A commentary by a former newspaper editor and University of Victoria instructor who is the author of False Alarm: Facts Versus Fears.
For Trevor Hancock, in his June 25 column “Climate action needs a greater sense of urgency,” the current “face” of “climate change” is forest fires — it’s reportedly the “worst wildfire season in the past 20 years.”
That may be so, but the number of fires in Canada has actually gone down over the past 30 years, according to the . If forest fires are the “face” of global warming, shouldn’t the number of fires have gone steadily up for those 30 years?
In reality, “climate change” has many faces. For some, “climate change” means more forest fires; for others more floods; for others more drought; for others more cases of extreme heat; and so on.
None of these problems, alone or in combination, are new; humans have been dealing with them for thousands of years, mostly with success, through affordable, engineering-based solutions like flood-control measures, channeling of water sources to reduce drought, flood-control measures, and cooling measures like air-conditioned community centres to protect vulnerable people for the few days a year of “extreme heat.”
Philosopher of science Karl Popper called these practical solutions “piecemeal engineering,” which means tackling problems as they come up, as opposed to what he called “utopian social engineering,” which aims at some broader, overarching goal.
For Popper, the sensible reformer (or columnist) “will be aware that perfection, if at all attainable, is far distant. The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.”
In other words, if you have raccoons in the attic, the “solution” isn’t burning the house down to get them out but calling the exterminator.
But for social reformers like Hancock, piecemeal solutions aren’t good enough. Their “solution” to forest fires, floods, heat waves, etc., is to dismantle our technological civilization by drastically reducing use of fossil fuels.
This dismantling, they believe, will reduce carbon emissions and, over a few decades, bring global warming to a halt, or at least keep it at 1.5 C above pre-industrial times (the mid-1800s).
This “burn the house down” Net Zero approach will be ridiculously expensive. A recent report by McKinsey and Co. estimates the cost of Net Zero by 2050 at $275 trillion globally, or about $9 trillion a year.
This is not a trivial sum — Canada’s GDP in 2022 was less than $2 trillion. And, for our efforts, we will only reduce the global temperature by a fraction of a degree Celsius.
Hancock’s solution will also require lots and lots of utopian social engineering, of which he has been an enthusiastic advocate in this and many previous columns. What can we look forward to in this Brave New Green World?
A 2023 Health Canada report includes a suggestion that, to reach our “climate goals,” we must change several “core values” of Western society, including “liberty and individualism.”
Are most of us willing to give up our liberty and individualism, the bedrocks of Western civilization, to satisfy the desires of those who wish to completely remake society?
Worse, these utopian reformers also want to remake human nature. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report suggests that to reach Net Zero, we all must undergo an “inner transition” that typically involves “a person gaining a deepening sense of peace and a willingness to help others, as well as protecting the climate and the planet.”
What about those who don’t want their brains greenwashed? A United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) report notes, soothingly: “Opposition from vested interests to transformations aiming to secure a sustainable and prosperous future is to be expected but can be addressed. Individuals and organizations have habits, procedures and ways of doing business that can yield a reluctance and resistance to change. Individuals and organizations can also oppose change that disrupts their livelihoods, market share and revenues, or that otherwise appears unfair.”
Imagine! People opposing changes that will disrupt their livelihoods, market share or revenues, or that appear unfair!
Fortunately, these liberty-loving diehards can be converted by “Just Transition” programs that will help them retrain and relocate. But what about those who insist on keeping their “liberty and individualism”?
UNEP doesn’t say, but we can be sure coercion of some sort will be applied until these selfish holdouts learn to love Green Big Brother.
Any psychologist will advise that you handle a large, amorphous problem by breaking the problem into manageable parts.
Similarly, the “solution” to an apparently huge problem like “global warming” isn’t to dismantle Western civilization and replace it with a socialist utopia that, like most utopias, will almost certainly make our lives worse.
The solution is to break the global-warming problem down to its component parts and then deal with each part through the “piecemeal engineering” approach that has worked well in the past.
Also, the piecemeal approach allows us to continue to use fossil-fuel energy while we move gradually and organically to a new energy system, most likely nuclear, that can still sustain Western-style civilization.
We haven’t lost our “liberty and individualism” yet, which means we, the voters of Canada, can still halt the utopian social-engineering project of the Net Zero believers.
But the clock is ticking and once freedom is lost, we may not get it back.
