After the heat domes, who still believes we can stop climate change?

Cedar Creek Winery, British Columbia

All felt right with the world as I stepped from the air conditioning at this lovely winery’s celebrated restaurant, hardly caring that the air felt like a dry sauna gone wild.

It was our first family meal in an actual restaurant in 16 months. A lovely coda to mark the waning of the Covid-19 pandemic; a holiday break in the alluring Okanagan Valley, fulfilling my nonagenarian father’s long-held wish to pick cherries and eat them directly from the tree.

While the family waited in comfort, I stepped into our rented 4x4, pushed the Start button, turned on the air conditioning, gripped the steering wheel. And recoiled with a grimace, as though I’d seized the handle of a hot cast-iron pan. My palm began to blister as I swiftly opened the driver’s door and poured water over my burns.

Then I looked at the temperature on the dashboard: it was 54 degrees inside the jeep — 131 Fahrenheit degrees, in the measure only Americans use to reckon temperature. Through the open door, the 43-degree (110 F) afternoon heat suddenly didn’t feel so bad.

It was yet another heat record, the warmest day ever recorded in the Okanagan, its lake-shaped microclimates yielding an abundance of lush vineyards and orchards.

We were in a heat dome: the freakish weather phenomenon that was melting permafrost in Siberia, settling its intense furnace for days on end across northwestern North America.

Within a day of our lunch 131 lightning-sparked wildfires began to consume the Okanagan, an overture to the heat and fires that continued to ravage western North America through July, with little end in sight.

After the elation of breaking out of the pandemic — all of us doubly inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine, able to expand our family bubble to include more than one household — here we were facing the crisis that actually can’t be stopped: the inexorable heating of the Earth.

Our rented jeep was a gas guzzler, part of the millions of vehicles spewing greenhouse gases, burning the petrol that for decades brought fortune to our home province of Alberta, the petro-state where we have made our lives since leaving India more than half a century ago.

The jeep is just a symptom. Our real problem lies in hubris: the comforting lies we tell our leaders and one another, that climate change can be “reversed” or even “stopped” through human ingenuity and a bouquet of technologies about to leave the test bench and enter commercial application.

It’s all nonsense.

We can do nothing to “stop” global warming and the freakish effects of climate change. No more than we can steer a canoe in the face of a tsunami.

Yet so much of the political discourse has been about “stopping” the relentless heating of the atmosphere. As the heat domes make clear, it is a question of adapting, and mitigation — doing what we can to slow down the pace of change.

It takes decades for carbon emissions to cycle through the atmosphere. Today’s heat domes are a direct result of the way we lived, well before the turn of the millennium. The way we live today will have its atmospheric consequences well past the middle of the century.

Edmonton, Canada, 15 March 2019

I am following an extraordinary event unfolding the world over, startling evidence of the difference that one ordinary person can make in the world.

On the Ides of March, the schoolchildren of the world are teaching their adult “guardians” a lesson.

All across the world, in nearly 100 countries, children are leaving their classrooms to join a “strike”, demanding meaningful action to address catastrophic climate change.

Following reports and videos as the protest spreads, I am seeing unfold before me a 2019 version of the satyagraha Gandhi once led.

Within six months, what began as a solitary act of silent protest by a reserved and plain-spoken Swedish child has become a global movement. It is inspired by Greta Thunberg, aged fifteen, who is speaking today at a rally in Stockholm — one of tens of thousands of students in some two thousand gatherings in communities spanning the globe.

“We have only been born into this world, we are going to have to live with this crisis our whole lives. So will our children and grandchildren and coming generations,” Thunberg says. “We are not going to accept this. We are striking because we want a future and we are going to carry on.”

Like Autumn Peltier, the Canadian teenager who told the United Nations to give water personhood to preserve Mother Earth’s most vital force, the children are leading where adults dare not venture in responding to climate change. All the demonstrations have been organised using social media. In Singapore, with its strictures against public assembly, the rally is a virtual one, held in real time on social media platforms.

And as it has since Greta’s movement began, the movement is fuelled by a simple act of defying authority: skipping school on Fridays to demand action on climate change.

Since Greta’s act of civil disobedience began 30 weeks ago, an ever-increasing movement of students have been skipping school on Fridays to spur action. The March 15 rallies are the biggest global event yet, timed to coincide with the end of the five-day United Nations Environmental Assembly in Nairobi.

And well-meaning though the summit was, you can see why the young are frustrated. The final communique was a masterful exercise in recognising the obvious, and promising in elegant diplomatic language to, uh, do, er, something, you know?

The dead giveaway is that these are non-binding resolutions.

Greta’s generation understands far better than its elders what they face. “Climate change is worse than Voldemort,” declared one rally poster in Wellington, New Zealand. The trouble is that many of the adults who run the world have no idea what that means.

The scientists, however, do. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. In its October 2018 status report, it amplified the conclusions and warnings of previous ones.

To put it in plain language, we have between two to three decades — at which point Greta and her peers will have barely reached middle age — to achieve net zero emissions of carbon dioxide before the planet becomes unsustainable for human life as we know it.

The tragedy is that we’ve known so for decades.

The intensity of climate change has become ever more prominent since that momentous day in November 1989, when the British Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, aroused the United Nations with an urgent call for action to avert climate catastrophe.

“What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate — all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.”

Margaret Thatcher’s ardent conservatism was founded upon the word “conserve”: proper preservation and stewardship of all we have and are, tending our patrimony for the benefit of generations yet to come. And as the only scientist among the world leaders of the day — she read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and worked as a research scientist before turning to law and thence politics — she was keenly aware of the perils of anthropogenic climate change.

Since her warning, carbon emissions have continued to grow well beyond the 1990 emission levels that were set as an international benchmark. Lady Thatcher’s remarks were both precise and eloquent in defining the challenge our elected leaders face.

“We must use science to cast a light ahead, so that we can move step by step in the right direction. But as well as the science, we need to get the economics right,” she said. “That means first we must have continued economic growth in order to generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment. But it must be growth which does not plunder the planet today and leave our children to deal with the consequences tomorrow.”

Edmonton, Canada, July 2021

So how do we cope? How do we not only adapt and mitigate, but pay for it: particularly for poorer countries?

We begin with a coordinated international effort. Earlier in July, the world found an unprecedented resolve: to impose a global minimum tax on enterprise, to prevent corporations from playing countries off against one another to find the lowest tax rates.

And as we have seen in the global response to the pandemic. the deeply flawed patchwork that left richer countries well-vaccinated and poorer countries ravaged by Covid-19, none of us is “safe” until all of us are safe.

Effective adaptation and mitigation needs the same mindset: climate change knows no national borders. We would do well to build on earlier international initiatives to set up global green funds, using the momentum achieved by the global corporate tax.

We can begin by taxing fossil fuel use, measured as the equivalent of a barrel of oil (BoE). Rather than impose the tax on the end user, we would tax at the source of production: a “severance tax,” applied when a fossil fuel resource is severed from the state of nature. Coal, natural gas, bitumen, crude oil, any fuel emanating from fossils would be subject to a Global Climate Tax (GCT). The funds would be collected and administered by international agreement, much as the Covaxin programme seeks to deliver doses of Covid vaccine across the world.

Energy companies that have relied on fossil fuels already express a willingness to be part of the solution, rather than the villains of the piece. Canada’s Suncor, for instance, now identifies as a multi-platform energy company, using its legacy fossil fuel projects to drive investments in green energy. Yet in much of the energy sector, the greening of fossil fuel production through emission reduction per barrel, and the development of renewable and alternative energy, are simultaneous. Fossil fuel energy companies have the capital and the resources necessary to pursue alternatives: whether this is “green washing” or a serious commitment remains to be seen, but there is little doubt about the capacity.

A $3 BoE (barrel of oil equivalent) global tax on fossil fuel use would generate significant revenue to pay for adaptation and mitigation.In July 2021, the United States Energy Information Administration estimated global daily oil consumption at more than 101 million barrels. This alone would generate about $303 million a day in a global severance tax. Converting global natural gas use to BoE (68.4 million barrels of oil equivalent), adds another $205 million in tax revenue. Add another 41 million BoE for daily coal consumption, generating $123 million a day in severance tax.

So a daily severance tax on oil, coal, and natural gas alone would generate about $631 million a day to pay for adaptation and mitigation in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

That is a substantial sum. The tax in itself will be an incentive to move away from fossil fuels as swiftly as possible. And the fund itself will support surging global investment in alternative energy, which now exceeds $550 billion a year, about half of that coming from the Government of China and government-backed Chinese enterprises.

Even in my native petro-state of Alberta, private sector investment is surging into solar and aeolian energy, far eclipsing fossil fuel investment, since the pandemic began.

The Global Climate Tax would accelerate the transition throughout the world, not only in petro-states. There is a critical need, especially after the pandemic, to build self-sufficiency and new economic opportunities in the countries most affected.

The GCT could:

➢ Accelerate the development of low-carbon industries
➢ Greatly increase investment in renewable and alternative energies, leading to a global clean-energy economy.
➢ Build a carbohydrate economy to the scale of the hydrocarbon economy (using starches and sugars in agricultural waste, forestry waste, and nitrogen-fixing vegetation meant to restore arid soils): to produce plastics, building materials, even vehicle parts.
➢ Create a zero-waste economy in which every product and byproduct is processed to optimal value
➢ Accelerate the spread of Controlled Environment Agriculture, where indoor farms grow food safely and abundantly, 365 days of the year, impervious to climate and weather. New breakthroughs in aeroponic technology grow plants vertically, with minimal water use, roots nourished by a nutrient mist.

This is only a starting point. It is only possible to imagine such a future with a GCT that would generate more than $230 billion per year, with a $3 BoE tax on all fossil fuel. Add that to the $550 or so billion per year being invested by the Chinese state, and private enterprises, and you have substantial momentum toward a future that works for all of us.

Call the GCT a good start. A catalyst, to accelerate our transition to a carbon-neutral economy. To abet all the other investment made by companies and countries, to fund the shift towards a sustainable future for our planet.

This is the minimum “do something” climate protesters can champion. A “save the planet” tax of three dollars a barrel.

Shall we begin?

I welcome your comments. Please email me: satya@cambridgestrategies.com