Lawyers are usually slaves to precedents.  I don’t consider myself such a slave, but there are places for precedents.  Bill McKibben pointed out, there is a precedent we should consider.  Even though we have got ourselves into a very bad position by supporting monsters like Putin and other autocratic leaders of oil and gas states for so many years, we should be able to stop such support and take a new path even in the midst of a war in Ukraine. Wars are fought on many fronts and that includes the war in Ukraine.

One of the fronts against Russia and Putin does not require anyone to die or put their lives in danger. In fact, it involves taking one out of danger by withdrawing from supporting Putin and Russia.  It does however require us to enlist the same kind of efforts we have done in past. For example, in the year before the United States entered the Second World War Canada and the United States transformed the industrial system of North America in an all-out effort to provide the military hardware their forces would require to defeat Germany and Japan. It was an astonishing transformation. For example. Ford Motor Company converted its industrial structures from supplying automobiles to supply aircraft and other military equipment and this was a very significant part of the Allied war effort. At the height of the war, a bomber was produced in the United States every hour! The industrial might of North America became one of the most important instruments of the Allied war effort that led to victory in Europe and Japan.

Now we need to transform our economy to produce instruments to fight climate change and convert to green sources such as solar and wind power. We will need a similar effort. We did this before and we can do it again. A bomber is a hugely complicated piece of machinery. Solar panels and wind farms are much easier to produce. As McKibben said,

None of this is simple. None of this comes without cost, but add it up against the cost of allowing despots to dominate our politics and then add up the costs of allowing climate change to proceed. The latest economic projections I have seen for allowing climate change to proceed unchecked this century is $550 trillion, which is more money than currently exists on planet earth!

Now it is true that some people are undermining solidarity on issues such as this. For example, some politicians running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada are promising to do away with carbon taxes in Canada and pay rebates to Canadians paying a lot for fuel right now. As in World War II, this is a time to build solidarity and tackle a big problem. It is not a time to hand out baubles to unhappy Conservative supporters. This will require a big effort. We have done it in the past; we can do it again.

Bill McKibben said he had trouble feeling confidence right now. When he hears Canadian conservatives begging for relief he gets discouraged. He admitted he was angry with political leaders like Vladimir Putin and Jason Kenney who just want to take windfall profits at such a dangerous time. As he said, referring to leaders in the energy sector, “It is a reminder of just how irresponsible they have been for decade upon decade and that irresponsibility is killing people in Ukraine and is killing the planet and this may be our last good chance to do something about it.”

There is a precedent for getting together and tackling a tough job. We can do this. But we must not defer to vested interests.

Just like Boris Johnson, Alberta’s premier Jason Kenney, has argued that now because of the war in Ukraine we should open the floodgates to Alberta’s oil and gas to flood Europe. Alberta would benefit from that (in the short run at least), but that is not the way to go. That will lead to more misery not a solution. More of the same is rarely a solution to any problem.

It is clear that we have made a lot of mistakes.  We have got suckered. Just like every other addict we bought the lies, got sucked in, and now find we have a hefty price to pay. Our addiction to fossil fuels has come at an awesome expense. We have only started to pay that price. What can we do to get off this train?  As Bill McKibben pointed out,

“Sun and wind come from everywhere. They are ubiquitous and omnipresent. A world that runs on them won’t have the equivalent of Vladimir Putin. There is no way for a character like Putin to embargo the sun or block the wind. So it is fake realism to pretend the way to stand up to him is to somehow produce more of this stuff. The way to stand up to Putin is to move the world to the way we know it needs to go anyway if we don’t want it to overheat even more disastrously than it already has. This is a choice point. This is a pivot point—the kind of place where we could make a big shift. We’ll see. And Canada is one of the places where we will decide. The oil and gas industry is using this moment to push for more offshore drilling.”

We can follow the advice of the oil and gas industry as we have done so often in the past and then pay the price again, as we have also done in the past.  We need to get advice from disinterested parties who don’t stand to make fortunes from our decisions. The pushers of oil and gas don’t have our best interests at heart. This is the time for the right decision, and I believe, we must make a change. Right now. The old ways will merely deepen our dependence on fossil fuels. We know where that leads. We should not listen to dealer in the back alley.

We could listen instead to Canada’s Minister of the Environment the Honourable Steven Guilbeault. And guess what? He actually is honourable. He has pointed out clearly that we need to bust the habit.

Now I am not clean here. I like to travel a lot.  My environmental footprint is pretty deep. I have a son who works in the oil and gas industry. I don’t want to see him unemployed.  But, I think we as a community must work with the people who work in the industry to shield them from the blows and direct them to better industries where their talents can be better used. We as a society need to do this together. We can’t just let them hold the bag. That is not justice. And if we don’t have a just society I don’t want it.

It will also demand sacrifices. But we must remember the sacrifices the people in Ukraine are making. They make our sacrifices look like pretty thin gruel.

I think a lot of people are willing to pay for higher gas prices if it means we can help the people in Ukraine. Pundits always assume that we are all selfish. I don’t think that is always true. This war is a reminder of our problem.  The war in Ukraine has helped to drive up oil prices, but as McKibben reminded us, the sun is still delivering energy at the same price it did a week ago or a year ago. Same with wind. And the prices of both will be the same next year. Why do we keep paying for the one energy that keeps skyrocketing up from time to time as regularly as wars?

This is a good moment to make the move that we must make anyway. How many more chances will we get before we cause irreparable damage to our planet. That is the approach the oil and gas industry tried to foist on us as they have done so often in the past. By now we know– there is a better way. Let’s take it.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  told us 6 years ago that we had to cut our emission increases to zero by 2030.  Just recently, their latest scientific report said they were wrong. It is now worse than they thought it would be. We have to make those changes by 2025. That is less than 3 years!  And the alternative as we knew 6 years ago, and still know today, are devastating.  Just ask the Ukrainians. The world acknowledged this 6 years ago. Now we know it is even more urgent. This is the time to do it.

Ukraine  offers a lesson to all of us—don’t become beholden to autocrats. Ukraine made that mistake; so did much of Europe. Becoming beholden to autocrats is a dangerous thing to do. The clearest example of that is European dependence on oil from dictators.

Addicts usually look to the pushers for wisdom. After all, pushers get rich from pushing. They must be smart. Right?  Yes they are smart, at least from their own perspective.

In Canada Jason Kenney the Premier of Alberta wants  us all to be beholden to Alberta and its  oil. Listen to what Jason Kenney said recently at an energy conference in Houston:

“We are the natural answer to the global issue of energy security. We have talked for years about how some of the world’s worst regimes have had a growing presence in global energy markets. Revenues generated from those sales have been converted into violence, terrorism, conflict, and global instability. Much of that energy being produced by regimes with radically lower levels of transparency, of environmental standards, not to mention labour and basic human rights standards.”

Now I agree it is better to buy fossil fuels from liberal democratic countries than wicked oil barons from the seediest parts of the globe. But that is not the answer. There is a better way.

As Bill McKibben said,

“People like Jason Kenney have been keeping us hooked on fossil fuels for decades. I wrote the first book on climate change which came out 33 years ago. We’ve known for a very long time what we need to do. And if we had done it, if we had been able to overcome the opposition of vested interests  and Jason Kenney is obviously a perfect representative of vested interests… then we would long since have put people like Putin the rear view mirror. He is just making the argument for more of the same because it benefits him. And actually, it is at this point disgusting…”

People in the fossil fuel industry have for decades spent a lot of money convincing us not to do anything about climate change and they have profited enormously by those delays. But we have paid, and are paying, a horrible price. Nowhere is that more obvious than Ukraine, but actually we will all be paying that price. Had we ignored their cries 30 years ago the cost of mitigation efforts for climate change today would be much less, and despots like Putin and the King of Arabia would have been starved out years ago. One of the worst things we ever did was to listen to them for 30 years and one of the worst things we could now would to be to listen to them some more. They are pushers pushing our addiction for their benefit and to our peril. These pushers are our enemies not our friends.

If we don’t get out of our addiction now, we will no doubt have an endless series of such wars as the war in Ukraine. As the temperature rises and rises, the world will become increasingly unstable and unsafe. The sooner we stop that train the better we will be. If, as the UN has predicted,  we will have a billion climate refugees on top of the “regular refugees” we will be in a very dangerous place. We won’t have purchased security and stability as Kenney suggests. We will have purchased bedlam instead.

30 years ago, we might have had an excuse to keep on our course. But now wind and solar energy are the cheapest sources of energy. We don’t need to follow the old path to oblivion. Batteries to store that power have also come down. There are still challenges but the old way is not the best way anymore.

There is a better way—get off the addiction to fossil fuels  now.

How can anyone seeing what is happening in Ukraine not realize that all of the countries currently addicted to fossil fuels are on a dangerous path? Is it not obvious that we would all be better off getting off this addiction to fossil fuel?  Does the war in Ukraine not make this absolutely clear?

Fossils fuel is concentrated in a few places around the world. As Bill McKibben said in his recent interview by CBC radio,

“That means that the people who live on top of those places, end up with more power than they deserve. Vladimir Putin, the King of Saudi Arabia. It is not as if he is an interesting dude, he executed 81 people with a sword this week, but because he has a lot of oil everyone has to pretend he has something interesting to say. In my country the Koch brothers (one of whom has passed on to his rewards in heaven which he has paid for) our biggest oil and gas barons, biggest land holders in in Alberta’s tar sands in different periods, use up their winnings to buy up a political party to warp America’s political system.”

In Alberta they claim their oil is ethical, but sadly, such claims are dubious. Oil and gas money has for decades in Canada and elsewhere funded campaigns to convince us that climate change is not real so that we failed for those decades to do anything about the wolf at our door—i.e. climate change. In time, even those millions from that not so ethical source has proved ineffective at hiding the truth from us of what they have been doing. But in the meantime, those decades of delay have increased the costs of climate change mitigation immeasurably. Oil sector companies have spent a lot of money  to delay political change, while they have earned enormous extra profits as a result, and are leaving us holding the bag to pay for the consequences. I have a hard time agreeing to call that “ethical” activity.

Some of us old timers may escape paying the price of that delay by dying, but sadly, our grandchildren will not be so lucky and they will no doubt wonder why our generation could have been so stupid to buy the lies sold to us by unethical oil. Of course, those grandchildren of ours might not be convinced we were stupid. They might come to the conclusion that we were unjust in not bearing the price ourselves even though we got the benefits of cheap oil for those decades. Instead we made the innocent generation pay for our profligacy.

Let’s hope that when the time comes, we are in a place where we don’t hear what they say about us when they learn the truth!

Getting off of addiction to fossil fuels is the best weapon to fight the war in Ukraine but it can also be a weapon in the other vital war in which we are engaged—i.e. the war against climate change. 2 days after the war against Ukraine was launched by Russia, the International Panel on Climate Change issued their latest report on Climate Change  which the Secretary-General of the UN Antonio Guterres said was the single most dire study he had ever seen on climate change. And he has seen a lot.

First according to UN Secretary-General our current course, even if all promises countries have made are kept, which on the basis of past performance is highly unlikely, we are “firmly on track toward an unliveable world.”   The latest studies show that temperatures on earth will shoot past a key danger point unless greenhouse gas emissions fall faster than countries so far have committed.

The UN predicted that we could see a billion refugees from climate change over the next decades. Imagine the havoc a billion  refugees can inflict on our societies.

Right now the world is having a hard time trying to absorb the 4 plus million refugees coming out of Ukraine. Multiply that by 200 times! 2 &1/2 million refugees from Ukraine in Poland right now. More are coming. Middle East refugees and South American refugees are still looking for sanctuary. Where are all these people going to go?  Where will an additional billion go? Our world is headed for some serious problems but most of us are looking the other way. We don’t want to see what is in front of us, but blind eyes are seldom very helpful at avoiding problems.

We have been paying a lot of attention to the Ukraine, as we should. But our problems do not end there. Not by a long shot. We need to get off fossil fuel addiction or all of us are in trouble, not just Ukrainian refugees.