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Let Kyoto go

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Short of signing on for more wrist-slitting workshops, enviros might consider a rethink in the cold light of day about how climate-saving could be instigated outside of Kyoto – a process that can now be judged as going nowhere fast.

As our federal enviro minister reneges on our lower emission promises and Stephen Harper muses about leaving Kyoto for an alternative U.S.-sponsored process (with no mandatory targets), we should remind ourselves that our PM is not the only fossil fool.

The fact is, only 35 countries – 34 if Canada gives up – are pledged to deliver on actual changes. And the compromises that made the international protocol possible like letting poor countries increase carbon levels while wealthy ones cut back are of no consequence to a planet facing a feverish rise of temperature.

Meanwhile, back in little Canada, deal or no deal, renege or no renege, global warming emissions aren’t going down any time soon. Who’s fuelling whom? Home to yesterday’s dinosaurs and today’s Tory Harpies, Alberta is proceeding like there’s no tomorrow with filthy and wasteful tar sands exports, while Ontario, home to Libs but no geological gifts of fossil fuels, woos more car manufacturers.

In Saskatchewan, home to New Democrats, the government hawks coal and oil, while Manitoba and Quebec, home to New Dems and progressive separatists, flog “clean” electricity from damming rivers, which increases emissions from methane, over 20 times more damaging to the earth’s climate than carbon dioxide.

The whole world’s a rogues’ gallery, and everyone’s a polluter, a green Shakespeare might say. In the face of this, international environmentalists have became the cheering section for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and are backing a new phase of goal-setting.

Fierce resistance from the U.S. and global oil and coal companies Polluters Without Borders, we might call them made backing that UN approach seem the only “realistic” alternative. It may still be the only alternative, but it no longer seems realistic.

In case there are greens out there up for switching horses in midstream, here’s my shortlist of assumptions and policies that need a rethink.

As in almost all UN initiatives, national governments are the only “actors” taken seriously. That’s a non-starter from several points of view.

From the perspective of the planet, nations don’t emit global warming gases. Individuals pollute, groups pollute and companies pollute. Nations just regulate some of the polluters. But as regulators, municipalities ranked way down there with NGOs at UN affairs are much more viable than nation states. They are closer to the action (or inaction) of where global warming activities actually happen, and more important, they’re less under the thumb of global corporations.

Auto and oil companies can threaten “senior” levels of government with loss of jobs or revenues, but they can’t threaten many cities. That’s why big industries never opt for decentralization of government controls down to the municipal level.

The UN does lend a hand to municipal initiatives through the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, its headquarters donated by Toronto City Hall. Without much in the way of guaranteed funding, ICLEI has animated a host of inspired programs in cities around the world.

The city also has its idiosyncratic Toronto Atmospheric Fund, which uses interest yielded from a massive 1991 civic bequest to provide loans and grants that finance imaginative, people-engaging projects, from energy retrofits to bicycle delivery schemes.

In Europe, 1,300 municipalities are cutting energy use drastically while supporting aboriginal conservation efforts to save the Amazon rainforests.

If such municipal initiatives garnered anything like the attention and funding of UN gatherings meeting about hot air, we’d be getting somewhere – and without using fossil fuel-powered planes to get there.

After reframing actors to feature municipal governments, greens need to reframe the campaign’s driver from “global warming” to “peak oil.” The same safe, sure and speedy planning and action is needed to address both.

But governments and corporations can respond to peak oil more readily because peak oil speaks their language, the language of scarcity, the foundation stone of economics and politics alike. Peak oil means the era of cheap and intense energy is coming to an end, like it or not. Get it?

That’s easier to absorb than the abundance message that seems to underline global warming we have too much fuel and we’re burning it too fast.

The planet and its weather systems are indifferent as to why we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, so if a scarcity-based appeal has more traction than an oversupply appeal, it’s time to switch arguments.

Then we need another kind of repositioning. In their bid to become respectable enough to be invited to diplomatic tables, mainstream enviros have changed their tune when it comes to analysis. Take the promotion of science writer Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, already a global best-seller and likely to become the most important study on global warming written in this decade.

In the foreword to the Canadian edition, Mike Russill, who signs himself “president and CEO, World Wildlife Fund” – a little status change from the pre-corporate days when greens had leaders called coordinators and executive directors – says, quoting Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is a far cry from the tone and message in Flannery’s book, which slags coal and oil companies and describes government support for them as a “catalogue of infamy” indicating government “capacity to be bought.”

A movement that can’t take the heat of naming corporate names and identifying boycott targets is not up to the challenge of addressing global warming, which, as Flannery emphasizes, is about distinguishing between companies that sell green energy and those that sell polluting fuels.

Instead of being gentle with corporations, environment orgs need to be more therapeutic with people. In Gatherings, a web-based journal of ecopsychology, activist Lisa Rayner links ecosystem collapse to the collapse of human ability to adapt under the duress of traumas like shell shock, battle fatigue, burnout and abuse.

The strategy to heal people who’ve been violated by such traumatic events isn’t all that different from the strategy to heal the planet from the trauma of pollution, she argues.

Enviros need to be gentle with people rendered listless, disengaged and disempowered by environmental and other life scares.

To heal, people need to leave the area where abuse took place and find safe places and empathic listeners.

How to do that effectively, I don’t know. But saying that global warming is about blaming us as the enemy, and preaching that individuals need to come up with personal solutions in the way they heat their homes or power their cars doesn’t seem like good therapy to me.

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news@nowtoronto.com

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