If you’re looking for odd connections in a chaotic world, consider the Nova Scotia election campaign which ended Nov. 26, and the COP29 climate change meeting which wrapped up a few days earlier in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Delegates to the multinational summit at Baku, like candidates in the Nova Scotia election, showed little enthusiasm for the job of curbing consumption of fossil fuels.
In the Nova Scotia campaign, the three major party leaders– re-elected Premier Tim Houston, Liberal leader Zach Churchill, and the NDP’s Claudia Chender – seemed far more interested in tackling inflation than in cutting carbon emissions.
Even Chender, now the first woman to lead an official Opposition party in Nova Scotia, distanced herself from concerns about a warming planet. Instead, the NDP Leader, who heads a party seen as progressive on climate change, promised voters a holiday on gasoline taxes – hardly a measure designed to dampen demand. (“Drive, baby, drive.”)
As for COP29, it charted a course that has been familiar since 1992, when almost 200 nations ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In the end, wealthier countries like Canada agreed a sum of money – $300 billion, in this case – should go to developing countries to help them reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. The recipient nations dismissed the sum as paltry in the face of the enormous challenge they face, a claim no less true for being oft-times repeated.
Given this backstory, in both and Nova Scotia and the world, it is no wonder that CO2 emissions have soared by an estimated 60 per cent since the UNFCCC was ratified 32 years ago.
Well, the CrowsNest crew thinks it is time to chart a new course after the carbon-reduction crowd has been sailing into tough headwinds for the past three decades.
Let’s start by giving a fair hearing to smart, research-based proposals to address climate change.
Some of this work is being carried out in our own backyard. Dalhousie University researchers have dispersed what they describe as a “mildly alkaline substance” – think TUMS for the oceans – into Halifax Harbour to see if it can draw CO2 from the atmosphere.
The Dalhousie research tests whether the oceans can be safely injected with a substance that turns them into a more efficient “carbon sink”, which takes us to work underway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MIT’s Climate Portal recommends two steps to address climate change – Mitigation and Adaptation. The former could involve enhancing carbon sinks and developing alternative sources of power including nuclear fuel. Adaptation can mean developing infrastructure to withstand the dramatic weather events that are coming our way and protecting coastal wetlands from development.
Renewable sources of energy, notably solar and wind power, have become more cost efficient over time. Denmark, a leader in the switch to renewable sources of energy, now generates more than 50 per cent of its electricity from a combination of onshore and offshore wind projects. Denmark’s success shows sensible steps can be taken to mitigate the impact of climate change. Frankenstein-like solutions, involving the re-engineering of Mother (or human) nature, are neither required nor desirable.
And lest we forget, we are a species capable of adaption, and of embracing scientific breakthroughs instead of resisting them. After all, the introduction of antibiotics and vaccines saved millions of lives in the 20th Century. In the field of agriculture, Normal Borlaug won a Noble prize for developing hardier varieties of wheat that produced high crop yields. His work saved an estimated one billion people from starvation, and enhanced food security in several developing countries.
In short, let’s start trusting sound research. It’s surely time that COP abandoned bold CO2 reduction targets its signatory countries never meet, in favour of taking a sensible, staged approach to managing climate change. We won’t build a better future in a day. Nor will it be built on rhetoric alone.
-30-