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Gwynne Dyer on Climate Wars at 2030 North in Ottawa, 2009

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I have recently been attending loads of conferences and workshops at which climate change is on the agenda. Most of them were permeated by a complete lack of any sense of urgency about what climate change will mean for North Americans in the next 20 years. So, I found Gwynne Dyer's gloom and doom in his talk on Climate Wars, sponsored by WWF, and delivered in conjunction with the 2030 North conference in Ottawa this week, to be very refreshing.  In his presentation on  the state-centred security dimensions of climate change, three main points stuck with me:

1. military generals in the USA are pondering how to deal with forthcoming events such as Florida disappearing when the ice caps melt. This contrasts with what I found when I flew into Ft. Lauderdale for a 2003 conference on invasive plants. I made a point of asking about 10 staff at my hotel whether they were at all worried about the sea level rises that would inevitably accompany the melting ice caps: I should note that I have teaching research into global warming in my ecology courses since 1990.  Without exception, the staff all looked at me as if I had just grown 2 heads!  How times change - at least in some parts of North American society.

2. a retired US General that he interviewed, said that he viewed the potential for nuclear attack during the Cold War as a "low probability, high consequence event" whereas Climate Change (warming) is a "high probability, high consequence event".

3. never mind about the Arctic, northern nations should worry about the nations to the south, where a 2 degree temperature rise (we are now hearing about a 4 degree temperature rise scenario), will mean that crop plants can't grow and survive.  A government that can't feed it's population is unlikely to be stable.

Hmm - the lights in the hotel ballroom where the talk took place were blazing, and I couldn't tell if there were low energy light bulbs - I hoped so.

Dawn R. Bazely

Gore’s $300 million gamble

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Former vice-president and eco-warrior Al Gore has just announced that the Alliance for Climate Protection, an NGO he founded, will spend upwards of 300 million dollars in an advertisement and citizen mobilization blitz ("we" campaign) during the upcoming presidential election campaign and beyond.

Here's an example of one of the ads:

Perhaps the largest and most expensive campaign of its kind, Gore hopes to mobilize enough support among average Americans of all stripes to force politicians to take climate change seriously. Such an effort was sorely lacking when the Clinton-Gore Administration watered down and finally walked away from Kyoto as it faced certain defeat in the House and Senate in the 1990s.

However, such a campaign faces huge hurdles that have derailed new environmental legislation in the past. Many of the most ardent opponents of environmental legislation are themselves insulated from democratic pressures due to the vagaries of American congressional system, where smaller states with low populations hold disproportional power (each of the fifty states is represented by two senators regardless of their population). Along with an industry-friendly administration over the past eight years, the US government's regulatory bodies have been gutted, environmental laws reversed, and scientists across the country demoralized due to the government's ideological intransigence.

The next president will need to repair the enormous damage, let alone advance a progressive environmental agenda. At the very least however, none of the frontrunners on both sides are climate change skeptics and Gore's groundbreaking strategy can be witnessed by his strange bedfellows ads:

A clip aired on CBS showed the Reverend Al Sharpton sharing a sofa with the conservative preacher Pat Robertson. The two men acknowledge they agree on almost nothing - barring the need to deal with global warming.

Other spots will feature the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, alongside Newt Gingrich, the conservative Republican who once held the same post.

The support from such conservative figures as Gingrich and Robertson marks a victory for Gore in his efforts to make global warming a cause for all Americans: evangelical Christians and fiscal conservatives as well as those on the left.

Incidentally, Gore will be in Montreal this weekend.

US Candidates on Eco Issues

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Grist Magazine as a handy chart that outlines the positions of the major US presidential candidates on environmental issues. However, on the Democratic side, the chart won't help that much given the almost identical platforms of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Unfortunately, the chart ignores minor candidates and parties such as Mike Gravel (still in the race) and the Green Party who are environmental giants in comparison.

Interestingly enough, the journal continues the troubling trend of collapsing all environmental issues along the climate change-energy continuum. Although they are obviously important in themselves, both civilizational level challenges lie (or are treated as such) in the domain of economic and technological fixes. More complex and far reaching issues such as biodiversity conservation are conveniently ignored in Grist's chart, even with habitat loss, species extinction, and dislocation of traditional livelihoods exacting their increasingly grim toll.

Beyond the usual laundry list of pledges, political will and a working green majority will be vital for the passage of any far reaching legislation, particularly in the US where entrenched interests have demonstrated their unyielding strength in both houses of Congress.

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