When celebrated Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees estimated humanity’s chances of surviving the century at “no more than 50/50,” Stephen Harper had not yet sabotaged the Copenhagen talks to protect the Alberta tar sands project from binding carbon reduction goals. Sir Rees has yet to update his estimation, but it cannot have improved. In the post-Copenhagen world it takes less than PhD qualifications to calculate the survival chances of the world’s most desperately poor at somewhere between “slim” and “nil.”
After Copenhagen, it appears the rich nations, the primary creators of global warming, will resist emissions cutbacks to maintain their competitive advantage in the world economy. Meanwhile, droughts will bring cholera, and floods will bring malaria to the poorest peoples on earth who, incidentally, do the least emitting. The savage drought currently leaving a trail of crop failures, animal corpses, and human bodies in its wake as it ravages Kenya gloomily foreshadows the fate awaiting the pauperized masses of the African coast and flood-prone regions. As the drought wreaks grotesque devastation on subsistence farmers, pushing 1.3 million people into risk of starvation, the tar sands project contaminates over 3 million barrels of water a day as its carbon emissions climb steadily into the range of mid-sized industrial states. The anticipated decimation of fisheries as oceanic PH levels decline due to climate change could be catastrophic. This fate now seems ever more likely.
The highly-trumpeted non-binding agreement thrown together at the eleventh hour of Copenhagen would only limit the world’s temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Even if this purely voluntary target is met (by signatories who displayed their abundant good will all week by blaming each other and the developing world for climate change), the deal still dooms Tuvalu and at least three other island states to watery graves.
That such people suffer the carbon profligacy of rich nations because major emitters refuse to rein-in industrial profiteering smacks of dystopian irony. It’s of little comfort that Stephen Harper told Bloomberg.com that this government will put economic recovery before efforts to protect the environment. Nor is it reassuring that the much-hyped Tar Sands Boom will be a lasting gravy train for the future economy. Leaving aside the immorality of prioritizing of the Canadian economic recovery above the survival of countless Africans, the idea that the Tar Sands will benefit the future Canadian economy holds water only if that economy is somehow independent of human survival past this century—a view not likely shared far outside of the Conservative Cabinet and the corporate oil lobby.
While Harper’s myopic choosing of oil over the planet unacceptably menaces our grandchildren with disaster, others are experiencing this disaster at present. Right now, Kenyans are doubtlessly wondering what Tuvaluans, Maldivians, and millions of coast-dwellers will likely wonder in the near future: “Why are the profits of big Canadian oil corporations more important than the lives of our children?” Others, even more audacious, may ask: “Why do the Canadian people allow their government to kill us for money?”
These are the questions we will have to answer in the future, unless we ask them now.
IPec
