The Letters section in today’s Globe and Mail is filled with readers’ thoughts on climate change. One such reader is me. Please see the fifth letter from the top for my response to the “What about China?” excuse for Canadian climate inaction.
Dear Prime Minister Trudeau,
In the wake of Sunday’s horrendous terrorist attack on Quebec’s Muslim community, I am writing to ask that you forcefully condemn not just the shooting itself, but the rising tide of Islamophobia that appears to have prompted it.
On January 27, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning the entry of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries and suspending America’s refugee program. It is not enough that you meekly defend the ability of Canadian dual citizens to cross the border. You must join with other members of the international community in denouncing Trump’s racist policy in the strongest terms possible.
Furthermore, Canada must put its money where its mouth is by significantly increasing its intake of refugees over and above the current target for 2017, prioritizing those who have been left stranded by Trump’s Muslim ban. We must also rescind our “Safe Third Country Agreement” with the United States.
Finally, in the event that the Trump administration continues to escalate its policies of bigotry and exclusion in the months and years to come, Canada must be willing to seriously consider measures such as expelling the American ambassador or withdrawing from practices of military cooperation. I realize this is not something to take lightly — the United States being our closest neighbour and ally — but some values must take precedence over friendship and loyalty, such as the fundamental equality of all human beings regardless of race, religion, or nationality.
A light touch is not what is currently needed. (Much less a “pivot.”) The desperate circumstances unleashed by Trump’s hateful actions require that Canada’s government be more steadfast than ever in declaring the universality of human rights.
Thank you for considering my thoughts.
Sincerely,
David Taub Bancroft
Vancouver, BC
cc: Harjit Sajjan, MP for Vancouver South
What is “Responsibility to Protect”?
“Responsibility to Protect,” or R2P, is a doctrine that grew out of a 2001 report by the Canadian-established International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). Unanimously endorsed as a general principle by the UN General Assembly four years later, R2P carries a hefty moral (though not legal) weight. The doctrine holds that it is the responsibility of nation states to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, and that if they prove unwilling or unable to do so, responsibility falls on the international community. As a last resort, this responsibility may take the form of military intervention.
What’s the difference between that and humanitarian intervention?
The concept of humanitarian intervention is older and less well-defined. While some R2P advocates prefer not to use the language of humanitarian intervention, we may think of R2P as the latest attempt to spell out and operationalize this older concept, specifically by switching the focus from the rights of self-appointed “global policemen” to the responsibilities of the international community as a whole.
Is R2P simply a dressed-up form of imperialism?
There are many hawks and warmongers around the world who seek to apply the doctrine in this way. But if they did not have R2P, surely that wouldn’t stop them from finding some other pretext for endless war. I am inclined to think of the motives behind R2P as being mostly noble, at least in the abstract. After all, it is hard to imagine that there is simply no such thing as a crime so heinous as to justify military intervention. Truly just wars may be the exception rather than the rule, but a stance of total pacifism is a bit absolutist for my taste.
So then R2P is a good thing?
Again, not quite. While considerably more fleshed out than past notions of humanitarian intervention, R2P still contains far too many abstractions and ambiguities to prevent abuse by militarists with ulterior motives.
Where does Syria fit in all this?
With a civil war raging that is estimated already to have killed 100,000 and displaced millions, and with allegations that large amounts of chemical weapons were used in an assault outside of Damascus last month, many Western politicians and journalists have advocated an attack on Syria on R2P grounds. As former Canadian Justice minister Irwin Cotler put it, “if mass atrocities in Syria are not a case for R2P, then there is no R2P.”
Well, is he right? Is the world required by R2P to intervene militarily in Syria?
No. For all its flaws, the R2P doctrine embraces the norm of non-intervention as a starting point and places the burden of proof on those who seek to break it. The following six criteria (borrowed from traditional Just War theory) must be met to allow military action: right authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects.
Surely putting a halt to the unspeakable violence destroying the people of Syria must be a just cause, right?
Perhaps so. But what of the other criteria? While it is not always obvious how to interpret R2P’s vague language; and while R2P’s standards for permitting intervention are, if anything, not stringent enough; it would be a stretch to believe that the case for war with Syria clears all six of the above thresholds.
Take “reasonable prospects.” This criterion requires a military action to have a good chance of bringing about a desirable outcome. With the notoriously unsavoury elements who make up large parts of the divided Syrian rebel forces, this may not be a realistic goal. What if the rebels continue, or even intensify, sectarian violence once they form government? What if, as some accounts allege, rebel factions were actually the ones responsible for last month’s suspected chemical attack, instead of the regime? What if the expected American bombardment of Syria drags other countries of the region into the war as well?
Then there is “right authority.” The original ICISS report on R2P requires any military intervention to be carried out under the auspices of the UN Security Council or, failing that, the UN General Assembly or, failing that, a regional organization (such as the Arab League) “acting within its defined boundaries.” The subsequent General Assembly endorsement of the principle restricted authorizing capability to just the Security Council, in line with established international law. In the atmosphere of pre-war sabre-rattling presently underway, the United States has not indicated that it will seek permission to attack Syria from any international body.
Okay, so no war. What should we do about Syria, then?
There are no easy answers to this question. A best-case scenario would be that the current threat of military intervention, unjustified though it is, might prompt a greater openness to diplomacy and compromise on the part of the Syrian regime. Far more likely, however, is that the civil war will just drag on. It brings no pleasure to admit this, but readily available solutions to the crisis in Syria do not present themselves through either intervention or non-intervention. In scenarios like this, the Hippocratic principle of “first, do no harm,” cited with approval in the original R2P report, must guide the actions of the international community. Right now, we need to focus our efforts on diplomacy and humanitarian aid instead of war, and hope for a breakthrough.
For many years, I have felt that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were an exaggeration. Yes, Israel has been unyielding in its expansion of settlements in the West Bank in clear violation of international law, effectively dividing the already-slight territory into several isolated segments and making the creation of a viable Palestinian state nearly impossible. But Israel has withdrawn settlers from occupied territory before, in the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. Unlikely as it may now appear, it could always happen again.
The above represents the optimistic perspective I have traditionally held. With every passing year, it becomes harder to maintain this optimism. Israeli settlers in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) currently number around half a million — far more than anything Israel has ever removed before. I do not know exactly how close the settlements are to a point of no return — or indeed if they have passed that point already — but what seems obvious to me is that if the two-state solution is not yet dead, it is clearly dying, and every decision to authorize or excuse settlement expansion in the West Bank diminishes its chance of full recovery.
This is the only lens through which to understand last week’s United Nations General Assembly vote granting Palestinians “non-member observer state” status. While Israel occasionally claims to be in favour of some form of two-state solution, as soon as the moment came to put its money where its mouth was, the country led a small number of other rejectionists (shamefully including my own Canadian government) in voting against Palestinian statehood. Then, in retaliation against Palestine for its victory at the UN, Israel announced plans for new settlement construction in a move that will further carve up the West Bank.
The occurrence of these events mere days after Israel concluded its brutal assault on Gaza and agreed to a truce with Hamas is especially disturbing. According to Palestinian parliamentarian and peace activist Mustafa Barghouti:
What worries me most today is that Israel is sending a message to the Palestinians that if you do non-violence, we will oppress you. If you do the most peaceful, non-violent act of turning to the United Nations, we will punish you. But if you use violence and guns, we will respect you. That’s the message that Palestinians are getting, and that’s a wrong message.
Furthermore, in addition to hurting Palestinians, Israel is hurting itself. If the two-state solution becomes impractical, Palestinians and their international supporters will not simply roll over and accept the eternal occupation of Palestine as a fait accompli. Rather, they will demand (and who can blame them?) voting rights in Israeli elections for all living under Israeli sovereignty. The two-state solution will die and be reborn as the one-state solution, featuring equal democratic rights for all people — Jewish and Palestinian — between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
For most Israelis, this is a nightmare scenario. I am not quite so pessimistic.
Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip together make up a natural social and economic unit, and if one accepts the right of return for Palestinian refugees (as anyone who believes in the universality of human rights must), then the pre-1967 borders are a rather arbitrary place to draw the partition line. The only good reason to defend the two-state solution is that it remains the path of least resistance. Majorities or pluralities among Israelis and Palestinians support two states, as does virtually the entire international community. Furthermore, after decades of violence and hatred, there may be some utility in at least temporarily giving each population its own state.
For these reasons, I have always supported an interim two-state period to allow tempers to cool, but have remained hopeful that eventually, after years of reconciliation, a single binational state might emerge.
Naive? Who’s to say? What is obvious, however, is that Israeli intransigence on settlements is eclipsing any possibility of an intermediate stage. A time will soon come — if it hasn’t already — when one state is the only choice left.
Mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right)
If you look at world history, ever since men began waging war, you will see that there’s a permanent race between sword and shield. The sword always wins. The more improvements that are made to the shield, the more improvements are made to the sword.
Today marks the 67th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. On 6 August 1945, the United States dropped a single bomb on the city that instantly killed 80,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki that instantly killed another 40,000. Many tens of thousands more eventually died in both cities from the effects of radiation, resulting in total deaths of over 200,000.
The use of nuclear weapons in war has thankfully never been repeated, but there are still an estimated 19,000 such weapons in the world — a mere five percent of which could render the planet virtually uninhabitable. These stockpiles are split between the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. And while some leaders occasionally pay lip service to the ideal of a nuclear-free world, it is not often that countries undergo unilateral disarmament.
Why? Because of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), according to which a country will be deterred from attacking another country provided that doing so risks self-annihilation. But even if it is true that a nuclear arsenal causes the national security of its possessor to improve by discouraging attack, the world as a whole becomes a much more dangerous place. Accidents can happen, nuclear materials can be stolen or sold to non-state actors, and there is no guarantee that military and political leaders will invariably respect the logic of abstract game theoretical models. As long as nuclear weapons exist, the probability of their use increases with time. In fact, there have been numerous close calls already. The prospect of destruction is made no more tolerable by virtue of its mutual assurance.
So how do we convince the nine countries currently in the nuclear club to give up their weapons? Relentless pressure on their governments by regular people all over the world is an obvious part of the answer, but it is almost certainly not enough. What else?
States must be assured that not only they but also their geopolitical rivals will be expected to disarm. And they must be confident that their rivals will not be permitted to renege on their agreements. So perhaps a stepping stone is needed — one in which full global disarmament does not take place right away. Instead, nuclear weapons could be taken out of the hands of nation states and given to the United Nations. Such an arsenal — belonging to the international community as a whole — would be meant to deter individual states from rearming themselves. However, the bar for its use would have to be set very high via the requirement of a large supermajority — say, 12 out of 15 members of the Security Council, or perhaps a similar percentage in the General Assembly. Only something along these lines would be high enough to prevent the weapons’ frivolous use, but not so high as to eliminate the deterrent effect.
Once again, this would only be a temporary measure, with complete nuclear disarmament remaining the long-term goal. The important thing is that nuclear weapons be taken out of the hands of unaccountable and potentially trigger-happy nation states. The loss of military power and prestige would be a small price to pay for the increase in overall global security. And on Hiroshima Day of all days, we owe it to the countless victims of the two nuclear massacres 67 years ago to prevent their tragedies from recurring.
George Monbiot offers a fascinating insight in the wake of last week’s United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro. While rightly deriding the declaration adopted by world leaders for containing little more than meaningless fluff, he notes an evolution in diplomatic language regarding the environment over the years from “sustainability” to “sustainable development” to “sustainable growth” to, most recently, “sustained growth.”
This seems as good a time as any to launch into a topic dear to every environmentalist’s heart: the growth debate.
Intuitively, it does not make much sense to suppose that infinite economic growth is possible in a finite world. Natural resources are limited, as is the Earth’s capacity to absorb pollution. To observe that we have not yet run up against any economy-shattering limits is to miss the point. Such undying faith in growth, according to biologist Paul Ehrlich, “is roughly equivalent to bragging about one’s ability to write a bigger check each month, while paying no attention to the balance in the account.” And while many predictions of ecological doom have come and gone, miscalculations over timing do not get us off the hook. The fact that limits exist, and that the world will eventually reach them unless we radically change course, is a matter of ecological, physical, and mathematical necessity.
It is here that three points need to be made.
First, the counterargument: human ingenuity (the ultimate free lunch!). Infinite economic growth need not be unsustainable, this line of reasoning goes, provided that it is geared towards such environmentally beneficial ends as recycling, mass transit, and wind farms. Technological fixes and the brilliant minds that think of them will always keep us a step ahead of disaster.
Unfortunately, such solutions will merely delay the inevitable rather than prevent it — which is not entirely a bad thing. The challenge of convincing the world of the monumental socioeconomic change that is needed is not to be underestimated, and environmentalists so far have not been up to the task. In this context, buying time is an important part of any strategy for sustainability. However, the time available to us is limited. Yes, we can substitute renewable for nonrenewable resources, but even the former have fixed rates of regeneration. And gains in energy efficiency are circumscribed by the laws of thermodynamics. Growth can be “green” for only so long before reverting to more familiar forms of ever-increasing production, consumption, pollution, and depletion.
A second consideration: distribution. If what I say is correct, we will eventually have to bring an end to economic growth or else have such an end forced upon us by the laws of nature. In fact, since the world population’s current ecological footprint is already too large to be sustained, we will almost certainly need to “degrow” — to reduce the overall size of the global economy. This is easy enough for somebody in a rich industrialized country to say, it might be objected, but what about those in the developing world, those for whom higher incomes are not a matter of greed but of basic dignity and survival?
My answer, sadly, will not make the job of persuading my fellow First Worlders any easier. The only morally acceptable way to pursue degrowth is, at the same time, to massively redistribute wealth both between and within nations. This means that while the global economy as a whole shrinks, the world’s most impoverished countries will continue to grow until their standards of living improve. Developed countries, meanwhile, those with wealth to spare, will need to “pick up the slack” and degrow even further until some kind of equilibrium is reached. This is the only way to bring about global environmental sustainability without pushing the world’s most desperately poor further into destitution.
My third point is one that makes even environmentalists a little uncomfortable: when we talk about growth, what we are actually talking about is capitalism. Private enterprise needs endless growth to survive. Without it, competitive market economies are reduced to zero-sum games where one person’s win is literally another’s loss. This is why recessions and depressions carry such heavy human tolls. While a no-growth economy could easily be environmentally sustainable, it would not be socially sustainable unless we transition to a completely different mode of production.
That’s right, comrades, I’m talking about the dreaded S-word! (Maybe Joe Oliver was right. Maybe greens — at least some of us — really are radicals.)
So, of the many forms of socialism out there, which should we adopt? How do we get there from here? How much time should we allow ourselves to make the transition? And how do we go about convincing regular people, to say nothing of those with money and power, to embrace such fundamental change?
I leave these questions to someone more knowledgeable than I. In this post, I prefer to restrict myself to superficially discussing limits to growth and their moral and economic implications, and to marking the lack of long-term solutions from last week’s Rio+20 conference. But as always, I am happy to entertain contributions of ideas, strategies, and criticisms in the comments section below from any whose human ingenuity is not quite so subject to natural limits as mine.
With an all-too-familiar rhythm, the drums of war are sounding. The target? An authoritarian Middle Eastern regime set on acquiring exceptionally destructive weapons.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
This time around the country is Iran, and the weapons allegedly being developed are nuclear. The Israeli government (although apparently not with the blessing of its people) seems to be laying the diplomatic groundwork for an attack on Iran, claiming an existential threat. Meanwhile in the US, Republicans are showing off their hyper-conservative chutzpah by forcefully condemning President Obama’s reluctance to lead or to sanction such a military adventure.
Most of the talk on this issue, from both politicians and the media, fails to consider two key points:
According to many analysts, including US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Iran is not currently building a nuclear weapon, but simply developing the capability to do so should it wish to exercise that option quickly at a later date — a capability which many non-nuclear states (such as Canada) already have, and which in itself does not contravene any international laws. But even if Iran does fully acquire nuclear weapons, why is it a foregone conclusion that it would use them? Countries are generally not in the business of committing suicide, and a nuclear Iran would be far more inclined just to exploit the deterrence value of its weapons than to invite nuclear retaliation from Israel and the US.
While every country individually is unlikely to launch a nuclear war, these low probabilities begin to add up as membership grows in the club of nuclear powers. We should not ignore the threat of catastrophe through theft, accident, or the inexorable illogic of a nuclear-armed game of chicken. But Iran is no more inherently dangerous in this respect than the US or Israel.
There is widespread belief in the West that the world can be neatly divided into countries that are and are not “responsible” enough for nukes, but the only objective measure for such a division is the historical record. How many countries have actually used nuclear weapons in war? One, the United States. How many additional “close calls” have there been? Two that come to mind are the Cuban Missile Crisis and the incident of the American scientific probe launched near Russia in 1995. The myth that longstanding nuclear powers are somehow more trustworthy than so-called “rogue states” is unfounded. Iran has as much reason to feel threatened by Israel’s nukes as Israel has to feel threatened by Iran’s.
Going to war will at best delay what nuclear ambitions Iran has, not destroy them. Instead of seeking to preserve the current global system of nuclear apartheid, the only realistic and non-hypocritical way to halt proliferation is to work for a just and lasting peace in a nuclear-free Middle East, and ultimately, a nuclear-free world.
Hot on the heels of my previous post, please see my succinct letter to the editor in today’s Vancouver Sun on the subject of Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol.
Per capita greenhouse gas emissions by country in 2000 (including land-use change)
After weeks of rumours, Environment Minister Peter Kent confirmed Monday that Canada is officially pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol. Echoing the United States, our government has long complained that China, India, and other large developing countries are not required under the current phase of the treaty to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, say our leaders, any fair agreement ought to treat all major polluters — rich or poor — equally.
Due to the usual distaste amongst politicians for clear statements for which they can later be held accountable, I have been unable to find out in precise detail what Mr. Kent means by his demand for equal treatment. (Not all equalities are created equal, after all.) As far as I can tell, there are two likely possibilities. One is that he wants both developed and developing countries to commit to the same percentage of emissions reductions. This would be an absurd and deeply immoral proposition. Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions per capita are four times those of China and thirteen times those of India. For all three countries to be legally required to reduce their emissions at an identical rate would preserve this inequality in stone and amount to nothing less than climate apartheid.
Of course, China and India both have higher total greenhouse gas emissions than Canada, as they have vastly larger populations. But this measurement is not very relevant. Nation-states are artificial entities; only people truly exist. Accordingly, countries must be judged by the greenhouse gas emissions of the individuals who live there.
The second — and more charitable — interpretation of Canada’s position is that our government favours equal levels of per capita greenhouse gas emissions in every country. On the face of it, this is much fairer, but it is also historically myopic. More than two-thirds of the carbon emissions ever produced have come from the small portion of humanity concentrated in the developed world; the imbalance is even greater when calculated in terms of per capita emissions. This trend is now changing, but it is hard to dispute the historical importance that the burning of fossil fuels played in the economic development of today’s rich countries.
Thankfully, more alternatives exist today, and it is incumbent upon industrialized countries to transfer technology and accelerate the establishment of an effective Green Climate Fund in order to facilitate sustainable development around the globe. But to the extent that it is true that, in our flawed world, at least some fossil fuel use will continue to be necessary for now to give developing countries the economic advantages already exploited by developed countries, it is only fair that they be allowed to eventually achieve a higher level of per capita emissions (they’re still a long way off), and to maintain this legal leg-up until their citizens’ standards of living begin to approach our own. Total global emissions need to go down sharply enough to avert catastrophic global warming, but how this burden is to be distributed across the world remains an open question. Intuitive standards of justice demand that the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change be respected.
So does the recently signed deal at the UN COP 17 conference in Durban achieve this goal? It’s hard to say, since not much was agreed to aside from a commitment to negotiate the real agreement by 2015. There is language acknowledging that this future agreement will take the form of “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties” (my emphasis). But whether or not all parties are to make an equal sacrifice is not specified. Nor, for that matter, are concrete emissions targets. Considering the urgency represented by the risk of runaway global warming, any delaying tactic — which is surely what the Durban platform amounts to (the predicted 2015 agreement is not meant to take effect until 2020) — is a step in the wrong direction.
And where does that leave Canada and Kyoto? According to the outcome of negotiations in Durban, the newly extended Kyoto Protocol will be the only legally binding global agreement regulating greenhouse gases until 2020. It is far from perfect; the targets it sets are not nearly stringent enough to solve the problems it needs to. But as the “only game in town,” it is considerably better than nothing, and represents at least a timid nod towards the morally necessary principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.”
And Canada, as expected, has abandoned it. Time and again, we are proving ourselves to be on the wrong side of history. No amount of griping about China and India is going to change that.
Song of the Watermelon 