Trying to change the course of history is never an easy thing. There is understandably much hesitance to move away from the familiar, the comfortable, the way things have always been.
Take climate change, for example.
Through the period of record high temperatures the world has experienced over recent years, we’ve seen a spate of tornadoes rip across the US, floods ravage parts of the US, Europe and much of Pakistan, extreme heat and fires rage in California and British Columbia, and a cyclone wash houses into the sea along the coast of Newfoundland, all leaving much destruction, misery and death in their wake. The extreme weather event that put life in the Pontiac on ice over the past week was but a relatively gentle reminder, fortunately without local casualties, of what the warming climate has in store for us.
It took years for the scientific facts of climate change to manifest in the global plan to do something about it that was agreed in Rio in 1992. That was three decades ago, and not much meaningful progress has happened since.
Some say that climate change is fake news made up by a cabal of elite globalists plotting to seize control of humanity. While others might accept that climate change is a real phenomenon, many don’t see it as a pressing threat, and oppose any efforts to shift humanity off the behaviours that are causing it.
Since Rio, public opinion has been sufficiently confused on the matter that thirty years worth of opportunities to put gradual change in motion have been squandered. We are now rapidly approaching a point where the table is set for serious consequences in our time and much worse to come thereafter, where the menu of options will be much smaller and look more like crisis management than crisis prevention.
Any government that is not now taking the climate crisis very seriously is not doing its job to protect the safety and well-being of the people it is meant to serve. Yes, our political representatives are talking much more about it now than they were ten years ago. We all are. But just talking about it is not enough. Taking it seriously means doing something that is actually going to improve climate outcomes significantly.
Ultimately, as with so many things, it comes down to us, the voters. If no political parties in this country are proposing anything significant on the climate file, it is because none of them sees a sufficiently compelling political upside to doing so. That’s our fault. If it is still too dodgy for politicians to go all in on climate change, it is because we, the electorate, have not made it clear that this is what we want.
For anyone opposed to climate action, this is great news. But while they may feel they are winning the battle merely by sowing sufficient doubt to forestall action, we all stand to lose the war. While lawyers defending big tobacco knew that every month they could hold back legislation to curb cigarette smoking would mean millions of dollars in profits for their clients, it also meant consigning millions of people to dying of lung cancer in the process.
But what if overwhelming numbers of electors were to let it be known that averting climate disaster is of paramount importance, and that attempts to use nice sounding climate rhetoric to camouflage essentially business-as-usual policies will be punished at the ballot box? Would this spawn the emergence of political candidates and maybe even a whole party with a serious plan equal to the public demand for change?
Could this happen? Could a political party with the fortitude to stand up to the powerful economic forces allied with preserving the status quo ever be viable in this country? And if one could, would enough voters have the courage of their convictions to put that party into power?
Theoretically, in the free world, in a democracy, this is exactly how it is supposed to happen. Whether it ever actually does is up to us.
Charles Dickson
