Something Revealing from Margaret's Pen

Today Margarte Wente decided to return once again to the topic she has mangled so badly so many times before. I refer, of course, to global climate change and the Copenhagen conference. To begin on a positive note, I want to say how very nice it is to see the real concern that motivates Ms. Wente put squarely on the table. But that’s faint praise, as we’ll see below. The nub of Ms. Wente’s worries in this column is the question of what we owe to the developing world over climate change.

Ms. Wente even begins on a reasonable note, remarking “in some ways, a climate fund seems only fair.” And she’s right about this. The developed world has grown rich, in very large part, by burning fossil fuels. The contribution that this cheap source of energy has made to our present wealth is massive. It has been estimated that the energy consumed by a middle-class American does work equivalent to having 200 human slaves. (See EOHT for this figure: it turns out that Buckminster Fuller was the first to propose this kind of analysis.)

But this energy was never as cheap as the price the market placed on it would suggest. There were externalities, costs borne neither by the seller nor the buyer of the energy, from the first. Local air pollution has caused or contributed to the deaths of thousands and even millions. More recently, the environmental impact of acid rain, largely from coal-fired electrical generators, became a serious problem that has since been resolved, largely due to cap and trade arrangements.

Now we’ve come to realize (in spite of an aggressive and continuing campaign of disinformation from fossil fuel interests and self-styled ‘conservatives’) that there is another externality involved in our use of fossil fuels: the long-term, cumulative impact of CO2 that we have added to the atmosphere. (A quick aside here: Rex Murphy declared recently, in an interview with CBC Calgary radio, that no-one could question Dr. Ian Plimer’s qualifications to speak on climate science. To give you an idea of just how good Dr. Plimer’s qualifications are, here is one small factoid: Dr. Plimer declares in his book on climate change that volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans do by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. This is just plain false. The U.S. Geological survey says that human-caused emissions of CO2 add up to about 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes. See USGS for this figure.)

The climate change already happening poses threats, to low-lying cities around the world which face risks of flooding as ice melts and oceans warm, to wildlife as climate shifts more rapidly than plants and animals can migrate or adapt, and to agriculture as water supplies diminish and growing conditions worsen. These costs will be suffered all around the world. So it really is hard to deny that we owe a debt to the developing world, a debt we can best pay by helping them to cope with climate change as it continues, and to reduce the CO2 they emit in the future with funds and technical support to help their economies adopt alternative energy sources.

But for Ms. Wente, this course is unacceptable. After all, she suggests, we can’t trust those people in the developing world to spend any money we provide as we think it ought to be spent. (And the possibility of negotiating agreements to ensure that the money is used in ways that both groups can agree to is, apparently, not worth mentioning.) In the end (echoing our current Prime Minister’s remarks about global warming in 2002) Ms. Wente declares that this demand for compensation is really just a plan to ‘soak the rich’: “Canada emits far more greenhouse gases than Kenya because we are far more prosperous and successful. And so – no matter how carbon virtuous we are – we're doomed to be cast as global greenhouse villains. And if that sounds like the familiar old morality of socialism, it is.”

If this sounds like a disgraceful piece of self-serving nonsense, it is. “Carbon virtuous,” of course, is the last thing that Canada has been. Our emissions continue to rise, the Federal Government’s declared targets for reduction are among the weakest in the world, and no-one who has seriously examined what is being done believes that Canada will actually meet those targets. Furthermore, “global greenhouse villains” is what we are and will continue to be: even if we invest now to change course, we will have contributed far more than our share to the problem, since CO2 persists in the atmosphere for thousands of years. (Another brief aside: carbon capture and storage, now receiving huge subsidies from both the Federal and Alberta governments, is the most expensive and slowest way to reduce our emissions. The only advantage of CCS is the fact that it allows business to continue as usual in the meanwhile.)

So Ms. Wente’s closing jibe about socialism is very revealing indeed: yes, we’ve been bad, we’ve (innocently at first, but now knowingly) harmed our planet. And we’ve grown immensely rich doing it. But Ms. Wente does not want to pay any reparations: she enjoys her lifestyle too much. To echo Margaret herself once more, if using up a resource that belonged to everyone and then refusing to compensate people whose share we’ve usurped sounds like the familiar old morality of greed and piracy, it is.