Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2020

The Current Transcript for November 5, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: The Paris Accord, I took us out because we were going to have to spend trillions of dollars and we were treated very unfairly, we have done an incredible job environmentally.

MATT GALLOWAY: It is the morning after, the morning after, and much hangs in the balance when it comes to the outcome of this U.S. election. One of those big issues is climate change. Yesterday, the United States officially exited the Paris climate agreement. This morning, a special programme looking at where the fight against a changing climate goes from here, no matter who leads the U.S.. And with Canada set to miss its commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by the year 2030. We hear why this is an urgent issue right now in this country.

SOUNDCLIP

The sea ice is kind of like a highway where we go get our food. The ice is very, very important for us to continue our lifestyle.

MG: Tackling the climate crisis in 30 minutes. But as the outcome of the presidential election slowly becomes more clear, we start with a closer look at who voted for Donald Trump and the steep cost the Democrats may pay for letting those votes get away. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

Democrats reflect on election and voters they failed to attract, U.S. pulls out of Paris Agreement

Guests: Leah Daughtry, Matt Jones, Eduardo Gamarra

MG: It has been a nail biting two days for Americans, Donald Trump declared a baseless victory in the early hours of Wednesday. Then by the afternoon, Joe Biden was looking more likely to be the winner and called for unity.

SOUNDCLIP

JOE BIDEN: So once this election is finalised and behind us, it'll be time for us to do what we've always done as Americans. To put the harsh rhetoric of the campaign behind us, to lower the temperature, to see each other again, to unite, to heal, to come together as a nation.

MG: There are some staunch Trump supporters, though, wanting the count to cease, and the Republican Party has launched several lawsuits on that front in states still tallying their votes.

SOUNDCLIP

PROTESTORS: [Chanting] Stop the count!

MG: Protesters chanting Stop the count as it stands now, Joe Biden is ahead in the Electoral College, but there are still enough states counting up votes that it's too early to call no matter what. It is certainly not the big win that many Democrats had expected or hoped for. And many Democrats are scratching their heads wondering what lies ahead for the future of their party. Reverend Leah Daughtry is the former chief of staff of the Democratic National Committee. She also served as CEO of the 2016 and 2008 Democratic National Convention committees and as chief of staff to Howard Dean and Terry McAuliffe. Eduardo Gamarra is a professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University. He's in Miami. And Matt Jones is host of Kentucky Sports Radio and the author of Mitch Please How Mitch McConnell Sold Out Kentucky and America, too. He is in Lexington, Kentucky. Good morning to you all. Leah Daughtry, let me start with you just briefly, Howard. Democrats feeling about where things stand this morning for Joe Biden.

LEAH DAUGHTRY: We're feeling pretty good. We're confident that when the all the votes have been counted that Joe Biden will be the president elect and Kamala Harris will be vice president elect, given where the outstanding votes are, the absentee ballots, the mail ballots that are being counted. They are primarily in areas that favour Joe Biden, where currently Biden is getting between seven out of 10 or nine out of 10 of those of those votes. So we're confident when the counting is complete. I think Pennsylvania will be last on Friday, that we will have a new president elect.

MG: There are many people in your party who thought 2016 16 that election was an aberration. It turns out that perhaps it wasn't that more people voted in this election for Donald Trump than in that last election. Some 69 million people. Critics have said that, that one of the reasons is that the party failed to broaden its base of support. What do you think Democrats missed this time around?

LEAH DAUGHTRY: Well, I think what we what we missed, if we missed anything, let's let's just also say that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have now received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. So regardless of what of Trump and how many he's got, there's been an increase on both sides. But I think what we have to understand as Americans is how deeply divided our country. And the fact of the matter is that Donald Trump won white voters of every demographic, college educated or not, every age group, he won them all. So there is a conversation that must be had about what is happening in our country in terms of race and that unfinished agenda that so many people could look at. Four years of Donald Trump and the racism and sexism that he has stirred, all of the divisions that he has stoked and still say, this is the person that I want to lead, that that is the conversation that needs to take place in America.

MG: He won those white voters. But Eduardo Gamarra, he also did better this time around with Hispanic voters than he did in the last election. How do you explain that?

EDUARDO GAMARRA: Well, I think we need to differentiate between Hispanic voters. There is no one Hispanic voters. There are a variety in the electorate. And so if you look at the at the broad national Hispanic electorate, when you group them, they voted overwhelmingly for Mr Biden. However, if you look at particular demographics, for example, and especially here in Florida where I live, and especially in South Florida, when you look at Cuban voters, for example, who have who are about 55 percent of them voted for Mr. Trump. But if you look also at South American voters and Central American voters with whom the anti-communist false message, but but nonetheless very effective, you know, resonated very much with with South American voters and Central American voters. Then he won about 48 percent of that vote. So, yes, he was able to to craft a coalition with a certain segment of Hispanic voters, but in the end lost the general Hispanic electorate, especially Mexican-American, Puerto Rican and so on.

MG: The president himself said in the run up to the election, in the last few days, black and Latino Americans are rejecting the radical social left. They're embracing our pro jobs, pro worker, propolis, movement. We want law and order. We want to have law and order and a pro-American agenda. Eduardo, is that a message that appealed to and again, it's not a uniform vote. It's not a bloc. But is that is that a message that would appeal to various members of his Hispanic communities?

EDUARDO GAMARRA: Yes. Again, it appealed very much so to, I would say, three groups who are very important in Florida. And of course, they're simply important in Florida because always the results here are within the margin of error of any poll. So if you take into account that there are about 900,000 Cubans who vote or or let's say roughly 200,000 Colombians who might, you know, make the difference in the final count, why did that vote resonate with them? Obviously, because they come from countries where we're Marxism or socialism has been has been a major issue and has really been the reason why they fled those countries. So so that message resonates. However, the reality is that it's a message that has absolutely no substance to it, because if you think about the specific policies that affect all of these groups, that's where I think we can talk about a uniform Hispanic population in terms of specific policies. Policies towards Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have been probably much worse than any previous policy of any previous administration. The situation in those countries has deteriorated under this administration much, much more rapidly. And then if you look at the social agenda and here are the great paradoxes, for example, Cuban-Americans, especially the elderly, Cuban-Americans who who voted for Mr. Trump are also perhaps the highest per capita consumers of Obamacare. So in a way, they voted, you know, on the socialism message, which really doesn't mean anything to them in terms of their everyday lives. Right. And essentially voted for somebody who's doing away with their health care.

MG: I want to bring Matt Jones in. But just very briefly, Eduardo, why were Democrats successful in pointing out this lack of substance and pointing out exactly what you're saying?

EDUARDO GAMARRA: I think there are three reasons. Number one, the Republicans. Always start early, and they invested a lot and they began their Hispanic strategy roughly around 2012, and it's a strategy that basically was a strategy of not neglecting any voter, not neglecting any any anybody until they were here. They were here on a constant basis. And they also conducted a very, very sophisticated research that enabled them to target specific subgroups. In contrast, the Democrats started very late and took for granted a lot of sectors, including African-Americans. And I think that's probably one of the greatest shortcomings that the Democrats have. They always start late. They believe that voters are always going to be with them no matter what. And and then finally, they do everything except research these populations so they don't understand the nuances.

MG: Matt Jones, you're in Lexington, Kentucky. You're a Democrat, but you tweeted yesterday, even if Biden wins, there needs to be an awakening in the Democratic Party. What did you mean by that?

MATT JONES: Well, I'm talking about a specific subset of voters in places like Kentucky and rural America. Your fellow panellists have made important points about other groups. But in when Democrats won elections with a broad coalition that included a lot of rural blue collar voters in small towns across America, people who a lot of which were in unions, people who worked on a daily basis and sort of, you know, jobs involve manual labour, etc, a lot of those folks have abandoned the Democratic Party and specifically for Donald Trump, who spoke to a lot of their interests. Now, some of those interests are social. These tend to be religious people. These tend to be people who are pro-life. But also, I think there has been sort of a forgotten movement from the Democratic Party to not actually try and get these folks. If you look at the states, which Democrats used to win easily, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Biden may pull it out in Michigan, where he has in Michigan, Wisconsin probably will in Pennsylvania. But those states used to not be close because because Democrats would actually win in the rural areas as well. They would target their economic interests. And I think this is important on social issues. The party was a little broader in terms of reaching religious Americans and reaching Americans, for instance, for whom guns is a big issue. And I think what's happened is the Democrats have sort of lost the messaging to those folks and some of the same issues your other panellists are bringing up about African-Americans or Hispanics. The same thing is happening with rural Americans, many of which are white. And I think when you look at the states that used to be part of the coalition, we're seeing that what we have lost in a lot of those states is the ability to get rural Americans, not in cities, not in urban areas, and finding a way to reach out to them.

MG: Leah Daughtry, what do you make of that? That's in some ways, as Eduardo was saying, the party took for granted African-American voters and Latino voters, but also to match point that there needs to be an awakening within the party.

LEAH DAUGHTRY: Well, I think a green mostly is that I think that the structure of our party and, you know, disadvantages to being a big tent and part of being a big tent is that you have a lot of opinions and a lot of leadership and a lot of ideas about what needs to happen. But it also means that there's rarely a galvanising point outside of the presidential cycle. And so you you know, the kind of investments that the professor was talking about that need to be long term, that need to be strategic and that need to take, you know, the 10, 20 year view don't often happen because, you know, we tend to go from presidential cycle to presidential cycle. And you can't build a party like that. You have to do the long term investment and you have to value every single voter. I have to make that point. I do a great deal of work in rural America, in Appalachia and on Indian reservations and so forth. And he's exactly right. And part of, I think, the challenge that the Democratic Party, as we approach this from a very intellectual point of view, where we think because we are making these great points and we have these great ideas, that automatically that signs people up with us and people will automatically vote in what we think their interests are. And it just doesn't there's a lot of hard work that has to happen. And that's where you get these disconnects. What we've seen is what Trump got some of the biggest Linzess of support in places with the coronaviruses off the charts. How do you explain how do you explain that? I think it's.

MATT JONES: Matt, go ahead. You say you can explain ahead.

MATT JONES: Well, a lot of these places, some of them are in urban communities, but a lot of them are in rural America. And I think it's this I don't think we as Democrats speak to these people in ways that they actually want to hear. I think the point that she just made about speaking as an intellectual is a really good point. A lot of these folks for Trump, it's not about intellectual argument. It's about a feeling. They feel like he cares about them and they feel like we don't. And they actually feel like we talked down to a lot of these folks that because of their social values, we don't think they are as good as as a lot of the folks in our coalition. And I think it makes them turn us off, not because they disagree with us. A lot of these folks are on Obamacare, as the professor said. A lot of these folks use social programmes, greater rates than most most other folks around the country. But they just feel like national Democrats look down on them as people and it makes them look at someone like Trump and say, well, he may not be perfect. Yes, he screwed up the coronavirus, but at least he doesn't think I'm somehow lesser than everyone else. That's what drives the vote. I can hear you in the background, Eduardo. Just briefly. Go ahead.

EDUARDO GAMARRA: No, I agree with both of my colleagues there, absolutely, and as a professor yourself who looks at the intellectual side of it really is quite amazing when you see it in poll after poll that people don't like being talked down to. They they they believe that the Democratic Party in general has this very, very, you know, sophisticated outlook on life, which which neglects, you know, the so-called deplorable. I mean, that very concept was one that probably has caused the Democratic Party more than we can really understand. And that's translated, by the way, also with populations like Hispanics who really don't like being talked down to.

MG: Leah Daughtry, the cost of this, people are saying, is that yes, votes are still being counted. Joe Biden could end up being the president, but he may not have control, for example, of the Senate. Would he be able to to pass, you know, major laws? Would he be able to appoint non conservative judges if he doesn't make those gains, if his party doesn't make those gains?

LEAH DAUGHTRY: Yes, I think that any first term president has a challenge when they have a divided Congress. We saw it with Barack Obama. We've seen it- we've seen it over the years. I think that Joe Biden does bring a unique personality to this in that he served so long in the Senate. Many of the people that he served with are still in the Senate. He understands that process. He knows Mitch McConnell. And I think that they will be able to craft a different kind of relationship that will allow him to get some things done. But again, you know, presidents always have you know, you got to pick your fights and pick your battle and you probably get through one big thing in your first term. And so I think he'll follow that pattern. I do want to just step back up again in all of the analysis. I don't want us to lose sight of the implications and the fact of race that plays into the American political process. Because when we look at who Biden won, he won all demographics of white people, including college educated white people, who you, in theory, would think if you are appealing to intellectuals, if that's the Democrats fault, that there would be some resonance there. But that's not so. And so there is something else that is happening. I think there is the unfinished conversation around race that impacts black people and how people think about Latino people, Asian people. And that is part of what goes into the voting booth as voters make their selection.

MG: So just in the last few minutes that we have, I mean, people have talked about how divided the country is in the wake of the result. And again, the outcomes are still being formulated. But what do you think this result tells you about your country? Leah, we'll start with you briefly.

LEAH DAUGHTRY: Well, it tells me that our country is divided, that there is a chasm that that that needs to be bridged. And I'm not sure the right way to do it. I think both all sides need to learn to listen to each other better, to hear each other better and to try to forge a way forward. But there are deep divisions that have existed for decades, for centuries, perhaps even, and that that we see that every day and certainly in this presidential election.

MG: Matt Jones, for you, as somebody who has again called for an awakening within your party, where does this leave not just your party, but the country?

MATT GALLOWAY: Well, I think it shows that if you look at the division of states and the division of the vote totals, what you're seeing is both sides not only are divided.I mean, we've had close elections the last four or five elections, but they are passionate about the division and they don't just believe in the division. They are suspect of the motives of the other side. And that has caused, I think, a notion that politics has these huge stakes and that this presidential race. Let's look right now, we're waiting on votes in three states. It looks like Biden will win. But there are people who sort of think the fate of the country relies on a few thousand votes in a few states. And I agree with them. I think the division is not just there, but it's deep seated. And the scepticism with which each side looks at the other makes it very hard for anyone, including Joe Biden, to govern going forward.

MG: Eduardo Gamarra.

EDUARDO GAMARRA: Yes, I would just say to build on what my colleagues have said, there is a structural dimension to that that I think is is really unsolvable. The fact of the matter is that we have an electoral system that works and it works because it essentially, you know, looks at the popular vote, which the Democrats are always going to win. Democrats have now won the popular vote in nine of the last 10 elections. Only in 2004 did Republicans win. But the paradox is that that system that works is the one that aggravates precisely the kinds of issues we're talking about. So we're not going to do away with the Electoral College, but I think that we have to work on the issues that my colleagues have talked about. The issue of race is really fundamental in this country. And and, you know, to me, at least looking at it from the perspective of Latinos, you know, one of the things that Latinos in general here in this state look at race from the perspective really of of how should I put it, of the American dream. They don't identify with the logic of civil rights. Mexican Americans do, unless we can have a very, very deep discussion about race in this country. I think this challenge is going to deepen.

MG: It's great to speak with you all about this. Thank you. The Reverend Leah Daughtry is a former chief of staff of the Democratic National Committee. Eduardo Gamarra is a professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University. Matt Jones, host of Kentucky Sports Radio and the author of Mitch Please How Mitch McConnell Sold Out Kentucky and America to the CBC News is next. And then, regardless of the battle south of the border, as votes continue to be counted, U.S. diplomacy continues to move. The United States officially left the Paris climate agreement this week. When we come back, we'll turn our attention to the environment and what that exit means for the global fight against climate change there and here and right around the world. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio one.

Back To Top »

'Window of opportunity' remains to tackle climate crisis as U.S. exits Paris deal: expert

Guests: Elan Strait, Jessica Green, Michael Mann, Jamie Coutts

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, a gamble on a plan that might just save this planet. But first, America's French exit.

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: Look at China, how filthy it is. Look at Russia, look at India, it's filthy. The the air is filthy. The Paris Accord. I took us out because we were going to have to spend trillions of dollars and we were treated very unfairly. They were going to take away our businesses. I will not sacrifice tens of millions of jobs, thousands and thousands of companies because of the Paris Accord.

MG: And as promised, Donald Trump's decision became reality yesterday when the United States officially withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. Almost 200 countries, including Canada, remain pledged to keep average global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius. But politics and politicians have failed to deliver on climate action before. If he's president, Joe Biden has said he would deliver.

SOUNDCLIP

JOE BIDEN: Climate change is the existential threat to humanity, the existential threat to humanity. Unchecked, it is going to actually make this planet not. This is not hyperbole. It's real.

MG: There is a lot at stake, not just for the United States, but for the entire planet. And a lot to talk about at this very uncertain time. Michael E. Mann is a climate scientist and distinguished professor of atmospheric science at the University of Pennsylvania. Elan Strait is a director of U.S. climate campaigns with the World Wildlife Fund. He was a negotiator with the U.S. State Department for the Paris Agreement in 2015. And Jessica Green is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, specialising in international climate policy. Good morning to you all. Michael Mann. When you look at the science of global climate change, what was at stake for you in this election?

MICHAEL MANN: Yes, I'm actually at Penn State University, so go lions. So everything is at stake here, right. Because as you know, you played that clip of Joe Biden. This is an existential threat to the planet. If we don't do something about climate change, then we are essentially committing to catastrophic impacts in the years to come. But there's still a window of opportunity. There's still time to do what's necessary to reduce carbon emissions so that we don't cross that threshold into catastrophic climate change. So the window is narrow. We need a president who will not only, you know, get us back into the Paris Agreement, but, in fact, build on that, make even greater commitments, because we're going to have to go well beyond Paris, both here in the United States and abroad if we're going to achieve the reductions we need.

MG: Jessica Green, we know Donald Trump's position. What would a Biden win mean for for U.S. climate policy? He's been tweeting, for example, that that he would put the United States back into the Paris accord in 76 days.

JESSICA GREEN: Yes, well, that would be great. I mean, you know, we need to rejoin the Paris agreement, but as Michael said, the Paris agreement is not going to save us. Right. We need to go much bolder, much more quickly than even the pledges in the Paris agreement. So it's a step in the right direction. And I think, you know, the bar has been set incredibly low by the Trump administration, but we need to move quickly and boldly. And I think some of Biden's plans are a step in the right direction. But we need to go further.

MG: Is there an international signal that would be sent? And again, I understand that you'd need to go and the world needs to go further and we'll talk about what that further looks like. But is there an international signal that would be sent if the United States were to rejoin this?

JESSICA GREEN: Absolutely. I mean, international law is all about co-operation, right? It's all about showing good faith effort. And I think it is in some ways important for the U.S. to send that signal and especially to repair so much of the damage that the Trump administration has done. But at the same time, the design of the Paris agreement is such that success doesn't necessarily depend on the U.S. Every country gets to decide what it is going to do. I call it the choose your own adventure approach to climate policy. So if the U.S. doesn't participate, it's not going to sink the whole agreement. I mean, yes, the U.S. is the second largest emitter. Historically, it is the largest emitter. And so that signal is important. But countries can continue to move forward without the U.S. And so I think, you know, it's a double edged sword in that regard.

MG: Elan Strait, I mentioned in the introduction that you were a negotiator for the United States for the Paris agreement. What was it like for you watching the United States pull out? I mean, that announcement was one that the people around the world were paying attention to.

ELAN STRAIT: I think it was obviously a great mistake, but it also really makes no sense. As Jessica said, the agreement is a choose your own adventure. And so with the United States did by withdrawing, was decide that they didn't want to be at the table for things like holding China accountable for their environmental regulations. The truth is, if you want to hold China and India to account for reducing emissions and cleaning up their air, the best way to do it is through the Paris Agreement. And also there's a multitrillion dollar market that is being created right now for clean energy. And the U.S. is in danger of being completely left behind, whether that's clean energy or clean cars. And so withdrawing from the international stage to me just made absolutely no sense when it was announced.

MG: And so to Jessica's point, there's a lot more work to be done. But if the United States were to rejoin the agreement, what impact would that have?

ELAN STRAIT: ES: I think it's I totally agree with both Jessica and Michael that this is a first step, that really what we need to see is a complete prioritization of climate change across the foreign policy portfolio for the United States. So start talking about it with all the bilateral relationships, get the domestic policy work done. I think the combination of all those factors would help the world get on track for the goals of the Paris agreement.

MG: Jessica, there are a lot of countries, including Canada, that aren't on track to meet their Paris targets anyway. And sure, some are. But the targets themselves aren't actually ambitious enough to keep the world from warming under two degrees Celsius, which is the ultimate goal of this. So how much use is the agreement globally in the big picture?

JESSICA GREEN: Well, yes. I mean, every year the U.N. releases a report. It's called The Gap Report. And it's the gap between what the pledges in Paris are and how we're going to get to one point five degrees. And every year that gap gets larger. So you're absolutely right to say it's not enough. I think you know what the reality is. You mentioned it and it was in the in the clip that you played that this is an existential crisis. An existential crisis requires existential politics, and that means confronting the reality that there are going to be big winners and big losers. And we have to deal with the losers because they're going to oppose aggressive climate policy. And so we have to take really aggressive and radical measures to deal to confront the fact that there's going to be a lot of obstruction. And that means things like acknowledging the elephant in the room in Canada, which is the fossil fuel industry. You know, I mean, tax cuts are great R&B. That's superduper. But we have to acknowledge the fact that we own pipelines and we're building out our natural gas capacity. And we have to deal with those things head on right now.

MG: Michael, what's your understanding of how Canada is doing? Yesterday, the environment minister was grilled by the opposition saying that you made these promises you have enacted very few of them make the promises come to life. How would you see to Jessica's point, how would you see Canadian commitments to tackling climate?

MICHAEL MANN: Yes, let me just follow up on a point that Jessica made first, which is, you know, it's about leadership here, right? And yes, there are countries that haven't lived up to their Paris commitments, but in part, that's because of the signal that the United States sent under Trump when the United States when Trump said, we're not going to do our, you know, we're not going to meet our commitments, we're pulling out of the Paris agreement and we're dismantling the progress from the past administration that sent a signal to the rest of the world. And China, for example, which had been actually decommissioning coal-fired power plants and was going well beyond its Paris commitments, sort of started to ease off. You know, the United States isn't going to do its part, why should we? So that's why leadership here in the United States is so important. Now to this other question. You know, Canada has really provided a great example for its neighbour to the south, US, the United States, in demonstrating that you can make progress on this problem when you pursue policy measures like pricing carbon that really works. It worked in Australia before the conservative government took it away. We've seen the carbon pricing and explicit incentives for renewable energy helps move us in the direction that we need to go here in the United States. We don't have climate policy. We've had a Congress that's been unwilling to act under Republican control. And that will continue to be a challenge here if we have a split government with the Republican Senate and a Democratic president. Nonetheless, there may be an opportunity for politicians to reach across the aisle and actually enact climate policy like what Canada has, putting a price on carbon, precisely what form that would take. That's where the debate needs to be had. But obviously we need incentives that level the playing field so that renewable energy, which isn't destroying the planet, can compete fairly against fossil fuel energy.

MG: Jessica, do you see an incoherent message in Canada? You talked about, you know, the fact that we own a pipeline. Again, the environment minister took a lot of heat yesterday for the promises that his government made in a throne speech, but has yet to act on.

JESSICA GREEN: Yes, I mean, I think I think, you know, I agree with with Michael in the sense that Canada has done well on leadership, but they've they've made a lot of promises and they haven't kept them. I mean, we are on target. Sorry, we are on a path to miss our our target, our Paris pledge by 15 to 20 percent. Right. And that's just inexcusable. And we have done things like put a price on carbon. But a lot of research shows that putting a price on carbon doesn't do a whole lot to reduce emissions, not as much as other policies like levelling the playing field, as Michael mentioned, for renewable energy, putting a price on carbon. What it usually does is it facilitates fuel switching. So, OK, maybe coal isn't competitive anymore, but then companies start making investments in natural gas. You know, we cannot invest in fossil gas and that is a bad idea. So what we really need to be doing is aggressive investment in renewable energy. And that starts with a very, very simple thing, which is not subsidising the fossil fuel industry anymore. We cannot be buying pipelines. We cannot be subsidizing natural gas plants. We have to invest as a as a country at the federal level in a serious industrial policy. Right. A serious plan for pivoting away from fossil fuels.

MG: Elan Strait, do you see the willingness at a governmental level around the world for that aggressive approach that Jessica is talking about?

ELAN STRAIT: I think political will is currently not where it needs to be. As Jessica said, it's not at the existential level yet. And I think that's for two reasons. The first is, as Michael was saying, the fact that the United States has been at the table for the last four years has caused a major problem. The United States is usually quite good at getting issues to be head of state level agenda items on the world stage, which they did on climate in order to get the Paris agreement done. So without the United States, it drops off some countries' radars, especially when you're dealing with a pandemic at the same time. And so without the U.S., you see other countries sort of losing the priority on climate. If the U.S. were to re-enter and reprioritize, I think that would help solve that first problem.

MG: And is that something you learnt when you were in the State Department? Just the power of moral leadership?

ELAN STRAIT: Yes, and that's that's exactly right. We had a rule in 2016 when the United States was trying to push the agreement into force, which is any meeting that President Obama had with another world leader. There had to be a point on climate change, no matter who he was talking to, no matter what the meeting was supposed to be about, President Obama is bringing up climate change. And so that means that any head of state that wanted to meet with the United States, which is many, if not all you had. You confront your position on on climate in order to meet with the president, and that had a huge effect on on global attention on the issue.

MG: The argument that some people will make, Jessica, is that if national governments aren't going to take the leadership, that you can turn to cities, you can turn to states, you can turn to provinces, you can turn to individual businesses to be more nimble and also be more aggressive. Does that argument hold for you?

JESSICA GREEN: Well, it's a really great question. And I've actually done a lot of research on this. And I think the answer is it's a [unintellitible] but it's not a substitute for federal policy. So we know that, yes, cities, regions, firms, they're all doing lots of stuff and that's helpful. But at the end of the day, we need federal regulations. And the reality is there's been a lot of work done on this and we don't know how much these kinds of voluntary pledges are actually contributing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. So we cannot count on this for the very simple reason that we just can't measure it. We just don't know. And so I think, yes, it's great. But we cannot depend on this voluntary action to be the saviour for climate. We need strong federal action to lead to lead the pack here.

MG: Michael Mann, how ambitious is Joe Biden's plan for tackling climate change?

MICHAEL MANN: It is quite ambitious and it has all the elements that we've been talking about, right? Price on carbon. That's important. Market mechanisms are important. That is one tool in the toolbox. But alone, it's not adequate. You need subsidies for renewable energy. You need enforcement of regulations and restoring the regulations that were dismantled under the previous administration. And you do need to stop funding and supporting the development of additional fossil fuel infrastructure, pipelines, et cetera, and getting rid of the subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. That's the reverse of what we need. We need to you know, again, we need to use tools that level the playing field so that renewable energy can transition even faster. We're seeing the transition. We're seeing renewable energy actually start to decrease global carbon emissions in the power sector. We saw last year that there was a decrease in carbon emissions globally in the power sector and that was associated with increased renewables. But it's not happening fast enough. We've got to decrease our carbon emissions by a factor of two within the next decade if we are to avert a catastrophic one and a half degree Celsius, three degree Fahrenheit warming of the planet. So the plan, the Biden plan has all of the elements you would want to see congressional Democrats, and that's both Senate Democrats and House Democrats each have a plan that has many of these elements. And so what we need to see when things settle out and we know what our government is going to look like, is there going to be some bipartisan support? Maybe a handful of Republicans will reach out across the aisle so that we can actually advance comprehensive climate policy. One last point. When it comes to this issue of states and municipalities and companies, we've seen enough action on that front that the United States is going to come close to meeting its Paris commitments, even without the support of the Trump administration. So that's important, but it doesn't get us what we need. We do need that leadership at the top, both at the presidential level and through Congress.

MG: We're having this conversation, Elan, in the midst of a global pandemic as well. And I just wonder what that has done in terms of being aggressive on climate change. You have a huge other thing that is distracting the world right now.

ELAN STRAIT: I think it's done two things. And Michael can speak to this, too. The first is that I think the public is way more aware of the role of science in policymaking as a result of the pandemic. When you ignore science, bad things happen. And so I think that will allow the public to better understand why you need to listen to the science on climate change. The second thing is that COVID has caused a deep economic recession. That's going to continue to deepen over time. And the best way to get out of that recession, the fastest way to put people to work is to invest in new infrastructure that's going to reduce emissions. So I think people are way more aware of the science now than they used to be. And I think people are hungry for government investment in the future. And I think climate change is going to benefit from both of those phenomenon, even if people are focussed on the pandemic.

MG: Michael, do you want to pick up briefly on that?

MICHAEL MANN: MM: Yeah, I mean, absolutely, you know, you need to use all the tools in the toolbox and you need leadership at the top level, you need an understanding on the part of the public. And you know, what Elon said is absolutely right. In fact, there's a saying, you know, every horror movie or every disaster film starts with somebody ignoring the scientists. And that we've seen that film, unfortunately, play out in the form of the pandemic coronavirus pandemic with the president Trump, who refused to listen to what the scientists are saying now. We will get past the pandemic, but an even greater crisis looms; the climate crisis. And once again, we need to see an engagement. We need a president who will embrace the science rather than reject it. And hopefully that's what we're just about to get. So, yes, there is sort of light at the end of the tunnel here. It looks like we will get that leadership. We will get it in an administration that will embrace what the scientists are saying and restore the rightful role of science to policymaking.

MG: Jessica, we started by talking about the United States leaving the Paris climate agreement. How important, just finally, is that relationship between the United States and Canada when it comes to climate issues? Who can we go it alone or do we need strong leadership from south of the border?

JESSICA GREEN: So let me just say one thing on science and politics. I have to like- I have to respectfully disagree here. I wish that people would listen to the science, but the reality is that they're not. I mean, we have anti-maskers, we have [unintelligible]. We have all kinds of conspiracy theories. We live in a post fact world. And the science is not going to fix this. The politics is what's going to fix this. And so as much as I wish that were the case and I think it's important, of course, that we have to acknowledge that climate change is being caused by human beings and that it's real. It's not a hoax. But we can't hold out hope that this you know, that more scientific information is going to fix this problem, I think. And in terms of Canada and the U.S., you know, this is no longer a climate change is real for every country. Right. So we're all experiencing it in different ways. And that's a terrible thing. But in a political way, it's a good thing because it means we don't have to wait for the United States to do anything we can act on our own. You know, the Arctic has been the warmest and we finally got ice in the Arctic about a couple of days ago, which is the latest that it's ever been and Canada is warming at twice the global average because basically because of our northern exposure, as it were. So we don't need to wait for the U.S. We can do things on our own because we are experiencing the effects here. And, of course, you know, it's better if we all address it together, but we don't need to take we don't need to take the cue from the United States, whether it's under a Biden administration or a Trump administration. We can act now.

MG: It's great to speak with you all about this this morning. Thank you. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, Jessica Green, political science professor at the University of Toronto, and Elan Strait is the manager of U.S. climate campaigns for WWF. In many parts of this country, as Jessica was hinting at, climate change is all too visible.

SOUNDCLIP

JAMIE: Jamie Coutts been in the fire service for 30 years based out of the Slave Lake region in Alberta. You know, I'd say for like the first 20 years, we would do all of our things on a calendar. We would get our wildlife equipment ready on this date. We would see the water bombers come to town on this date. And now since then, I would say that you might as well throw your calendar out, burn it, whatever you want, because it doesn't really matter. The only way to know what the weather is going to be is to look outside your window and see what it's going to be like for the next 15, 24 hours to out of control.

NEWSCASTER: Wildfires left Slave Lake in ruins, 40 percent of the town burned down as hundreds of homes, churches and businesses went up in flames.

JAMIE: 2011 May was a super dry May. And we've been talking about it for weeks, months, probably how dry it was and how it was going to be a rough spring. That time came. There's a big fire starts to the west, the town, and then another one starts east by the next day and it's burned right into the town.

NEWSCASTER: Seven thousand people managed to get out.

VOICES: Oh, my God, I can't see anything. Holy Crap! Oh, my God.

JAMIE: I can remember being on 12000 southeast and I don't know why I did this, but I actually took a minute and counted 35 houses on fire all around me. That was my defining moment. That was things will never be the same as they were. The fire conditions were so severe and the fire jumped up so fast. Really what we're seeing is drier, hotter, faster winds so that the climate has actually changed. And we're in a swing now for it being a lot hotter. I don't think that I know one person that would argue that the climate is changing. Right. I think you could argue all day with thousands of people about why it's changing, but that it actually physically is changing and that it's different and that we're in a different phase of climate. Nobody argues about that. And when you look at breaking records, the highs and lows, like we're still breaking records every year, more water than ever before, hotter than ever before, drier than ever before. And so, you know, that doesn't lead you to the fact that the climate is changing. I don't know what to- I don't think we're ready for it. I think that we're making steps to change, but we're not quite there yet.

MG: Jamie Coutts has battled many wildfires, including that one in Slave Lake and the one in Fort McMurray where almost 80000 people were forced to flee. Coming up after your regional update, it's an idea that some people call reckless. Others think this could be one of the last chances we have to save the planet in this special programme, looking at the fight against climate change as the United States officially leaves the Paris climate accord. We'll get into the idea of geoengineering. What exactly is that and how could it help save us in the midst of a changing climate? You'll find out in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. Stick around.

Back To Top »

Solar geoengineering and its potential side-effects, Why hope is a vital tool in the fight against climate change

Guests: David Keith, Elin Kelsey

[clip] [/clip]

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current. The American election may shift the battleground, but the climate is already changing. And threading the political needle to make Paris targets a reality all around the world is no easy task. And so other options are also on the table. Solutions that until now have been seen as too far fetched to consider. Geoengineering is one the idea of purposely altering our environment to slow or reduce global warming. It's been called reckless and a moonshot. But in the face of dramatic climate change, this idea is gaining traction. David Keith is a professor of engineering at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He's also a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government. He has been researching climate science and policy for many years. David, good morning to you.

DAVID KEITH: Good morning. Good to be on The Current.

MG: Thanks for being here. Geoengineering is something that you've been working on for a while, but it's this kind of umbrella term that means a lot of different things. What exactly is it? What are we talking about when we talk about geoengineering?

DAVID KEITH: I want to start just just before that time to the last panel into your introduction. I think it's really important to say that no technology will save us and that that nothing about geoengineering gets us out of the need to cut emissions. And that your last guest, Jessica, had it exactly right. This only gets done by a hard political action that some level is global technologies get implemented by politics and technologies don't save us. No way. Certainly not geoengineering. So one of the main things I work on is something that's often called solar geo engineering or solar climate intervention. It's the idea that humans might put a little bit of extra something in the atmosphere in space that makes that planet a little bit more reflective. So it absorbs just a tiny bit less sun from the heat, from the sun, which would offset some of the risks that come from accumulated carbon dioxide. That's a core idea. And it might be that a combination of emissions cuts and solar geoengineering say putting ourselves in the stratosphere would be less risky than just doing the emissions cuts.

MG: A little bit of extra something. What do you mean? What does that extra something what are you putting up into the atmosphere that would shield us?

DAVID KEITH: So so the option we know the most about is putting something very scary, sulphuric acid into the stratosphere about 20 kilometres over our heads. And that mimics something that nature does. So there's natural flows of sulphur in the stratosphere from volcanoes and other sources, and they make tiny little droplets less than a micron size that scatter light back to space. And they last for about two years up there and they can spread pretty evenly in the stratosphere. But that's just one idea. There're ideas for other particles that might be better than sulphates in some way, there're ideas for reducing certain kinds of high cirrus clouds with a kind of cloud seeding, there're ideas for making kinds of low clouds whiter. There's a whole host of different ideas in this kind of, you know, taboo topic of solar geoengineering.

MG: Why has it been taboo?

DAVID KEITH: I think the reason it's been taboo is a very well-founded fear of addiction, that is the fear that this will be used just as your introduction implied, as an excuse to avoid emissions cuts. And so many thoughtful people in the scientific community have said to me and others that we shouldn't talk about this or research it because it will be inevitably misused politically. People will think of it as a get out of jail free card to just keep the fossil fuel party running. That, I think has been a central reason. There are lots of concerns about governance and individual risks, but I think underlying all of them, tremendous fear of what's called the moral hazard, which I think in many ways is better called addiction. The idea that it will just enable our bad behaviour of kind of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere forever.

MG: Are people willing to to reconsider that, given the situation that we're in right now? Wildfires, storms becoming more unpredictable. The climate is changing and there's an added urgency. So is your sense is that leading people to reconsider something that might have been taboo in years past?

DAVID KEITH: That might be part of the reason. It's hard to know why attitudes are changing, but certainly there's much more willingness to talk about this seriously, much more scientific interest around the world and this topic and the beginning of serious policy conversations [unintelligible] to a very high level. I think the central thing to think about this moral hazard thing is not that now we have a crisis we should act, but that the moral hazard argument was never really a reason not to study this on an ethical reason. And it's not even clear it's a reason not to do it. After all, if if you were a smoker and persistent smoking and had lung cancer and I was a doctor, it would not be ethical for me to say I will withhold treatments like chemotherapy from you because of your bad behaviour. It's true that you should have stopped your bad behaviour. It's true that I, as a doctor, should do everything I can to help encourage you to stop your bad behaviour. Maybe I should lock myself to the front of your White House or block your pipelines to just muddy the analogy. But in the end, if there's really things that can protect people living over the next half century or century and reduce environmental damage, it's the fact that that people are also doing bad behaviour is not an ethical reason to withhold things that could really save lives.

MG: Let's talk a little bit about feasibility. Do you think you talk about the solar of geoengineering off the top and then there's other issues and cloud seeding and what have you, is it realistic to - people have called this a moonshot - is it realistic to think that something like that could actually work?

DAVID KEITH: That's what work means. So is it realistic that you could deploy some methods of this, like the stratospheric sulphates or some other stratospheric aerosol, and that you could do it in a way that was quite globally uniform, so north hemisphere and southern hemisphere balanced? I think the answer is definitely yes. I think I'm not aware of anybody who's looked at this carefully thinks that that cannot technically be done. And indeed, I think there's broad agreement. It can be done at very low cost with no funding, meaning sort of less than 10 billion dollars a year globally, even at large scale aid in this century. And there's no hard new technology you need to invest. So that's kind of one of the frightening things about it, is it's not remotely like a moon shot where we had to do invent all sorts of very hard new technologies and a giant focussed programme. This is something that the core technologies that do exist, at least to do the crude version, was sulphates exist now. And while people have very different views about whether we should take this seriously or about what the side effects are, I don't think there's a credible doubt that this be version could be done and that it would stop and it would reduce the overall average change in say temperature or some other major climate.

MG: Well, that was the other part. I was going to ask you what, realistically, what would it actually achieve?

DAVID KEITH: So that's where it gets less certain, and I think to be clear, my view is we should not implement any of these things now. We should understand them much better. I think what is, you know, going that they with very high confidence is it will reduce the large scale average changes in climate. So that means the increases in extreme storms, the increases in temperature increases, sea level rise. I think you can say with high confidence they would reduce all those things, but of course, it will itself introduce new risks and new changes. And we know about some of those, but we certainly don't know enough about them and we don't know precisely how well it would how even it would be. So there's a whole bunch of detailed questions underneath. So I don't want to sound like I'm overstating, but it is true and this sounds like an overclaim, but it's in fact a fair claim that if you wanted to use this to say, be certain of keeping the world under two degrees [unintelligible] and the one point five that is in principle doable because no question will reduce global average temperature and the global increase in rainfall and precipitation.

MG: What about the side effects? I mean, one is yes, you offer somebody get out of jail free card and perhaps they take it as as licence to continue to pollute. But if you start to mess with the environment, do we have any idea as to what else that might affect?

DAVID KEITH: I'll get there in a second. But I also want to get out of the easy. And I did it. Two of the business that we're going to offer somebody. This is a political fight. And let's be honest the somebodies are us collectively and there are different versions of us or different people that there are forces in our societies that want to fight and fight emissions cuts, forces that will be harmed by emissions cuts, principally forces allied with the fossil fuel industry. And that's the core of the political fight that has to be engaged no matter what. So just to make that a little more real. But- Sorry, repeat your question.

MG: Oh, no, no, that's fine. I mean, it's more just about if you, you know, put something in the atmosphere that's going to change the, you know, what we receive or you seed clouds. What happens if you do that? I mean, isn't that going to create perhaps a chain reaction that would have other environmental consequences?

DAVID KEITH: For certain, there is no version of this and any version of solar geoengineering, no matter how much you study it, there will be things we don't expect, unexpected side effects and changes. There is no risk free solution here. So sometime, you know, now or in in 20 years, we have choices and we have a choice to live with the CO2 in the atmosphere. Because remember that the crucial thing to remember is even if we bring emissions of carbon dioxide to zero, and to be clear, that's an enormous task, much harder than the first little bit of emissions cutting you done, that doesn't stop the climate problem. It just stops at getting worse. The problem is from the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. So at some point, let's say in 2045, in 2030, when people really would make compliments implementing, you have a choice of risk and uncertainty on both sides. You have the risk of uncertainty on the CO2 from the CO2 in the atmosphere. And we can't predict exactly what that does, the deep uncertainties of exactly what the climate impacts of that CO2 it. And there's the uncertainty of doing solar geoengineering. The question is - and it will have a bunch of uncertainty. We can't predict accurately. We can know a lot, but we can't predict no confidence - the question is, which world is less risky? A world with the CO2 in the air or a world with the CO2 in the air and a little bit of this offsetting sulphur or whatever it is from solar geoengineering that reduces the overall average amount of climate change? Both worlds are uncertain. So it does make a difference to do things deliberately, ethically and and for other reasons, but it's not as if we haven't messed with the atmosphere. We are messing with the atmosphere. That's the point. The question is, should we do some additional messing with the atmosphere to offset some of the messing of the atmosphere we're already doing?

MG: Do you expect countries like Canada to give serious consideration to investing in this kind of technology?

DAVID KEITH: Yes, I do, and I hope so I've been part of some conversations with Canadian scientists and the government, I think it's reasonable to do that. To be clear, I don't think anybody is talking about doing it now, but I think it's really important to begin scientific research and have that research inform governments, because the biggest question here is how are decisions made about governing this technology? We live in a single planet, and my view is we shouldn't, as Canadians turn this all over to the superpowers, kind of keep our heads down and say this is too controversial for us to deal with. So we're just going to assume the Chinese and Americans figure it out. Precisely because solar geoengineering is cheap and because of the controversy, it's something where I think small democracy's working together could really have an influence. So my hope is that there is a serious research effort in Canada and in some other small democracies, including some of the poorest in the world, and that people begin to try and work together collaboratively to think through how governance would work. One of the first steps of governance might be something that looks like a U.N. General Assembly resolution that tries to set some conditions, ruling out unilateral action on this topic and at the same time, agreements about how to share data and how to collaborate. I think it's actually really important for countries like Canada to get involved and not just leave it to the superpowers. And that means getting involved in the research and then the discussions about governance.

MG: And just before I let you go, how urgent is this? I mean, it connects back to what you started out with, which is this this idea that people have a sense that this would give licence, but also would would give us a bit more time, given how urgent the climate crisis is, how urgent is it that we have this discussion now?

DAVID KEITH: I think it's very urgent because because one of the reasons people are taking this more seriously, I think is simply evident. There's now a thousand scientific papers. It's not like we know everything, but there's really quite substantial evidence to suggest that there are ways we could do this, where it could reduce risks, a lot like reduce risk in half over the century, risk to humans and the environment. And that's a really good reason to take this seriously.

MG: David, appreciate your time this morning. Thank you.

DAVID KEITH: Thank you very much.

MG: David Keith, a professor of engineering at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, even.

SOUNDCLIP

[Inuktitut speeech]

This is Jimmy speaking. He's an elder of 73 years old and he was just talking about how the winters are very different than they used to be in previous years because the ice is melting a lot quicker than it did before, because it doesn't have a chance to fully formed and because it's very mild. The ice now has a blanket of snow and it's definitely not safer for hunters. And it's very difficult to look for seal breathing holes.

[Inuktitut speech]

My name is Ken [unintelligible]. I live here in Iqaluit [unintelligible] and I currently work as a [unintelligible] regional coordinator. It might be hard for some people to grasp, but like the case is kind of like a highway where we go find our food. A lot of people and a lot of communities rely on seal meat still to feed your families because the cost of food is so high up here and it's country food is just so much more nutritious than what you can get at the stores. And it's also it's been a part of our diet for thousands of years. So it's very important. And I really do hope that the younger generation will be able to experience life as I have, because I enjoy this life up here so much, just spending time on the line, going out on the ice, spending time with family and just having the traditional lifestyle. Well, it makes me hopeful for the future is that I feel like at a day and age of today where technology is such a big influence through all these different types of social media platforms and everything, that people are starting to be more aware of the changes that indigenous people are seeing, that people who actually live in fear are seeing, you could kind of put a face to a name and be like, OK, so this is actually real people who are seeing these changes. It's being personalised. And so we're a stronger voice. And having the youth now be aware of stuff that's happening will definitely help to get things changed to fix it.

MG: That hope we just heard about is one of the most powerful tools we as humans have when it comes to fighting climate change. Elin Kelsey has a Ph.D. in Science Communications. She's the founder of the Ocean Optimism Campaign, the author of Hope Matters, a new book about the role that hope plays in keeping global temperature rise below two degrees. And she's an adjunct professor of environmental studies at the University of Victoria. She's in Victoria this morning. Elin, good morning to you.

ELIN KELSEY: Good morning, Matt.

MG: When we talk about climate change, why does hope matter so much?

ELIN KELSEY: Well, it's really important because it's what keeps us, you know, with the strength to fight for these very important and urgent issues that we face. And, you know, I think one of the things that happened to us over the last decade or so is that as our awareness of just the global scale and the nature of climate change has become so much more apparent, we've really focussed in our communications strategy through the media on just making sure people are aware of these problems. And one of the things that's evolved from that is that, in fact, when we look at surveys across Canada, the United States, many parts of the world, climate change awareness and concern is really high, record high in many places. And what we now face is a situation where because so many of us are so aware and almost all the news that we hear about the environment and climate change is in this problem, identification way. You know, we hear about the problems. We hear almost nothing about what people are doing and what impact that's having in a positive direction. We've actually got what Yale University calls the hope gap, a situation in which we feel very committed and yet hopeless or helpless or doomed in the sense that we feel there's nothing we can do about it because we don't hear much about what people are doing about it.

MG: It is interesting. Last week on the programme, I spoke with climate scientists Katharine Wilkinson and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. They have a great new book out. It's called All We Can Save. Take a listen to what they told me about hope.

SOUNDCLIP

AYANA: How do you name a book about climate change that makes you actually want to pick it up? That's not just like lies about hope, right? Like, we didn't want to give people false hope, but we did want to offer possibility and focus on solutions.

KATHARINE: I will quote Ayana, who sometimes explorative Hope. Show me The plan. And, you know, I think that in a lot of ways is the pivot, which is the hope is often interpreted as something passive, something that is sort of well, I don't really want to show as sad or angry or anxious about what's going on. Could somebody make me feel better about things? And, you know, I think the reality is that the only way that we will feel better about things is to get to work on building a better world.

MG: Elin Kelsey, what do you make of that? That that hope can sometimes be characterised as a passive action rather than actually taking action?

ELIN KELSEY: Yes, and I should say, I love that book, but I I take the point, and in fact, it's the number one concern people have when they think about hope, they often equate it to wishful thinking, some kind of passive idea that, you know, that noble, bright someone will come along and save you. But the kind of hope I'm talking about is evidence based. It's fully accepting the severity of the issues that we face and then talking about, you know, the feelings that that generates for us and the real issues that we face when we don't also focus on what kinds of things are actually happening. We often talk about environmental things in in a kind of a future orientation. You know, if we do this, then this will happen and it creates a sort of starting line fallacy that all the hard work lies ahead. And I think it's really important that we ground our hope in the hard work that has happened and what things are paying off. So, for example, you know, we heard so much about the 2009 climate change strikes, but we don't hear as much about the fact that by 2020, you know, just last week, we now know that one in 10 people on the planet live in a place that has declared a climate emergency and by those declarations of climate emergency are important, is because they they make statements about greenhouse gas emission reductions. And so that's an incredible response to a mass movement of collective hope around both anger at the injustice that we face on Earth around climate change and the hope of of making those changes. And so I think it's really important to be focussed not only on what needs to be changed, but on the kinds of things that are emerging as a result of the actions that we're taking.

MG: You run the Ocean Optimism campaign, which highlights stories of environmental successes. And we don't think of optimism often when we talk about our oceans. We hear about warming seas. We talk about coral reefs dying in these giant islands of plastic. Can you just briefly tell us a story of ocean optimism?

ELIN KELSEY: Yes, I think a really big one that's happening right now is the establishment of marine protected areas. Near a decade ago there were almost none and we've seen the numbers of them doubling. We now see ecosystem scale, marine protected areas being put in place. And just in September, 71 countries, including Canada and some states like California, are committed to a 25 percent both land and marine protected areas by 2025, 30 percent by 2030. Now, of course, we have to push to make sure that those numbers are actually realised. But what we are seeing as the movement of marine protected areas is sweeping the globe. We're now seeing the results of that. So more fish, bigger fish in areas where marine protected areas have been put into place. Just last week, we saw no report coming out that five percent increase in protected area results and a 20 percent increase for fisheries. So we know that when we go to these natural climate solutions, what we're really seeing is this movement of biodiversity conservation through the U.N. programme and climate change, really working much more closely than we've ever seen it before to recognise the importance of preserving wild areas and ecological restoration around those areas.

MG: Why should we have hope here in this country when it comes to the fight against climate change? We aren't on track to meet our Paris accord targets. And if more aggressive action is taken and we talked about that earlier in the programme, there could be economic consequences, particularly for those in the oil and gas sector. So why should we be hopeful here?

ELIN KELSEY: I think we should be hopeful because we recognise that, you know, so many people in Canada are young, 42 percent of the global population is 25 years of age or younger. And what two values keep coming up in survey after survey is climate change and social justice. In fact, there is just a global millennial survey done before COVID and during COVID that showed that many people are as globally concerned about climate change as they are about the infectious disease spreads of COVID-19. And so the momentum of the demand for change is really happening. And we see it playing out now in financial markets. You know, the next era energy, which is the world's largest provider, wind and solar energy, is now more valuable than the oil giant ExxonMobil, which was once the largest public company on Earth. So we are in this transition and we see that, you know, those commitments, the Canadian throne speech talked about exceeding the 2030 climate targets. And we know that we have all of this energy around making sure that those commitments are held. We have the passion coming from this youth movement, which is very strongly oriented around social justice and climate change.

MG: Well, let me end there, because a lot of those young people and I know this from the young people in my own home, but the people elsewhere that you meet will say that one of the reasons they went on those school strikes was because they don't believe that governments like our own are doing enough and they worry about a bleak future. They think, as Gretha Thunberg said, that that her future had been stolen from her. What do you say finally to those young Canadians who see a bleak future and they don't see a window for hope right now?

ELIN KELSEY: Yes, I think I would say to them, you are not alone in those feelings. In fact, Ellen Field at Lakehead University just did a national survey of students between the ages of Great seven and 12. And what she found is 46 percent of them know about climate change, cared deeply about it, and believe that nothing can be done. So this feeling of helplessness is really dominant. And what I would say to them is actively search for things that are shifting in the positive directions, things that you care about. You know, we know that protected areas in Canada, national parks have been primarily indigenous led in the last 10 years. That's a really positive development. We know that more recently, research that shows the time lag between halting CO2 emissions and halting temperature rise, we used to think it would take 25 to 30 years. Michael Mann, who you just had on, was reporting that, in fact, the science now shows that it's more like three to five years. So we see these shifts. We see that assets and sustainable mutual funds where one trillion dollars in the second quarter 2020, we see a rise in plant based eating, especially amongst those young people which, you know, project drawdown, which lists what are the most important things we can do collectively for the climate puts plant based eating very high. I think it's number four. And that's the largest food trend, sweeping the country and sweeping the planet. And so we need to know the things that we're doing, which ones are having a positive effect, and then amplify those. And that's what I would say.

MG: And that gives you hope as well.

ELIN KELSEY: Absolutely, and watching them, you know what, I put together information, I talked to lots of students and they I really understand how strongly they feel and the depth of their despair. And I think creating safe spaces to talk about those feelings is really important. And at the same time, I tell them and it's true, I used to have to search through years of information to find the kinds of, you know, positive directions I wanted to share with them. Now I'm looking usually back just the last week because things change, stories change, and that's what makes hope possible. And I think the thing that we need to do is to responsibly keep track of those changes and communicate them with youth to help empower them on the important missions that we're all on together.

MG: Elin, thank you for speaking with us this morning.

ELIN KELSEY: It's great to talk to you, Matt. Thanks for having me.

MG: Elin Kelsey is the author of Hope Matters by changing the way we think is critical to solving the environmental crisis, would be really interested to hear from you, particularly those young people. Obviously, that in quotation marks, I like to think that I'm a young person. That's not the case anymore. From those young people, where are you finding hope in the fight against climate change? You can reach us through email thecurrent@cbc.ca Or go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. That is The Current for today. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Thursday November 5, 2020 Transcript

More Stories Like This