We need to live up to our climate commitments, now

I had the good fortune to be sitting by a Quebec lake on an early July day, one that scientists declared to have been the hottest day on Earth in the past 125,000 years. While that designation reflects average global conditions, it was also a scorcher locally. In nearby Ottawa, temperatures climbed to 33 Celsius. The air at the lake was acrid from northern Quebec forest fires that had been raging out of control for a month. Shawn McCarthy. Handout photograph On the dock, I cracked open a book, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. The choice was apt, but also disturbing. Robinson’s dystopian novel opens in the near future with the protagonist—a United Nations aid worker—enduring an unprecedented and deadly heat wave in India. Power outages kill all air conditioning; thieves take his life-saving generator; millions of people die on the street and in their homes. The aid worker is near death when he is rescued—the Westerner survives, leaving the impoverished locals behind. Robinson’s novel—which was a top pick of former U.S. president Barack Obama last year—is classed as “speculative fiction,” but it sounds all too plausible. Deadly heat waves and other extreme weather events are already upon us. The adverse impacts will only grow in terms of economic activity, human health, and mortality, as well as its deleterious effects on the species that share the planet with us. Of late, we’ve heard a lot of pushback from politicians and business leaders who oppose urgent action that would increase energy costs or impact jobs in resource-rich provinces, or reduce Canada’s lucrative oil and gas exports. At a meeting during Calgary’s Stampede, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith demanded Prime Minister Justin Trudeau back off his aggressive plans to cut emissions from the electricity and fossil fuel sectors. However, now is not the time to retreat. Or to think we can fully “adapt” to the more extreme ravages of climate change, even though we have to scale up that effort. Or to think that we don't need to act urgently because we represent a small slice of the problem. It is clear to everyone—or to most thoughtful people—that the solutions are available, but implementing them is incredibly hard. We know that. The world economy is a vast, complex system in which people have long reaped enormous benefits from access to affordable and reliable energy. The transition to a zero-carbon world will take time, but cannot be delayed. We also know that we are asking today’s adults to sacrifice in order to mitigate the environmental devastation that would be visited on those who are now children and on future generations. And that the sacrifices will not be borne equally, but will depend a lot on where you live and your socioeconomic situation. Clearly, Canadians alone cannot solve the crisis. However, as one of the world’s largest emitters both currently and historically, Canada has a responsibility to play a major part in the global effort. Time is of the essence if we are going to avert truly calamitous climate change. The impacts of a warming Earth will be costly as global average temperatures soar to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. They will be orders of magnitude greater if we hit 2 C of warming, 2.5 C, or —God forbid— 3 C. Those costs—deadly weather extremes, crop failures and damaged infrastructure, internal and international migration—will hit hardest on those who can least afford it, those who have little ability to adapt. And they will demand justice and reparations. So we need to live up to our climate commitments. We cannot rely on the private sector to make the necessary investments in low- and zero-carbon energy supplies unless government policies provide the push and pull. Banks and oil companies—along with other corporations—are setting targets for net-zero carbon emissions and those could be helpful. But so far, the executives don’t appear to be willing to change business-as-usual investment patterns to meet those targets. And they are unlikely to do so unless governments force the issue with a wide range of policies. In The Ministry for the Future, Robinson looks back from the vantage point of a fictional 2025 on the failure of the 195 signatory nations to meet the promises of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. “Reductions in emissions ignored, payment into investment funds that were meant to be spent on decarbonization not paid—in every way the agreement had been ignored and abrogated,” he writes in a line that sums up the situation in 2023. “A performance without substance, a joke, a lie.” Somewhere after those words, I closed the book and set it aside for later. It’s not exactly fare for the dock. Instead, I turned to a detective novel that dealt with mere murder. Shawn McCarthy is a senior counsel at Sussex Strategy, and a former national business reporter covering global energy for The Globe and Mail. He's also the past-president of the World Press Freedom Canada, a volunteer advocacy group based in Ottawa. The Hill Times