Master Navigators

Ancient Humans, Indigenous People before Contact

The thought of those stupendous ocean voyages from the east coast of the Pacific Ocean, bring up the critical question which Niobe Thompson asked, “Are those skills of the master navigators still alive today?” When settlers reached Hawaii they were 4,000 miles from the nearest land. What could be more remote than that? According to Niobe Thompson, “it may have been the most dangerous voyage of discovery Polynesians ever took. Find land or die at sea. When Europeans arrived that incredible story was almost forgotten.” It may have been the most dangerous voyage anyone ever took anywhere anytime! That is a story that should never be forgotten.  It was truly an epic voyage—perhaps like none other the world has ever seen.

By the 20th century traditional sailing was dying in the Pacific. Of course, why sail when you have found paradise? I know I would have been tempted to stay put. Things don’t get much better anywhere than they do in the South Pacific.

In 1975 Hawaiians discovered a man living on one of the most remote islands of Micronesia. He was the last of the master navigators who could sail across the Pacific without modern instruments or maps. He was “living proof that Polynesia was discovered by master navigators.” It was no accident. How did he do it? He relied on watching the location of the moon, planets, and stars at different times. They paid particular attention to the rising of the sun and moon and used this valuable information to navigate across thousands of miles of oceans without charts, books, records, or instruments. He relied on what he had memorized.

Oceanic people know that they did not discover the islands of the Pacific by accident. As anthropologist Sam Low said, “for oceanic people to set out on the Pacific like that required almost ‘super heroic’ people. It was one of the greatest migrations of humans in the history of humankind.” We have a lot to learn from people like that. That is what is important in this story.

For many people it is very natural to go to the sea.  It took a 1,000 years for humans at the end of Asia to decipher star maps and learn to sail the open ocean.  Thompson said, “Once they did, the South Pacific was theirs.” Yet, the human odyssey was far from over.  What about the second half of the planet?  What about the Americas?

The Big Pacific

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact

 

Countless islands can be found around Papua New Guinea. From these islands our ancestors perfected the art of sailing. They honed skills that were of vital importance for the human journey.

The Pacific Ocean is vast. It is the largest feature on the planet.  It is 19,800 km wide from east to west at 5º N.  This is halfway around the world or 5 times the diameter of the moon. It is also 15,500 km long from north to south and covers 1/3 of the earth.

The Pacific Ocean contains the lowest point on the planet—the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest part of the ocean and the deepest location on Earth. It is 11,034 meters (36,201 feet) deep, which is almost 7 miles. If you placed Mount Everest at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the peak would still be 2,133 meters (7,000 feet) below sea level. The average depth of the Pacific ocean is 4,280 metres  putting the total water volume at 710,000,000 cubic kilometres.

Of course the Pacific Ocean was bigger when the Polynesians first crossed it. That is because of plate tectonics, which are causing the Pacific Ocean is to shrink at roughly 2.5 cm (0.98 in) per year on 3 sides roughly averaging 0.52 square km a year. The Atlantic Ocean is increasing in size.

The Pacific Ocean covers more than 30% of the earth’s surface. It is clearly the largest water mass on the planet with a surface area of 60 million sq. miles (155 million sq. km). The Pacific Ocean basin is larger than the landmass of all the continents combined. It has almost twice as much water as the Atlantic Ocean. It holds more than half the Earth’s open water supply. The conclusion is clear: the Pacific Ocean is BIG! It was a very big obstacle for ancient humans to cross, but somehow they did it.

As Niobe Thompson said in his television series, “its islands are like grains of sand scattered across a vast blue void.  They are impossibly remote. Yet eventually, humans reached every one. Yet how we came to settle the islands of our greatest ocean is a mystery that puzzled European sailors for centuries.” After all, they considered themselves the master sailors. How could these people have done it?

Around Papua New Guinea there are countless islands from which our ancestors—our wise ancestors—perfected the art of sailing. Those skills would prove invaluable on some amazing journeys. Journeys that astound us to this day. It is possible that we discovered those islands by accident. For a long time this is what Europeans believed. They could not comprehend the possibility that perhaps some people—well before them—had greater navigational skills than they did. This was another example of the familiar hubris.

In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl and his crew set themselves adrift on the Pacific Ocean on their raft Kon-tiki to establish the theory of accidental drift.  Ocean currents pushed them 7,000 miles from South America to Polynesia. He believed that natives gradually peopled the islands across the ocean island by island. On the other hand, Wulf Schiefenhövel said this is nothing but Eurocentric vision.   New research indicates a much different vision.

Geoff Irwin of New Zealand spent a lifetime trying to prove that the first explorers of the Pacific Islands were not drifting aimlessly, but were instead master sailors.

In the South Pacific, the trade winds blow from the east to the west.  Most people, like Thor Heyerdahl, thought that this was also the direction of human migration. It made sense didn’t it?  Well not completely.

Irwin believed people did not come with the prevailing winds. He believed that people set out in a direction that would most likely make it easy for them to return.  After all, who wants to set out with no chance of ever coming home? Sort of like these people who have signed up for space journeys with no hope of returning. Some people are this adventurous, but not many. Most people are too sensible to be that brave.

As a result of this analysis it actually makes more sense for people to migrate to the South Pacific Islands from the west so they can set off against the prevailing winds and come home with those winds. It is not easy to set off into prevailing winds, but sailors know how to do that. They were incredibly smart sailors.

Yet we need some hard evidence for this interesting theory. Where is that evidence?  At a wind tunnel at the University of Auckland they changed sailing in 1995 when New Zealand took the Americas Cup for the first time with a boat designed there. Even at 40º into the wind a canoe can still drive forward. Their experiments showed that upwind exploration was possible. This is still not proof, but it is evidence that it is possible for Irwin’s explanation to be right.

The next question was if people from Papua New Guinea used their boats to sail across the ocean how they did they navigate? Lisa Mattisoo-Smith used genetics to reconstruct the settlement of the South Pacific. She is Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of Otago focusing on identifying the origins of Pacific peoples and their plants and animals in order to better understand the settlement, history, and prehistory of the Pacific and New Zealand.

As a result of her investigations she concluded, “the navigational skills and knowledge of course are not preservedarchaeologically, but it is indicated archeologically.” The fact that their exploration was almost instant is good evidence that they possessed the skills and had an exploration strategy. There was almost instantaneous dispersal from Papua New Guinea. Not only that, but they were continually successful at their settlements and that tells us “these people knew what they were doing. These people were prepared. They knew where they were going, and they knew what they needed to survive when they got there.” In other words, their explorations were far from accidental. They knew exactly what they were up to.

These ancient travellers crossed the islands near Oceania to remote Oceania about 3,000 years ago.  That was about 2,500 years before Columbus “discovered” North America or about 1,500 years before Vikings came here. We have to remember how far the Polynesians  traveled over the vast Pacific Ocean. These were astonishing voyages all made without western navigational instruments and with just tiny islands in the vast Pacific to be discovered.  As a result the Eurocentric view has been exploded. Within 300 years they did it.

Lisa Mattisoo-Smith makes it clear: “the whole settlement of the Pacific is under-celebrated and under-valued in terms of representing the capabilities of people thousands of years ago. They did amazing things.” These ancient people demonstrated clearly that ancient people were wise. We have to respect that wisdom.

As Schiefenhövel said, “Homo sapiens is a crazy animal. They do things which you don’t believe are possible and the migration into the Pacific is one of those things.” They traveled against strong prevailing winds, yet that is exactly what they did. It seemed impossible, yet they did it.

Incredible Sea Voyages: The Outrigger

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues

We know about some fantastic voyages—Columbus “discovering” North America, though of course, it was already filled with people when he got there. Then there was Captain Cook and his amazing “discoveries” of island in the Pacific Ocean. Again, he found people that got there before him. How did they do it?

There is evidence of more than one incredible prehistoric sea voyage that suggest our ancient ancestors did not travel and discover new continents by accident. Even though humans evolved with feet on the ground they made truly amazing sea voyages that are difficult for us to comprehend.  They did not stay in Africa forever. How did this happen?  When did some humans become water people? How did we learn to live on oceans? Episode 3 of the series The Great Human Odyssey tried to answer these questions.

When early humans crossed Asia from Africa, South East Asia should have been the end of the line. The vast Pacific Ocean really should have stopped our ancestors. But our ancestors were not easily stopped. To any rational human being the enormous Pacific Ocean would have seemed an impassable barrier to any further colonization of our planet.  Really the Pacific Ocean was the largest barrier on the planet.

However as Niobe Thompson said, “instead it was nota  barrier, it was an opportunity, a life giving gift…our ancestors found ways to live with the sea and soon they found ways of crossing it.”

Wulf Schiefenhövel from the Max Planck Institute also made an interesting comment: “Our sea water had been frozen to such an extent that the sea was about 120 metres lower than it is now. That means people could walk from Sumatra to East Java and then there were channels of water around 30-40 km. wide.”

The first sea voyages happened so long ago that we don’t have much evidence of how they did it. We can only speculate. It is very difficult to understand how early humans could have made it. It seems so difficult that it seem impossible. But our human ancestors had determination.

There is no archaeological evidence of the first human boats. Yet, there is some interesting evidence in Papua New Guinea, the world’s biggest tropical island. Humans reached it at least 50,000 years ago. As Thompson said, “It is a rich culture today that opens a window on its past.”

In the wilderness of Papua New Guinea there is a ceremony that is very old and rare.  Few outsiders have ever seen it. There is an initiation ceremony where boys are transformed into men.  There is a ritual that mimics the snaky movement of the crocodile the most dangerous creature in the area. There is a secret space of the warrior society—i.e. the “spirit house.” Here families say good-bye to their children some 15 years old. To survive a boy must become a man by learning the secrets of the river. The boy must become part human and part crocodile.   Boys are cut in an extremely painful ritual. The object of the ritual is become “water people.” The crocodile people give a hint of what life was like on the water. The earliest kind of god is still used—i.e. a dugout canoe!

Over time, the people of Papua New Guinea tool dugout canoes to amazing extremes. Their war canoes are very long and fast. As Schiefenhövel said, “as every sailor knows, the longer your boat the faster your travel.” I didn’t know that. The people of Papua New Guinea, as far as we know, never had sailing boats because they never ventured into the sea.

The ingenious invention that allowed them to cross the waves of the ocean was the outrigger. This made the boat very stable on the ocean. These vessels  are very simple often made of hollowed out mangrove.  “The outrigger triggered a revolutionary new phase in our human journey—harvesting the winds of the sea.” This was the start of some astounding voyages.

Talk About wasting money

Climate change

 

Our governments have given hundreds of billions to the fossil fuel industry in subsidies. If we used that money to fight climate change, instead of using it to make things worse, we would have a substantial down payment on the funds required.

Subsidies include a myriad of payments, indirect and direct, made by governments to oil, gas, and coal companies. They include tax credits, and government underwriting of corporate risk. The OECD has identified a surprising 250 mechanisms currently in place to support and subsidize the oil, gas, and coal industries.

At the same time, renewable energies get much less. They are not allowed to compete on a level playing field.  So we have to get serious about tackling these issues. We can’t wait for better times. As Damian an Carrington from the Guardian said,

“If you thought that tackling the red-hot issue of cleaning up energy now was tantamount to burning money, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Without urgent and transformative action, today’s conflagrations will seem like stray sparks compared to the wildfires to come.”

As Fatih Birol has pointed out,

“One of the most surprising and alarming issues in the climate change arena is the fact that fossil fuels causing global warming continue to receive substantial government support, making them artificially cheap and encouraging more of them to be consumed. It’s a form of madness. What’s particularly baffling is that while government support given to environmentally beneficial renewable power is subject to seemingly endless media and political scrutiny, the 500% larger subsidies given to oil, gas, and (to a much larger extent) coal rarely get much attention…So what would happen if all these subsidies were phased out?  According to the IEA’s models, we’d see a massive reduction in global fossil fuel.”

This in turn would lead to a huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.  Isn’t that exactly what we are trying to accomplish?  Yet isn’t that exactly what our government keeps telling us we can’t afford?  Perhaps we could afford to do what so desperately needs to be done if we stopped giving away so much cash to so many enormously profitable multi-national oil and gas corporations. The IEA has estimated that with cuts to oil and gas subsidies we would have sufficient funds to provide about half the funds required to hold global warming to 2°C.

Think how powerful the oil and gas companies are to secure such lavish subsidies when the governments cut “fat” (as they called it) everywhere. So when energy prices at the time hit a record high, in 2008 government subsidies of more than half a trillion dollars were paid to some of the richest companies in the history of the planet! That money was equivalent to the combined gross domestic product of Sweden and Saudi Arabia!

I admit that it would be very expensive to pay for the various solutions to climate change. Yet half the necessary funds could be obtained by doing what we should be doing anyway!

Yet it will be  difficult to persuade our political leaders that they should do what needs to be done to eliminate these harmful subsidies. After all the richest companies in the world won’t go down without a fight. They will spend lavishly to protect their interests and  obtain the influence to get what they want and resist actions they find unpalatable. It is a fact that environmental groups are pipsqueak opponents of the energy sector. As Birol said,

“I don’t know of any global data about the relative size of fossil and renewable lobbies, but where figures are available, the hydrocarbon brigade massively outspends those pushing for clean energy—by a factor of 12 in the U.S. according to one estimate.”

Even Greg Mankiw, a professor at Harvard and energy advisor to Mitt Romney who was one of the Republican Presidential candidates all of whom refused to even consider any tax hikes under any circumstances, has admitted that the current pricing of fossil fuels does not make economic sense. According to him, the price of gas should be higher, as “Economists who have added up all the externalities associated with driving conclude that tax exceeding $2 a gallon makes sense.” So the rest of us are paying for expenses that the oil companies should be paying, to the tune of $2 for every gallon they sell. If that is not insane, what is?

Instead of subsidizing fossil fuels, we should be taxing them more so that their price more accurately reflects the “real cost” to all of us. That is why more and more of us are advocating a carbon tax.

When Stephen Harper was running against Stephane Dion he unfairly, but successfully,  characterized the carbon tax as “a tax grab.” In fact, in Dion’s case it was clearly revenue neutral. He wanted to “shift” tax to bad things from good things. The total tax would not have changed. Yet that was considered too radical for Canada. Now some—not many granted—Americans are advocating the same thing.

Elizabeth Kolbert, one of my favourite writers for the New Yorker,  got it right when she said,

“What the country needs—and has always needed—is an energy policy that, instead of pandering to American’s sense of entitlement, would compel us to finally change our ways. In addition to a phased-in increase in the gas tax, it would include a comprehensive, economy wide tax on carbon, or alternatively a cap-and-trade- system.”

No matter how much we want to find a different solution, we just have to raise the price of carbon so high that we will find alternatives and fund research for new alternatives. Until we do that, we will find no solutions to our declining fossil fuels nor to the ever rising global warming. We can pay now, or we can pay later.  And paying later will be much more painful than paying now.

Ancient food: Better than MacDonalds

Ancient Humans

In that  television series I watched on PBS, Niobe Thompson was interested in the important questions like what triggered the development of the modern human mind? Part of the answer is that this development was assisted by the accident that humans found shelter in caves beside the ocean in southern Africa, not far from where I visited in 2013.  Humans probably took advantage of the rich marine food sources  there that were rich in poly-unsaturated fatty acids that are so valuable for the development of large modern brains. This would have given the evolution of humans a major boost. The humans likely noticed that all the shell food lying around was very good to eat and provided vital nutrients. Some say that because human brains got larger they noticed the shells.  Thompson said it was more likely that because they took advantage of the food in shellfish humans developed larger brains. The regular consumption of shellfish provided nutrients for brains to become better. In either case, I wish their descendants used those big brains  more often.

It is likely that humans found they could harvest more than shellfish that were lying around on beaches. It is very probable that humans learned how to harvest the wealth beneath the waves of the oceans.  For example, abalone, an extremely nutritious food source, would only be available to those humans who could dive to the bottom of the

The sea is treacherous and cold. Even in southern Africa it would not be easy to harvest food from the sea. Yet humans have proved remarkably resourceful at attending to that marvelous food source in the oceans.  Though the ocean was treacherous the risks were abundantly worth it. It likely enabled our early ancestors to escape extinction when the land suffered through interminable droughts. The ocean allowed our ancestors to obtain all the food they needed. The ocean contains a vast storehouse of food that can be harvested when conditions on land are as difficult as they were when our ancestors became the first modern humans and allowed them to escape the disasters that befell all of their kin species.

Thompson also went to the Badjoa of Tawi Tawi in the southern Philippines. These people are incredible divers. They can hold their breath for more than 5 minutes in search of food deep under the ocean surface. The Badjoa live in a war zone yet have mastered the art of hunting and gathering on the ocean floor.

Some of the Badjoa divers are able to dive up to 100 metres deep in search of food. That is so deep that divers who reach such depths are able to walk on the floor. Their bodies don’t float up. Humans are the only terrestrial animal that can get that deep to hunt for food.  The Badjoa have diving and swimming skills that can only be compared with seals. That’s how good they are at this.

These Badjoa have for centuries passed on the diving and hunting and gathering skills to succeeding generations. There are very few groups of humans that still have these skills. The Badjoa clearly show that humans might have harvested enough food to escape extinction by mining the rich storehouse of food in the ocean. Our early ancestors may have been driven by serious environmental and climatic challenges to develop skills that enabled them to survive and thrive on food from the sea.

As Thompson said, “We are children of a changing planet forged in Africa, but also driven to the brink of extinction. Only a handful of survivors knew how to outsmart the shifting climate.” Our amazing ancestors threatened by disasters, challenged by extreme environmental hazards migrated over many generations from Africa to every part of the globe. We are only now beginning to understand what remarkable ingenuity, co-operation, and relentless determination was required to accomplish that while so many other species so like us failed to do that and perished from the earth.

The Importance of Art in Human History

Africa, Ancient Humans, art

One member of our group was from the southern  US and he did not like to think that Africans were our ancestors. How could we have black ancestors? Right?

There was another aspect of the first episode of the television series on the Great Migrations that struck me as critically important and interesting. This was the importance and role of art in this human story. It showed that we are the artistic species and that this artistic bent played an important role in our survival. Even though a couple of years ago I was in Africa, near where some of the series was filmed, and even though I saw some of that amazing art of our early human indigenous ancestors, this important insight escaped me at that time. At least now I have seen the light.

Niobe Thompson pointed out that ¼ of the world’s rock art sites are found in South Africa. Remember, these were often created by our earliest ancestors. As Thompsons astutely pointed out, “From the moment our ancestors became modern humans we became artists.” I find this astounding. “Art is the signature of our species,” Thompson proclaimed. Art is not some interesting side salad; art is a crucial component of who we are.

This is where I crawled down into a cave That was the only way to get in

This, of course, raises the next profoundly interesting question. Why? Would not drawing pictures on a wall have been a serious distraction for hunter/gatherers? The point is they were more than just pictures. Art helped bring the prey into the mind of the hunter. Art helped them become better hunters, because they were able to identify with their prey. That is what great art does. Art identifies us with the world around us. For hunter/gatherers this is no distraction; it is vitally important.

Thompson also pointed out one of the rock art pictures on the walls. It showed a shaman. Why would they introduce a shaman? Thompson thinks the point is that shamans were also part of the hunting process. Shamans helped the hunters hunt and helped the gatherers gather.

Rock art was part of the important human process of using symbols to look beyond themselves. Rock art was used to store knowledge and information about hunting and gathering. It would also have been enormously helpful in passing on hunting and gathering knowledge to the next generation. The essence of language and the value of symbols is demonstrated in the Rock art of Africa the home of our oldest human ancestors.

At a critical time in the evolution of humans, Homo sapiens learned to communicate with symbolic language. That was a critical tool in the development of humans around the world. Perhaps this was the reason  this branch of hominins to survive where all the others failed and collapsed.

Symbolic language allowed us to think about the past, learn from it, and look at the future and plan for it.  These were critical skills. With symbolic language humans were able to imagine what the future could be.

Symbolic language and art enabled us to understand who we are and what are the possibilities of our being. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Our early ancestors—long before Socrates—appreciated this as well.

At the dawn of symbolic thought, under tremendous climatic pressure Homo sapiens used that symbolic thought and that art to carve a niche where they could not only survive, but thrive.

Niobe Thompson is a scientist, not an artist. Yet this is what he had to say about art:

“I am an anthropologist who became a filmmaker. I left university research because I believe the communication of science is my path. I want my children to grow up in a scientifically literate society, where films that explore the natural world play a central role. But I also believe in the power of art to enlighten, and I am thrilled to be pushing the artistic boundaries of film, striving to make science just as spectacular as it is fascinating.”

Art is important. It is no mere icing on the cake. Art is the cake.

This art was not from that cave. It is not that old as it was outdoors.

The scientists in the television show were clearly of the view that humans in the caves in South Africa 75,000 years ago must have been talking to each other. How else could they transmit their complex knowledge about the environment, about prey, and about the things that could be gathered, to future generations? With language they could talk about what plants were edible and where and how they could be stored. For example, they learned that water, absolutely vital in the drought conditions of southern Africa, could be stored in ostrich egg shells buried under the ground. With language they could tell others what plants were poisonous. They could use language to show each other how to build better stone blades for spears and arrows. They could use language to help each other harness the power of fire they could learn from others what stones when crushed could be useful for their art.

What minerals would last a long time in their stone art? For example, they learned that ochre would make a fine paint for rock art. They could then tell others where ochre could be found. Communication arts would have given early humans a superlative advantage over other hominins. With language humans were able to advise others what soil could be used for art and how complex chemical processes could be taken advantage of by making fires. All this was done 100,000 years ago.

The earliest humans probably used paint, made from things like ochre, to paint their bodies. They put holes in shells, painted them, and then wore them around their necks.

Human needs, even in earliest times, went well beyond food and shelter.  Their concerns went all the way to art.

In many ways, early humans were about as advanced as modern humans.

Subsidizing Pollution

Climate change, Environment

 

Did you notice how the federal government in Canada characterized their carbon tax as a tax on pollution when it introduced the tax. I thought that was smart actually. After all it was true.

Then did you notice how last year (2018) the government quietly, without much fanfare, delivered a $1.6 billion bailout to oil firms in Canada! Some people keep telling me how Indigenous people are always standing with their hands out waiting for money from the government. Well, if that’s true they are not the only ones. You could buy a lot of water treatment plants on Canada’s Indian Reserves for that amount of money.

Here is how Mia Rabson reported on this in the Winnipeg Free Press reported quietly on it in the business pages of the paper:

“Canada’s $1.6 billion bailout package for Alberta’s battered oil industry is well underway, but with little transparency about who is getting the money and for what.

Almost $1billion of the package of loans, guarantees and government grants is in the hands of companies, but details are available for a small fraction of the spending.’

So just as Canada has been falling behind its international commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as international agencies recently announced, we are paying the oil and gas industry $1.6 billion to pollute more! Makes a lot of sense doesn’t it? Paying to pollute.

A subsidy is a financial benefit that the government gives, to businesses or industries or even consumers. Oil and gas subsidies support oil and gas production (and even coal production). Subsidies can be paid directly in cash or indirectly in tax breaks. Either way its 6 of one or half a dozen of the other. Either way the tax-paying public pays. The fossil fuel companies take. You could call it socialism for the rich.

It is not well known that Canada already subsidizes its oil and gas industry by about $3.3 billion. Canada is the largest subsidizer of financial support to its oil and gas industry in the G7 per unit of GDP.  Countries around the world have criticize us for it too. That money could instead be used to pay for 44,000 hospital beds, or put 260,000 high school students through high school or pay for a lot of transition to cleaner energy. So instead of using that money to pay things like that, we pay industries to pollute and we do it at the cost of our international reputation.

Such subsidies also help to lock in our dependence on fossil fuel in the country and continue to supporter the competitor to clean energy provides by making oil and gas seem cheaper.

European countries are already protesting Canada’s position. As Rabson reported,

“Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, said Wednesday it had sold its Alberta-government issued bonds because it will no longer invest in assets held by governments or companies with large climate footprints.

A day later, the European Investment Bank (EIB), the non-profit lending institution of the European Union, announced it will no longer invest in any fossil fuel projects after 2021.”

I know that the Canadian oil and gas sector is already hard hit by the withdrawal of $30 billion in capital in the last 3 years and it is still an important industry in Canada, but isn’t it time that we stop paying people to pollute? Can’t we find better ways to invest our money?

The Madness of Subsidizing Oil and Gas

Climate change, Environment

 

The Oil and Gas sector is heavily subsidized in both Canada and the United States. It has been for years. But many people don’t know how much. This is the case even though their profits are enormous.

I started paying attention to this issue during the Obama administration. At that time, Exxon was the world’s biggest oil company and perhaps the world’s biggest company, and also had the world’s largest profits ever in one year. President Obama, pointed out at the time that Exxon earned $4.7 million profit every hour! He said that the 3 largest oil companies made combined profits in 2011 of $80 billion or $200 million every day.

What was even more astounding was that such large companies, with such huge profits, were subsidized by taxpayers. They were on the public dole! That meant average taxpayers contributed extra subsidies to those  corporate giants. Many of those subsidies were paid through tax breaks. These were tax breaks that ordinary citizens and ordinary small businesses did  not enjoy. According to President Obama, those subsidies amounted to 4 billion annually in the United States. A staggering amount considering who the recipients were, namely huge and already profitable corporations.

In 2012 US President Obama tried to eliminate those subsidies. Shockingly, to me at least, the Senate Republicans blocked the measures to eliminate those tax breaks.  President Obama in arguing for the bill made a simple comment that is hard to deny. “With record profits and rising production, I’m not worried about the big oil companies,” Obama said,  “… I think it’s time they got by without more help from taxpayers, who are having a tough enough time paying their bills and filling up their tanks.”  Yet such simple logic was beyond the ken and understanding of conservative politicians.

When oil companies argue against reducing the subsidies that they have come to cherish their “best” argument is that these subsidies are less than that enjoyed by other huge corporations.  Wow. Some get even more!  This is nuts!

What is really strange—hallucinogenically strange—is that those subsidies continued right through the recession when both the American and Canadian governments claimed to be so lacking in money, they had to make all kinds of cuts. Meanwhile these subsidies seriously exacerbated the most serious environmental problem of our time—climate change. Ordinary people were paying to make things worse!

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008 we have been in and out of recession. Some  think we never really got out of it. A lack of cash made it difficult to consider expensive projects.  Projects like doing something about climate change. Yet we can afford even less to do nothing. Inaction is much more expensive than action.

Carbon emissions have continued to rise during the recession,  though admittedly not as high as they would have risen had economic conditions been better. As Damian Carrington said on his environmental blog,

“The house is ablaze and we are throwing bucket after bucket at it—buckets of petrol. Worse if that is possible, the world’s politicians are not stepping in to stop us stoking the flames: instead they are helping us to pay for the petrol.”

In other words carbon emissions have risen during tough economic times because governments have dragged their feet on the necessary actions and then have made matters worse—much worse—by subsidizing fossil fuels the primary culprit behind climate change. These are truly weird times.

Despite clear warnings from the scientific community for a number of years, our political leaders have done nothing to halt the emission of greenhouse gases so those emissions have been rising by record amounts. This is beginning to look more and more like the people of Easter Island who kept cutting their trees down on their island until they were all gone. I always wondered who was the person on Easter Island who cut down the last tree and how did he think that made sense?  Sometimes we are just plain stupid. And as I have said often about myself, making it a fundamental principle of mine, ‘life is hard when you’re stupid.’

Scientists have for a long time pointed out that any average temperature rise beyond 2° C would not be safe.  “Safe” perhaps is not the best word.  Average temperature rises of 2° C would be serious.  Some say disastrous. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has predicted a temperature rise of 3.5 °C based on current policies. Some agencies have predicted even greater rises. That means we will soon enter a world of mass migrations and severe water shortages. In such a world, England would have the temperature of Morocco today. Manitoba would be about like Kansas.

Another possibility though is that average temperatures will rise even more to 6 °C.  According to Carrington, “That’s Armageddon: large parts of the planet uninhabitable and the risk of runaway warming threatening the rest.”

I am not minimizing what all of us individuals have to do. We too have to get serious about climate change. We have to change the way we live. But the role of governments is also of critical importance. The current inaction by our political leaders is a disgrace.

The IEA has said the role of government is “critical.”  Yet governments like our own stand still. During the Harper regime in Canada he said, he would not inflict the costs of action on our country.  Yet according to the IEA “delaying action is a false economy.” According to the IEA if we save $1 now by doing nothing we will pay $4.30 later to make up for it.”  That certainly would be a misleading “saving.”