A commentary by a local writer who focuses on history, spirituality and climate change.
We live in really challenging times.
Premier David Eby’s Jan. 15 commentary about the potential harm of U.S. tariffs bore the title, “sa国际传媒 prepared for economic defence against American threats.”
Such tariffs, if they’re imposed by the new Trump administration, will squeeze us uncomfortably and require a carefully calibrated and coordinated response with provincial, national and international partners who are similarly attacked.
While “squeeze” may prove to be an appropriate description of this pending reality, it’s even more apt for our trapped circumstances relative to our economic dependence on fossil fuels, which increasingly imperil us environmentally.
The same day as Eby’s commentary, the sa国际传媒 ran a lengthy story, “Climate and energy come under one roof with Dix as minister,” which noted Adrian Dix “faces a difficult conundrum: He’ll remain tasked with growing sa国际传媒’s LNG and fossil-fuel sector — which generates a quarter of the province’s greenhouse gas emissions — yet will still need to meet provincial climate targets to drop emissions by 40 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050.”
Moreover, with the exception of two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, annual provincial emissions have been rising.
Eby, who is poised to cancel sa国际传媒’s pioneering consumer carbon tax, stated in his commentary that natural gas is “foundational to our success as a province” and that “strong economic growth … makes us all stronger…. We can’t pour from an empty cup.”
Remember that metaphor.
Last year, noted climate scientist James Hansen, 83, who has been warning about the danger of global warming for decades, remarked: “In due course, probably in my lifetime, we will witness a weather event so awesome, so destructive, so evidently outside of the realm of normality, that it will wake up even the most hardened denialist with a jolt.”
Are this month’s wildfires in the Los Angeles area, which have killed 25, damaged or destroyed more than 12,000 structures, including many schools, and rendered thousands homeless, sufficiently outside the realm of normality to wake up denialists like Donald Trump?
In 2015, Elizabeth Kolbert won a Pulitzer Prize for her book The Sixth Extinction.
Last October, her New Yorker article, “When the ice melts: What the fate of the Arctic means for the rest of the Earth,” reported that the Greenland ice sheet is one of two dozen potential “tipping systems” identified by researchers.
“At a certain point,” she writes, “…feedbacks could become so powerful that, even if CO2 emissions were cut dramatically and temperatures stabilized, the ice sheet would continue to shrink, possibly until it collapsed. The ‘best estimate’ of when this critical threshold will be reached is when average global temperature rises 1.5 degrees Celsius,” which we reached last year.
As more freshwater streams into oceans from Arctic rivers and the melting Greenland ice sheet, the density of the North Atlantic is changing, “potentially enough to interfere” with the critical “conveyor-belt-like motion” of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), of which the Gulf Stream is a surface current.
Scientists “have concluded that the AMOC is slowing.” Moreover, a 2023 Nature Communications study, in Kolbert’s words, “predicted that the AMOC could tip into a new state within decades,” while another study estimated, again in Kolbert’s words, “that it could shut down completely sometime between 2037 and 2064.”
According to oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf, “A full AMOC collapse would be a massive, planetary-scale disaster.”
Heat would build up in the Southern Hemisphere, global rainfall patterns would shift, the Atlantic would have more destructive storms and “warm water would pile up on the shores of the eastern U.S., leading to rapid sea-level rise.”
Britain and Scandinavia would become “much colder; according to one recent study, temperatures in London would drop by almost 20 degrees, which would give it a climate like present-day Siberia’s. Farming in much of northern Europe would become impossible.”
I suggest we consider the squeeze we are feeling about potential tariffs as a training experience for the vice-tightening psychological effects of the Russian roulette we are playing as we continue to burn fossil fuels, increase global warming and get closer to one or more unforgiving tipping points.
Stimulating economic growth by accelerating our production of greenhouse gas emissions and reducing our ability to meet our climate targets is most definitely a form of Russian roulette.
I’m not saying we won’t survive it, but I am saying it’s very, very dangerous. We are accountable for how we fill the economic cup we pour from.
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