to ten; eleven seems like the right number for 2021. Or maybe thirteen.”  (October 21, 2020)

“In 1959, when humans began measuring the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, there was still some margin. That first instrument, set up on the side of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, showed that the air contained about three hundred and fifteen parts per million of CO2, up from two hundred and eighty p.p.m. before the Industrial Revolution. Worrisome, but not yet critical. In 1988, when the nasa scientist James Hansen first alerted the public to the climate crisis, that number had grown to three hundred and fifty p.p.m., which we’ve since learned is about the upper safe limit. Even then, though, we had a little margin, at least of time: the full effects of the heating had not yet begun to manifest in ways that altered our lives. If we’d acted swiftly, we could have limited the damage dramatically.

 We didn’t, of course, and we have poured more carbon into the atmosphere since 1988 than in all the years before. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has topped four hundred and fifteen p.p.m.—that’s much too high, something that we know from a thousand indicators.

 . . . . If November 3rd doesn’t mark the start of a mighty effort at transformation, subsequent November Tuesdays will be less important, not more—our leverage will shrink, our chance at really affecting the outcome will diminish. This is it. Climate change “is the No. 1 issue facing humanity, and it’s the No. 1 issue for me,” Biden said in an interview on Saturday. With luck, we’ll get a chance to find out if the second half of that statement is true. The first half is already clear.”  (October 28, 2020)

Learning through Reflection

Watching a recent video on Farnham Street, I noted the emphasis on reflection after decision making.  Shane Parrish observed that if we don’t review the choices we make after the fact, we don’t learn.  Organizations that want to make a difference have the same weakness as individuals as the story in a recent Globe and Mail reveals. When someone like the Auditor General Brenda Lysyk releases a report, it reveals we fail to learn from past experience. Ideally all organizations would have such a function as an auditor general – non partisan, independent and speaking to the wider community.  While taking a mini-sabbatical from some volunteer work, I found the report on how my province is doing in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic revealing – and thought provoking in the way organizations of all sizes operate.

 In an emergency a command structure matters. I remember one I was involved in some years ago and the number was two persons.  That made it clear and fortunately we didn’t have to add to it. Who leads? What is the meeting structure? Who takes minutes? How are decisions followed up?

 Regrettably, this emergency response got off to a bad start.  Ontario was one of the worst sites of the SARS epidemic earlier in the 21st century and recommendations from the Auditor General started in 2003. Among them was a Cabinet Committee for Emergency Management consisting of the Premier plus eight MPPs. That committee finally met for the first time in 2019 and three times in the early part of 2020 for updates and discussion. No minutes were taken. It never took the lead. Efforts instead were led by a group of 21 that expanded to 83 and ultimately to 500.  Some did not know whether they were attending with specific responsibilities or were just there.  Meetings started by teleconference with unidentified speakers or roles and only later moved to video conference.  While the Chief Medical Officer of Health was named Co-Chair, he never chaired. Minutes of decisions were not made.  Discussion, as we know, does not necessarily involve making choices.

 In most organizations changeover in leadership occurs, but often a new team has no mandate or record from the past. Emergency plans were out-dated and staff was insufficient.  To remedy that, the government hired consultants.  I know that is a pattern for trying to fix things and I’ve even been one of them. In this case it was a top of the line firm (*single sourced with no competitive bids) resulting in a billing of $1.6 million to create a plan with its first meeting in April – and another $3.2 million to plan for the opening of schools. Neither plan has ever been released There has been little coordination with municipalities.

 Lessons from the past were simply not learned. The SARS experience suggested taking early precautions even when the world was still learning about a new virus.  Though travel was clearly a source of infections, people were encouraged to go on holidays during the March break. Expertise is often disregarded. The Chief Medical Officer of Health did not exercise his full powers in a medical emergency. Masks were not required until October 2020. Instructions to local authorities were delayed and had been requested as early as May. The Ministry of Health collected data rather than Public Health. Transparency of data was identified as a problem when the CMOH did not release information until Cabinet had approved it. There was a good deal of variety in how local authorities responded, causing further confusion.

 The lessons learned were not carried out over time. The Auditor General’s department reviewed the recommendations of 2003 again in 2007, 2014 and 2017 and focused on the need for updating of contact tracing and laboratory procedures. The latter were still paper based and not integrated with public health information systems.  Good procedures for testing, tracing and isolating could have reduced the spread by 80%.  Targets – always a favorite of governments, were set – but never met, with the worst results in the largest populated areas. By the end of August 2020, Ontario had the third highest number of cases on the country and the second highest rate of deaths per 100,000.  We could have done better.

 But will we?  Rather than reflect, all the government parties have immediately become defensive when they are faced with the reality of choices made in the past.  What if, instead of defending themselves, the party in power could respond, “Yes, most of this is true, much as we don’t like to face it” rather than slamming the Auditor General. The opposition could respond, saying, “We agree and we wouldn’t necessarily have done better” rather than “We didn’t cause all these problems when we were in power in the past – it’s the current government’s fault”.  What if they  all stopped saying “It’s not US and THEM – it’s just US”?  How are WE going to do this better from now on?

Choices

Climate issues are new to me in terms of training and background. Beginner’s mind is a perpetual state. It does mean that there are plentiful resources to educate myself - and one of the best is Yale Climate Connections. Some weeks there are tales of doom and gloom but there are also many positive stories that point us in good directions.

A recent article suggests three options going forward

• Countries can work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to decrease global warming

• Governments and other organizations can do what they can to protect the livelihoods of those affected by the changes that are already happening and we can’t prevent them

• We can ignore the need to change and deny the problem. Our children and our ecosystems

  will pay the price

Their chart shows the seriousness of the consequences. The planet’s temperature is increasing because of human action. We can’t reset the thermostat.

Some of the risks seem unstoppable. The efforts have to be long term and sustainable. There are clearly economic costs but there are also encouraging signs that renewable energy is more viable and more accepted. While the US is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, Canada is far from innocent. Our first nations people can teach us much about thinking of the generations to come rather than remaining fixated on our own comfort and welfare.

Comparisons

This is Bill McKibben’s take on why Facebook and the oil companies think in the same way

“For decades, people have asked me why the oil companies don’t just become solar companies. They don’t for the same reason that Facebook doesn’t behave decently: an oil company’s core business is digging stuff up and burning it, just as Facebook’s is to keep people glued to their screens. Digging and burning is all that oil companies know how to do—and why the industry has spent the past thirty years building a disinformation machine to stall action on climate change. It’s why—with the evidence of climate destruction growing by the day—the best that any of them can offer are vague pronouncements about getting to “net zero by 2050”—which is another way of saying, “We’re not going to change much of anything anytime soon.” (The American giants, like ExxonMobil, won’t even do that.)

(From an article recently appearing in The New Yorker)

The Way to Net Zero

In the midst of two crises - the pandemic and climate change, it’s easy to forget the promises that goverments made re the latter - to bring carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 - that’s thirty years away. It seems a long time except we also promised to be half way there by 2030 - and we are not even close.

I heard Isabel Turcotte, The Pembina Institute’s Director of federal policy speak at a seminar of the University of Toronto’s Department of the Environment late last year - and she has recently written a good article for Corporate Knights, outlining some principles that the corporate world needs to follow - reminding us that goals are not solely about government initiatives.

• Carbon budgets are necessary to measure progress. We have to know where we stand and whether we are making progress or just talking

• We have to start early. It’s no point in having a long term goal and delaying putting it into action.

• We have to effect the reductions by using all the tools at hand - not just one.

• Corporation s have to work together and initiate policy - Turcotte terms it “turning up the heat.

  Good reminders.