The Big Picture: We Sit Around And Gab

WEDNESDAY · SEPT 27 · 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld. . .

This week, the truth about global warming with author Terry Glavin, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, Tory MP Bob Mills, Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers' Association's Mark Nantais and former Winnipeg mayor & environmentalist Glen Murray talking about the solutions.

Tune in to The Big Picture with Avi Lewis to watch the action! For more about the doc, the talk, the show & Avi: www.cbc.ca/bigpicture . . . get involved in The Big Picture with Avi Lewis Campaign at www.HelloCoolWorld.com/BigPicture.

That's the bumpf. The Big Picture is here. The Attenborough documentary that sets the stage is here.

I didn't really have all that much to say, or much time to say anything, actually. Avi was a great host and Glen Murray was especially good, I thought, but there were lots of smart people, with lots of interesting ideas. If I'd had the presence of mind, though, I would have tried to figure out a succinct way of making these points:

To begin with, it's too late.

The great challenge we face is the work of seeing to it that we don’t make matters worse. The only realistic goal now is to slow the rate of global warming and keep the planet’s temperature down, just enough, so as to prevent the deaths of billions of people owing to global droughts, desertification, massive crop failures, and resultant starvation.

A great part of the problem is that for too long we've allowed the whole question to be cast as an "environmental" issue. And environmentalism, as a separate category of thought, as a way of thinking that erects an impermeable barrier between "nature" and "culture", isn't up to the challenges associated with global warming. It never was.

And sorry, revolutionists, but we don't need to overthrow capitalism to do these things. Capitalism has been quite effective in developing the already-existing means to scale back on greenhouse gases, and most of us in the developed world could easily meet or exceed our per-capita Kyoto obligations with relatively minor "lifestyle choices."

We need massive public investment in transportation infrastructure and renewable-energy alternatives, as well. But these huge challenges are made up of lots of small challenges, and practical solutions are already available. And it's not all bad news:

True, the United States, Canada and Australia have betrayed the rest of the industrialized world by thumbing their noses at the greenhouse-gas reduction targets set out in the Kyoto Protocol. But 163 nations have ratified the treaty. And in a perverse twist of luck, the first-round “rich nation” target of bringing greenhouse-gas emissions back to 5.9 percent below 1990 levels has actually been met – mainly because so many of Russia’s Soviet-era factories have fallen apart.

The European Union, meanwhile, has established a carbon-trading system to keep within its targets, and some countries are going a step further. Iceland continues to harness more of its geothermal power resources and is investing heavily in hydrogen engines for its transportation sector. The country plans to be oil-free by 2050. There is good news from the climate change front, everywhere.

The main thing we need to do is engage the global-warming challenge as citizens, not just as protesters or activists or consumers. We also have to reject the misanthropic reflexes that are so commonplace in climate-change debates, and reaffirm our commitment to the idea of progress. We should start to think about effective and ambitious measures in response to global warming as a necessary defence of western civilization's most cherished values. Tony Blair, whatever his faults, is one of the few developed-world leaders who clearly understands how everything is connected:

Unless we re-appraise our strategy, unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade, and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win. And this is a battle we must win. What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future.

To defend those values, we should put all the Gaia-bothering behind us and face up to the objective economic and social inequalities that are such barriers to progress.

On the global-warming front, we're going to have to come to grips with the fact that there are millions of North American working people who can't afford fashionably swish little hybrid cars, and don't have the luxury of riding bikes to work from their condos. Face those kinds of facts globally and you get the really "big picture": Two-thirds of the world's people wants the kind of economic development we've taken for granted in Europe and North America, and they're entitled to it. Coal and oil are going to remain a part of the picture.

Think of the atmosphere as a global commons. There's a limit to the volume of greenhouse gases that the atmosphere can handle, and we're already exceeding that limit. What we have to sort out is a) how we're going to break out of the tragedy of the commons that's unfolding in the atmosphere, b) what the size of humanity's annual greenhouse-gas budget should be, and c) how to equitably distribute access to that budget.

The Kyoto Accord was a start. It's an embarrassing little baby step in world-scale decision-making, but even so, it's proved too much for the likes of Canada's Conservative government, and of course they're going to go to hell when they die for being such moral cowards. But it must also be said that we've all wasted precious years thinking about global warming as an "environmental" problem, and the domain of a loveable but especially inarticulate tendency within a general liberal-left pattern that has been with us since around the time of the first Earth Day, in 1970.

This pattern seriously discredited left-wing politics in the eyes of many working-class voters, who felt the cohesion of their social order under assault in this turbulent period. Liberal fellow travelers compounded the problem by indulging the belligerent posturing of the New Left, frequently adopting it as a fashion statement.

Global warming is a macro-economic problem, with vast ecological, cultural and geopolitical implications. It may be the greatest single impediment to global human progress. Its impact will be felt mainly by the poor. In other words, it's a class problem.

That's the point that I would have liked to make.

Tune in to CBC Newsworld tomorrow at 10 p.m. After the show you can contribute your own comments on-line, here.