Suspended disbelief

The New York essayist and cultural commentator Fran Lebowitz has a bit where she talks about wanting to write a manifesto called “Pretend it’s a city” – which is her snarky way of saying that we should pay more attention to our surroundings and make reasonable accommodations for others as we move about in public spaces. Listening to Elizabeth May give an address in Halifax recently, I thought maybe she should write a manifesto called “Pretend it’s a country.”

While Lebowitz mostly plays the part of a gadfly, buzzing around sardonically within the confines of her urban environment, May, the longtime Green Party of Canada leader, has devoted her adult life to the cause of ecological sustainability, locally and globally. And since being elected MP for the B.C. riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands in 2011, she has been a voice for civility, collaboration, and intellectual rigour in federal politics. Friends who have attended her regular community meetings in the riding tell me that she goes to great lengths to help her constituents understand how Parliament works; rather than merely staking out her position, she delves into the nuances of policy and legislation. (You might say that this approach is a luxury that comes with belonging to an electorally marginal party. I would reply that maybe we need more representatives who are similarly unencumbered.)

Speaking in Halifax, May lamented the increased partisanship in Ottawa – the constant jabbing and jockeying for position, at the expense of sensible initiatives to serve the public interest – and she expressed concern about polarization in Canadian society at large. “If I’m sharing from my heart, I would have to say what I am most worried about right now, for our country, is the pandemic did some damage psychically, spiritually, socially,” she said. “We’re not exactly the same country we were before the pandemic. We’re not as good at pulling together.”

This divisiveness is likely to compromise the delivery of public services, the health of our institutions, and the well-being of citizens – but perhaps most worryingly, it has resulted in politicization of environmental issues that have consequences for future generations. May, who is now 70, expressed incredulity that we are still debating the need to act on climate change. “I was holding my infant daughter in June 1992 while I watched my prime minister and every world leader from all around the world – I mean everyone from George Bush to Fidel Castro – everybody signed the two major treaties coming out of the Rio Earth Summit: the Treaty to Protect Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” she recalled.

“We knew then what we know now: that burning fossil fuels unleashes greenhouse gases. As a gathering of scientists said at the first really large international conference that was hosted by Canada in June of 1988 – I was still working then in the Office of the Minister of the Environment for the Mulroney government, so I helped organize that conference – 400 scientists from all around the world issued this as a consensus statement: ‘Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to global nuclear war.’ That was 1988 – that was before we were being visited by the impacts of climate change….

“We understood then that we needed scientific advice, and we created the largest peer-review system on earth, called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change … to look at all the published science, and advise governments. The sixth assessment report of the IPPC told us exactly what we needed to do – and pretty much collectively, governments around the world shrugged. To every wake-up call, they hit the snooze button…. I feel like such a failure. I was holding my baby when these guys – it was mostly guys – all signed the commitment to reduce greenhouse gases to a level that they would never become dangerous in the atmosphere. We’re way past the danger limit now.”

Global average temperatures have risen about 1.1 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution, and they are expected to continue rising somewhat even if we immediately begin reducing emissions. “I hate to say it, because I believe in being hopeful, but I don’t think I could find a scientist who would say we can still hold to 1.5. Now, 1.5 is not a global average that gets us back the climate we grew up with. That’s gone,” May said. “I’ve got to work harder than I ever have before and I’ve got to wake up my friends in Parliament, who are all decent human beings – every single last one of them – but they don’t necessarily understand the urgency, because it’s an uncomfortable reality to know that our own conduct may wipe out the future for our children. Staying below 2 degrees Celsius really matters…. Thomas Homer Dixon says what he wants to avoid for his own children is the dystopian, sci-fi, Mad Max type of world. To do that, we have to get off fossil fuels as fast as humanly possible.”

May said we need to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency by 2030 – and this would be entirely feasible for our country, except that there is a lack of cooperation. “The European Union has its act together better than Canada. Countries that were at war with each other – England, Germany, France, Italy. We can’t get B.C. and Alberta to work as well together as England and Germany. I don’t get this,” she said. “I don’t know why we have this idea of Balkanized, competing jurisdictions, as though we’re more territorial and nationalist as provinces than the sovereign nations of the EU. I can’t figure it out, honestly. I think one thing provinces will always agree on is that they hate Ottawa. Ottawa says, ‘It’s OK, we’ll bribe you.’ But we don’t actually sit down together as a country.”

As an example of the kind of commitment that is required to address the climate crisis, May cited the reconstruction work that was undertaken following the 1917 Halifax Explosion. “They built thousands of units of housing in months,” she said. “Housing was built by governments. Nobody thought you had to tinker with the market and wait for the market to respond to the need. People had just lost their homes from the single biggest man-made explosion that ever happened, up to Hiroshima. We know how to take care of each other. Social cohesion – loving each other, taking care of each other – is in our DNA as Canadians. We’ve got to find that, grab it, and make it really work hard, and talk about it, celebrate it – or we’re indeed in more trouble than I could ever possibly imagine.”

May pointed out that Quebec’s surplus renewable electricity is exported to the Northeastern United States instead of being used within Canada. “We could shut down every coal-fired power plant in Nova Scotia if Hydro Quebec would cooperate with Emera and we had a grid that worked east-west instead of just north-south,” she said. “Each province, for the most part, has a monopolistic energy grid run by an electricity company whose business model is ‘We produce a lot of electricity in a mega-project and we sell it along long, inefficient wires to an ultimate consumer and we can charge what we want because we’ve got a monopoly.’ What disrupts that, what blows that up, is that solar power is now cheaper than coal. If we liberated communities and individuals to have as much installed renewables on their own property, in their own municipalities, it blows up the business model.”

With more energy self-sufficiency at the local level, excess production from large renewable power projects could be stored, May said. “On a windy day, if Denmark couldn’t offload some of its electricity, the grid would blow up – so they sell it on an underwater cable to Norway. Norway takes the excess wind-generated electricity and uses something elegant and simple called pump storage. They pump water up into an existing reservoir, and when they need the power, they open the sluices and generate the hydro. Elegant, simple, sharing of electricity across international boundaries, under the sea – and we can’t do the Atlantic Loop? I don’t understand it. We should be able to figure this out. I wish we could get Canada, and Canada’s governments, to think like a country. If we could think like a country, maybe we could act like a country.”

I thought of May’s remarks when I heard the mid-September announcement that an Irish company called Simply Blue has plans to produce liquid biofuels in Goldboro, on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore. The feedstock will be wood biomass (Wagner Forest, which owns about 450,000 acres of the former Scott Paper land, has already signed on to supply 700,000 tonnes annually), and the necessary energy will come from the company’s own renewable power supply, comprising about 100 wind turbines as well as a solar farm. This multi-billion-dollar project is intended to produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and methanol (which can be used as a marine fuel) – both for export, like the “green hydrogen” from other proposed wind farms in Nova Scotia. Such projects may displace some portion of fossil fuel consumption globally – but that objective could be achieved more efficiently by feeding renewable power onto our grid. Mostly, they satisfy the province’s hunger for foreign investment. Is this the best we can do? Is there a coherent energy policy at work here, or is Nova Scotia merely fulfilling its traditional role as hewer of wood and drawer of water? DL