Canada currently ranks last in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in terms of environmental protection, and is the only country to have pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty governing the reduction of carbon emissions. On a national level, the Conservative government has cut major programs like the Federal Environmental Assessment, the Contaminated Sites Action Plan, and the Action Plan on Clean Water, jeopardizing our clean water and air resources while expediting megaprojects in oil and mineral extraction.

Francois Choquette, an New Democratic Party (NDP) Member of Parliament and Deputy Critic for the environment, told The Daily that the Conservative government dismantled and cut funding to important environmental programs, leaving weak regulations on the transport and carbon sectors that will contribute to a three degree Celsius warming over the next century.

“We are still waiting on [the government’s] regulations on the polluting industries of oil and gas”

The current scientific consensus is that anything above a two degree Celsius rise (compared to 1990 levels) in global temperature will be irreversibly damaging, causing more intense and frequent extreme weather events, significant water shortages, and failing crop yields in developing and developed regions. Choquette told The Daily that despite these harsh realities, “We are still waiting on [the government’s] regulations on the polluting industries of oil and gas.”

The NDP proposes a more rigorous plan that involves investing in renewable energies, working alongside First Nations and Inuit peoples, and regulating carbon emissions to stay within the two-degree limit. The NDP also aims to restore the losses many environmental organizations have experienced under the Harper government, such as the Federal Environmental Assessment Act, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and endangered species habitat management programs.

But even if the NDP were to go into power next term and keep all their promises, would it be enough?

Cameron Fenton, founder of the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition (CYCC), believes that true change comes from the people, not politicians. Fenton told The Daily that “[communities must] push back against the political and financial power of fossil fuel corporations. Until we’ve taken away their power, no political solution will be enough.” Fenton went beyond the environmental dimension to say that “climate change is a symptom of deeper inequalities in our economic and political systems.” Climate change is not only about the carbon dioxide; it’s about our broken economic system.

This is especially relevant to the younger generation, hardest hit with sky-high student debt and youth unemployment rates. Fenton started the national CYCC movement in 2009 to challenge federal politics and build a “unified youth voice on climate change.” Fenton believes that this movement “isn’t a fight against pollution [but] a fight against polluters.”

Fenton sees hope in the fossil fuel divestment movement and encourages students to jump on board. According to Fenton, “[It has] taken off faster than any campaign on climate change […] [and] directly challenges the power of the fossil fuel industry” in an unprecedented way. The divestment movement points out the nation’s carbon bubble – the idea that though a lot of value is put into the fossil fuel industry, once the world starts to seriously target climate change the fuel will lose its value. Fenton said this movement is also “[pointing to] the fact that Canada’s heavy investments in fossil fuel extraction are putting everyone’s economic stability at risk, from pension funds to University endowments.”

“Our current economic model is jeopardizing the very planetary conditions that sustain life”

The national climate action movement has spurred on many local organizations, including Climate Justice Montreal (CJM). CJM’s Kristian Gareau, like Fenton, is disappointed but unsurprised by the federal government’s dismantling of environmental legislation given the current corporate culture.

“Our current economic model is jeopardizing the very planetary conditions that sustain life,” Gareau told The Daily, and the consequences are unequal in spread. “Our governments are willing to bail out the economic elite, while the rest of us are stuck with the bill,” he noted.

Gareau, like many climate justice activists, said that, “We need system change, not climate change.” Climate justice opens up a conversation about the so-called winners and losers of climate change, and allows the community at large to explore alternatives to the current economic paradigm.

In a political climate where the federal government favours corporate tax cuts and pipeline expansions over human health and environmental sustainability, it is up to the people to shake up the conversation and shift the power.

The post The real change in climate change appeared first on The McGill Daily.

After a 30-year political career, Gore unabashedly spoke of an increasingly capitalized and problem-ridden “Earth, Inc.,” as he termed it, as well as a “declining” U.S.. He drew upon historical and scientific anecdotes to address global issues in the economic, political, environmental, and societal spheres.

Gore explicitly criticized profit-driven capitalism. “The ‘one per cent’ is not an Occupy Wall Street slogan – it is a fact,” he said.

He called for systemic changes in economic policy toward a “sustainable capitalism,” one that abolishes “short-termisms,” changes incentives to account for externalities, and redefines growth.

As to what a new paradigm would look like, Gore was unable to give a clear picture. “I don’t know the answer, and I don’t think Al Gore does either,” said Saurin Shah, a U2 student in Cognitive Science. According to Shah, Gore’s message was that, “‘All the pieces are there, someone just needs to pick it up’ and not ‘we need to build a new system’ […] He didn’t say capitalism is not sustainable.”

Shah did agree, though, that Gore evoked “a sense of urgency.”

Gore also addressed both the potentials and consequences of rapidly developing technologies in today’s quickly changing world. “The future of democracy depends on the choices we make, in relation to these new [technological] capacities,” he said.

In this respect, Gore addressed the student crowd directly: “These times now call for young men and women such as you to shape the future and make it what it should be.”

Payal Patel, U3 student in Political Science and Psychology, said she felt empowered after the talk. Although the content was not new to her, she said, “It was cool to see things from my political science class, my arts and science class, and my psychology class all come together […] and made me think about how it’s all integrated.”

Gore spoke openly about the U.S. – its current decline as a superpower, and its dysfunctionality as a country “radiating into global governance as a whole.” Shah, an American student at McGill, appreciated that Gore took a critical stance on America’s “crushing bureaucracy [and] increasing inequality of a developed nation of its size.”

Gore even called the recent government shutdown “pathetic” and “pitiful,” a far cry from what he called “an avatar for democracy around the world.”

In addressing this “democracy in decline,” Gore optimistically pointed to the internet as a powerful tool to participate, collaborate, and “win the conversation of making the right choice” – though he did not specify which, or whose, conversation.

However, Shah pointed out that Gore ultimately equated real change with institutional decision-making. While Gore admitted to declining confidence in the current capitalism-democracy model, he rejected neither, and in fact believed that they remain the best paradigms in governing society today.

“[As] a career politician, he is not really willing to […] condemn any government and say [their] method of democracy isn’t working,” said Shah.

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McGill professor Daniel Weinstock, who specializes in ethics and political philosophy, is one of the acting co-directors and founders of CIRM. According to Weinstock the event was a huge success, not only in alerting the public of the Centre’s existence, but in generating new conversation on urban creativity.

Weinstock, like many of the presenters, sees “creativity” as a “branding term which many cities have used to distinguish themselves, whether to attract tourists or capital,” as he put it. “We at the Centre think it’s a double-edged sword in various ways.”

Weinstock noted, in agreement with many of the presenters, that “cities are these uncontrollable, chaotic systems that don’t live very well with imposition” in the form of top-down policies. Instead, he said, cities can be thought of as sites of resistance. The institutional “idea of creative cities is one thing that cities have to resist – creatively,” Weinstock said.

Weinstock used the example of Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles, where art is ‘planned’ to occur, versus ‘real creativity’ from below – linguistically, artistically, and architecturally.

According to Weinstock, the impetus for the CIRM’s creation was McGill’s Quebec Studies Program, which aims to rethink Quebec studies in an original way, relative to other universities. Weinstock, along with a handful of faculty members, realized that there are plenty of researchers who focus on the urban life of Montreal, but do not have a unifying platform.

The group identified about 25 researchers at McGill, who met monthly over the course of the last academic year to present their work to each other. Throughout the process, Weinstock noted that they “became quite convinced that [they] had the material to create something more permanent.”

Weinstock sees the Centre as an “opportunity [for McGill] to break out of linguistic and institutional isolation,” but also reveal how much McGill is already “bilingualizing” and integrating into Quebec.

And so the Centre was born. Despite the University’s current financial struggles, CIRM received a great deal of institutional support from McGill. Weinstock said the project seemed to “capture the imagination of everyone” they spoke with, including the McGill administration.

Weinstock sees the Centre as an “opportunity [for McGill] to break out of linguistic and institutional isolation,” but also reveal how much McGill is already “bilingualizing” and integrating into Quebec.

The goal of the Centre, according to Weinstock, is “not so much to create new projects, but rather create a place that federates what already exists.” The Centre hopes to bridge different views on urban life in Montreal and to bring academic research into the greater community.

Weinstock’s vision is that ten years down the road, the CIRM will oversee a number of clearly-grounded research aims, through student and faculty interdisciplinary research, and perhaps an academic program on Montreal studies.

The CIRM hopes to build on the growing presence of interdisciplinary work on campus, which exists in other campus models such as the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and the Institute for the Study of Canada.

Weinstock observed that people “tend to view university experiences in a very narrow way; we have our courses and our departments. But we are at this amazing university where, at any given day, there are so many opportunities to enrich yourself.”

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Canada plays a key role in the global energy industry. The Alberta tar sands are the largest industrial project in human history, and 50 per cent of the energy produced in Canada is exported, primarily in the form of oil and gas. These fossil fuels, revolutionary stimuli for technological and economic growth over the past 50 years, are known today as the primary human cause of global climate change.

The unsettling fact of Canada’s economic dependence on such a dirty industry calls for a national conversation on energy policy in Canada – a conversation that is long overdue. Suncor, leading corporate giant in the tar sands, decided to host that conversation by teaming with The Walrus, a Canadian magazine, to present a conference on sustainable energy called “The Walrus Talks Energy” at McGill early this month. As Quebec drafts a new energy policy for 2014, this timely conference featured eight diverse and thought-provoking speakers.

Peter Calami, founder of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, grounded the discussion with some basic physics: energy is neither created nor destroyed. Thus, “humans neither consume nor produce energy; we simply transform it. What we are really talking about is energy carriers,” he said. However, we need to realize that these carriers are not interchangeable, and that “we can’t power our laptops with coal,” so we can’t just talk about a single ‘energy policy.’

In the coming decades, we need to revamp our infrastructure – “not just pipelines and refineries,” said David Layzell, a professor in the University of Calgary’s Department of Biological Sciences. Layzell suggested that we instead strive for efficient cities that “maximize use of electricity.”

Perhaps more challenging than the physical transformation is the social and cultural shift needed to sustain Canada’s new energy system. The technology exists – we simply need to use it. As McGill professor Zetian Mi purported, LED bulbs are over 20 times more efficient than incandescents, yet we still use the latter after several decades!

As people are naturally resistant to change, applying human psychology and “social science research is necessary to shape the essential national dialogue,” stated Calami.

Chris Henderson, author of Aboriginal Power, took a holistic view of this national dialogue. His solution: clean energy projects on protected lands. Henderson suggested we should see renewable energies as an “opportunity to write a new history with the First Peoples” – one that regenerates bonds among Canadians and with our land.

Kali Taylor, founder of global movement Student Energy, reminded us of why we are having this debate in the first place. It is not the oil per se that we want, but what its energy enables us to do. With that in mind, we need to radically rethink energy and its role in human society.

So, is Suncor going to stop tar sand production and start building dams with Indigenous communities? Not exactly. The company has created OSQAR (Oil Sands Question and Response), a blog for “constructive dialogue on the oil sands.” Whether this is a truly critical platform for energy debates, or simply a marketing tool, Suncor has piped up in the conversation all Canadians should partake in.

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