Now Things Are Getting Really Ridiculous

A sad menagerie for all to behold.

Is Left-Wing Populism The Answer?

While I personally don't see anything on the horizon to resurrect the fortunes of the federal NDP, Avi Lewis thinks he has a winning strategy: embrace populism, something he thinks could galvanize Jagmeet Singh's leadership. The key, he says, is to keep things simple:

“Why go for something that you have to explain? What populism tells you is that there are simple truths about our economy that can be communicated with great power,” said Lewis, who co-authored the environmental and social democratic treatise, the Leap Manifesto, with his wife, author and activist Naomi Klein.

While populism today seems to be the purview of the extreme right, exemplified by Trump's presidency, it is important to remember that the left has had its own practitioners:

Jan-Werner Mueller, a politics professor at Princeton University, told the CBC last week that populists can come in different ideological shades, so long as they trade in a rhetoric of divisiveness that questions the legitimacy of those who don’t share their views. “It’s always about excluding others,” he said.

For that reason, Mueller considers Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan socialist strongman, a populist of the left. He doesn’t use the label for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and U.K. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn — politicians who rail against inequalities perpetuated by unbridled capitalism, for instance, but who don’t necessarily vilify their opponents as illegitimate contenders for power.

According to David Laycock, a political science professor at Simon Fraser University, the essence of populism is the division it sees in society:

He said one of populism’s central tenets is an argument that the fundamental division in society is “between the people and some sinister elite.”

For right-wing leaders, that elite tends to be heavy-handed government bureaucrats, a media maligned as progressive and out of touch, or groups that benefit from the largesse of state handouts, Laycock said. On the left, it is the corporate elite or the wealthy few who abuse their power at the expense of the wider populace.

Laycock believes Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives are gently experimenting with populist messages, including recent statements about how the media is biased against their party. He said the NDP could do something similar with more aggressive arguments for distributing wealth or slashing subsidies to big corporations.

Michael Adams, president of the Environics Institute, questions the enthusiam wth which such an approach would be met, given how different we are from other countries:

Canadians are more likely to be union members than Americans, for instance, while people here have universal health care and more generous social programs than south of the border, he said. At a time of relatively robust economic growth and low unemployment, all this could dampen the prospects of a left populism about a corporate elite ripping off the general population.

Avi Lewis' idea is a provocative one, but I find myself made uneasy by the prospect of left-wing populism. While the right under Harper and Scheer have not been shy about 'dog-whistle politics,' all-too obvious attempts to manipulate and control their base, the suggestion that the same techniques can redound to the left's benefit suggests to me the adoption of the same kind of political cynicism that the other parties are all too happy to practise, a politics that, at its heart, sees the electorate, not as people to respect and lead, but rather to be exploited for the sole purpose of acquiring power.

We have surely had enough of that already.

Worse Than We Thought

Yesterday, friend Mound posted a disturbing piece on the fact that the oceans have absorbed 60% more heat than expected. The implications for global warming are significant, and suggest, among other things, that we have far less than 12 years to drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. If you haven't yet read it, I urge you to.

Last night Global News did a piece on the crisis, explaining in a very accessible manner the situation:



But as the Mound so tartly observes in his post, our political leaders are, of course, missing in action when we most need them. We cannot look to them for environmental salvation.

On Personal Hypocrisy

"The price of admission to the climate-change battle is hypocrisy."

I interpret those words, as best as I remember them from a book on climate change I recently read, as the stark admission that we all fall short in the battle against climate change. They are offered, however, not as excuse, but rather as prologue to a personal admission I would like to express in my first blog post since my hiatus. More about that momentarily.

The reason for the hiatus was twofold: I was (and still am to a large extent) feeling burnt out, my hope for any constructive change in the world at this point pretty low. In light of that, I had to ask myself whether it was right to continue posting, a question which forced me to analyse why I have been writing this blog for so long. I concluded that the following are my reasons:

1. To serve as a personal catharsis. Throughout my life I have found that writing about something over which I have little or no control serves as a kind of safety valve, in that it lessens ever so slightly my sense of powerlessness in particular situations.

2. To keep my mind and my writing skills sharp (although some might questions the efficacy of the latter given my sometimes opaque, even convoluted, style).

3. To share with readers my own commentary on aggregated material. We live in a very busy world, and I like to think that some of the things I have found in my reading of newspapers, books, online publications, etc. might be of interest or value to those who might not have the time to read as much as I can, given my status as a retiree.

The second reason that covers part of the time the blog was on hiatus is that I was out of the country.

Out of respect to readers, I have always tried to be honest in what I write. I have made no secret of the fact that I still fly once or twice a year, despite the well-known greenhouse gas costs of such an activity. My personal admisssion today is that I did it again; we went to England, a very socially troubled country (although the people we encountered were very kind) which I may write about in a future post. The fact that I do still fly makes me uncomfortable, forcing me as it does to question how seriously I can really be taken when I post about the impending catastrophe we call climate change. Even though I try to drive as little as possible and take other measures to limit my carbon footprint, I know that those efforts pall in comparison to taking even one flight. Hence my hypocrisy.

This has been an obviously brief piece, but one I thought important to publish. I will likely still continue to post about issues involving our rapidly-deteriorating environment, but only readers themselves can decide whether or not, in light of my own hypocrisy, they are worthy of consideration.

A Brief Programming Note

I'll be taking a break from the blog for the next little while. See you soon.

On Short Attention Spans And Political Expediency

The climate catastrophe bearing down on us serves to underscore the fallibility of our species and the shortcomings of our politics, as these Star letter-writers ably point out:

The news cycle is a funny thing. The UN has issued a “life-or-death” report about the clear and present danger of climate change. The Star has given it front-page coverage. But we all know it’ll be gone by next week.

I guess it doesn’t matter. Ordinary people don’t get it anyway, or get it for about five minutes, then move on. Political and corporate leaders don’t get it either. In fact, they don’t want to get it.

So we wait for Trump’s next rant, the next oil leak or terrorist attack, the next royal wedding or sports spectacular, and watch them all disappear just as quickly as they brighten our screens.

Climate change? People running from coastal cities? Droughts, floods, wicked storms and broken food chains? Who cares. It’s a fantasy, just a flicker on the news channel and it’ll all be gone tomorrow.

Stephen Purdey, Toronto

The new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a grim picture of what is in store if we don’t start to significantly reduce carbon emissions within the next dozen or so years. The consequences of climate change have beaten us over the head in recent years — from extended heat waves and drought to more intense wildfires and flooding. Yet many of our political leaders are merely paying lip service to the crisis.

Doug Ford says he “believes” in climate change, but is opposed to carbon taxes. Jason Kenney is sitting on the fence, but he knows that he doesn’t like carbon pricing. Andrew Scheer says he will have a “very detailed and comprehensive plan” to get us to our Paris commitments — without a carbon tax.

We know what they don’t want, but what are they in favour of? For Scheer, in particular, with an election a year away, the luxury of cheap talk is over. He needs to tell us exactly what he proposes and let us judge if it is better than what is currently on the table.

Richard Schertzer, Milton

Climate change is affecting Canadians as much as a buzzing fly in the room. It is annoying and in the back of everyone’s mind and yet ignored in the belief that it will eventually dissipate once some new technology comes along.

Many people do not have this luxury, however. Natural disasters are sweeping mostly impoverished, developing nations, including the recent Haitian and Indonesian earthquakes. These disasters are headed our way and that fly in the room will soon become a hungry lion. Yet politicians seem to be more concerned about wearing a headscarf to work or having beer cost a buck than the fate of our survival on this planet.

If we want to have any chance of keeping the increase in temperatures to a maximum of 1.5 or even 2 degrees C, we need to put pressure on those in power to shift their focus. We must stop pushing this under the rug and take greater measures than those we’re taking now.

Emma McLaughlin, Montreal

Politics And Climate Change

Sad to say, climate change and politics in the worst possible sense are inextricably linked. Even as we face the defining crisis of human existence, the question remains one of optics. The Star's Susan Delacourt wonders whether ordinary Canadians can be sold on climate change.

On the one hand are people like Stephen Harper who, in his new book,

warns that standing up for the environment makes for bad politics, especially in a populist age when parties are looking for the votes of “ordinary” people.

“Political parties, including mine, have won elections just by opposing a carbon tax,” the former prime minister writes in the newly released “Right Here, Right Now.” “The reason is simple. It is ordinary voters who pay carbon taxes.”

On the opposite polarity is Green Party Leader Elizabeth May:

In a speech to her party’s convention in Vancouver last month, May said ordinary Canadian voters are more than ready to hear the truth about the climate crisis in the 2019 campaign.

“We really do need to level with Canadians,” May said. “If the one issue is survival, it’s kind of the issue.” She intends to build her campaign around the idea that Canadians are ready, even eager, to have politicians telling the truth to them, and climate change is a perfect entry into that discussion.

Given the latest doom-laden but all-too-real Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, May says the time is right:

“We’re no longer talking about future generations,” May said in an interview yesterday. “We’re talking about the life span of our own children, who are alive right now.”

May wonders why the IPCC report cannot become the Dunkirk of the current generation — a call for citizens and government to work together for a common aim. In the “darkest hour” of the Second World War, she said, people came together to fight a common enemy. May believes that citizens are ready to hear the same message when it comes to saving the planet within the next dozen years.

May's historical allusion is a good one, but it ignores something vital: with Dunkirk, a sense of national purpose was instilled by a strong leader, Winston Churchill, in response to an immediate threat, a threat that was all too real to the British people.

So far, we haven't sufficiently personalized the threat posed by climate change. Will it take a series of Canadian catastrophes similar to what is happening in the United States and other parts of the world before our leaders, and our people, find that sense of purpose? Were the Western forest fires this past summer, the 2016 Fort McMurray conflagration and last month's tornadic destruction in the Ottawa area not sufficient foretaste?

If we are waiting for more dramatic destruction on our home soil to move us, it will, in all likelihood, be far, far too late, and the earth will continue on its current course of ridding itself of a good portion of its greatest affliction - the human species.