Today the Vancouver Sun published an opinion pieceI wrote in advance of the next provincial election. I am reproducing the text of this piece here so I am able to share it on my Facebook Page (which doesn’t allow news stories from Canadian Media to be published).
Opinion Editorial
As we approach the fall election, it is clear to me that Premier David Eby presides over a centrally controlled administration doing more harm across the province than good. Simply put, he has lost the plot of what it takes to govern by deciding to pander to his narrow base of support.
I abhor gamesmanship for political advantage and inflexible doctrines. My departure from academia to run for office in 2013 was predicated on a desire to positively impact the daily lives of my fellow British Columbians toward building a better future, and to change the political discourse on climate change.
Climate change is not something to fear or deny, but rather a grand challenge to be embraced as an incredible opportunity for innovation in mining, forestry, agriculture, manufacturing and the new economy.
While I never considered myself a politician (I much prefer the term “change maker”), I quickly understood that achieving progress requires bringing people with you. One cannot claim to be a leader by preaching what is “right” while willfully ignoring the voices you are supposed to represent.This simple concept helped me navigate negotiations for a confidence and supply agreement with NDP Premier John Horgan following the 2017 election. Collectively, we identified problems, developed a framework for potential solutions, and subsequently worked collaboratively through action, not rhetoric.
Did we agree on everything? Absolutely not. Yet I never wavered in my faith in Horgan’s sincerity to work for the benefit of all or his devotion to practising pragmatism over politics.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for David Eby.
Since assuming the premier’s chair in November 2022, radical ideological-driven activism, empty promises with destructive consequences, and out-of-touch hubris embody the hallmarks of his tenure.
The decision to decriminalize the use of small amounts of drugs while prescribing “safe” supply narcotics is a philosophy that emphasizes harm reduction at the expense of prevention, treatment and enforcement. Yet when Eby had to ask Health Canada to be able to recriminalize public drug use due to parks and streets being overrun, he blamed the courts rather than his shortsightedness for the course correction.
This approach is in stark contrast to Horgan’s admission of regret over the $789-million plan to replace the Royal B.C. Museum. “We made choices based on the best information at hand and we thought we had it right. Clearly, we did not,” is a statement of humility from which Eby should have learned.
Despite continuous commitments to improve outcomes, B.C.’s health-care system is on the verge of collapse. There are 885,000 residents without a family doctor, emergency room admission wait times that regularly fluctuate between four and 12 hours, hospitals running rolling shutdowns due to severe staff shortages, and walk-in clinics so overwhelmed by demand that people often rely on Google to self-diagnose.
Under Eby, government fiscal management is out of control, with two consecutive budgets since Horgan stepped down that raised spending by 14 per cent and 20 per cent respectively. Deficits over the coming three years will dwarf those the province experienced during the height of the pandemic, while the province’s debt has tripled since pre-pandemic levels in 2019-2020. In both cases, the increases far outpace the rate of inflation and population growth.
As a result, two major credit-rating agencies have downgraded B.C. since Eby became premier, which will inevitably result in increased borrowing costs and higher taxes.
I’m also troubled by the rise in hate crimes, particularly against the Jewish community, which has been met with nothing but token reactionary statements by the government. This was confirmed by the resignation of former NDP Finance Minister Selina Robinson, who felt that “it wasn’t safe” to use her voice as a Jewish member of the governing caucus, and that Eby’s response to growing antisemitism was “simply performative.”
I recently publicly opined that I was considering supporting John Rustad’s Conservative Party of B.C. in the October election, which brought a flood of inquiries on how that squared with my beliefs as a climate scientist.
I’ve had several discussions with Rustad, and while there are still gaps between our views on how to respond to the challenges and opportunities afforded by climate change, they are not as wide as some might imagine. In fact, there were similar gaps in the views held by Horgan and myself in the early days of our minority government.
Like Horgan, Rustad’s ability to listen and be open to input are the traits of effective leadership. My conversations with Rustad have given me a very different understanding of his policy proposals when compared to the recent attack messaging advanced by Eby’s government.
I remain unsure of how I will vote in the election. Yet I know with certainty that this is the most consequential decision for B.C.’s electorate in a generation, and it warrants careful consideration away from the noise of self-serving political interests.
Today I published an article in The Conversation concerning the headlines last week proclaiming the Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025. Facebook has decided to block reposting of news stories originating from Canada on their site, so I decided to reproduce the article here. Please go to the link above for the published online version.
“Be very worried: Gulf Stream collapse could spark global chaos by 2025” announced the New York Post. “A crucial system of ocean currents is heading for a collapse that ‘would affect every person on the planet” noted CNN in the U.S. and repeated CTV News here in Canada.
This latest alarmist rhetoric provides a textbook example of how not to communicate climate science. These headlines do nothing to raise public awareness, let alone influence public policy to support climate solutions.
This is also not the first time such headlines have emerged. Back in 1998, the Atlantic Monthly published an article raising the alarm that global “warming could lead, paradoxically, to drastic cooling — a catastrophe that could threaten the survival of civilization.”
In 2002, editorials in the New York Times and Discover magazine offered the prediction of a forthcoming collapse of deep water formation in the North Atlantic, which would lead to the next ice age.
Building on the unfounded assertions in these earlier stories, BBC Horizon televised a 2003 documentary entitled The Big Chill, and in 2004 Fortune magazine published “The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare,” piling on where previous articles left off.
Seeing the opportunity for an exciting disaster movie, Hollywood stepped up to created The Day After Tomorrow in which every known law of thermodynamics was ever so creatively violated.
The latest series of alarmist headlines may not have fixated on an impending ice age, but they still suggest the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation could collapse by 2025. This is an outrageous claim at best and a completely irresponsible pronouncement at worst.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been assessing the likelihood of a cessation of deep-water formation in the North Atlantic for decades. In fact, I was on the writing team of the 2007 4th Assessment Report where we concluded that:
“It is very likely that the Atlantic Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) will slow down during the course of the 21st century. It is very unlikely that the MOC will undergo a large abrupt transition during the course of the 21st century.”
The 6th assessment report went further to conclude that:
“There is no observational evidence of a trend in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), based on the decade-long record of the complete AMOC and longer records of individual AMOC components.”
Understanding climate optimism
Hannah Ritchie, the deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School, recently penned an article for Vox where she proposed an elegant framework for how people see the world and their ability to facilitate change.
Ritchie’s framework lumped people into four general categories based on combinations of those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic about the future, as well as those who believe and those who don’t believe that we have agency to shape the future based on today’s decisions and actions.
Ritchie persuasively argued that more people located in the green “optimistic and changeable” box are what is needed to advance climate solutions. Those positioned elsewhere are not effective in advancing such solutions.
More importantly, rather than instilling a sense of optimism that global warming is a solvable problem, the extreme behaviour (fear mongering or civil disobedience) of the “pessimistic changeable” group (such as many within the Extinction Rebellion movement), often does nothing more than drive the public towards the “pessimistic not changeable” group.
A responsibility to communicate, responsibly
Unfortunately, extremely low probability, and often poorly understood tipping point scenarios, often end up being misinterpreted as likely and imminent climate events.
In many cases, the nuances of scientific uncertainty, particularly around the differences between hypothesis posing and hypothesis testing, are lost on the lay reader when a study goes viral across social media. This is only amplified in situations where scientists make statements where creative licence is taken with speculative possibilities. Possibilities that reader-starved journalists are only too happy to play up in clickbait headlines.
Through independent research and the writing of IPCC reports, the climate science community operates from a position of privilege in the public discourse of climate change science, its impacts and solutions.
Climate scientists have agency in the advancement of climate solutions, and with that agency comes a responsibility to avoid sensationalism. By not tempering their speech, they risk further ratcheting up the rhetoric with nothing to offer in terms of overall solutions or risk reduction.
Yesterday I published an article in The Conversation. It is reproduced below as Facebook appears to be blocking reposting of Canadian news articles.
The Article
This June was the warmest one ever recorded and unprecedented summer heat waves are now gripping southern Europe, China, the Middle East and the southern United States.
In the face of such unprecedented heat, one would think that the world would wake up to the urgent need to rapidly decarbonize energy systems, transition to a low carbon economy and increase investment in negative emission technologies.
Globally-averaged June surface temperature anomalies relative to the 20th century average showing June 2023 as 1.05 C above this 20th century average.National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association
Tourists also headed in droves to the beaches and historical sites of Italy, Spain and Greece, where governments were warning them to stay indoors to avoid the potentially life-threatening heat.
I doubt those jetting off to visit the heat-ravaged regions of the world are aware that Antarctica has already shattered previous sea ice melt records, with potentially dire consequences for glacial outflow and future sea level rise.
Are tourists aware that coral reefs worldwide are in the process of dying off on an unprecedented scale?
Perhaps they might want to reflect on the fact that Earth has already warmed by around 1.1 to 1.2 C since pre-industrial times.
I suspect that these travellers are unaware that when these other pesky greenhouse gases are included, the net radiative effect is equivalent to 523 ppm CO2e, of which only 417 ppm is from CO2 alone.
The Paris Agreement
Governments worldwide have signed on to the 2015 Paris Agreement committing nations to collectively limit global warming to well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C.
The Paris Agreement might appear promising. But the reality is that the 1.5 C guardrail cannot be met, and that socioeconomic inertia prevents us from even staying below the 2 C threshold. Even if every country met its promised emissions reductions, global mean temperatures would still soar past 2 C.
We have known for more than 15 years that “if a 2.0 C warming is to be avoided, direct CO2 capture from the air, together with subsequent sequestration, would eventually have to be introduced in addition to sustained 90 per cent global carbon emissions reductions by 2050.”
So, while governments, industry and public sector institutions worldwide are announcing their intention to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, the reality is these are nothing more than aspirational goals made by decision-makers who will not be around to be held accountable for the decisions they made.
Reaching net-zero
To meet the target of these net-zero claims, most will rely on so-called nature-based solutions such as planting trees, using biochar in soils to enhance soil carbon uptake and restoring mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass meadows.
To be clear, nature-based climate solutions have an important role to play.
Human disruption of natural ecosystems has accounted for about 30 per cent of historical greenhouse gas emissions, so it is reasonable to expect nature-based climate solutions to have a key role to play moving forward.
While nature-based solutions can help in climate change adaptation and the preservation of biodiversity, there is a growing danger that governments, industry and the public will come to rely on them to maintain the status quo, thereby delaying what is actually needed.
We now need an immediate transition towards the decarbonization of global energy systems and the widespread introduction of negative emission technology, such as direct air carbon capture and deep underground carbon sequestration.
This is the only hope humanity has for a long-term solution to global warming.
We can take comfort in the very real successes of nature-based solutions and their many benefits. But we cannot take our eyes off the scale of the challenge before us. While all the solutions are known, achieving the goals of net zero emissions in the future is a matter of individual, institutional, corporate and political will.
Each of us is part of the problem, meaning that each of us can also be part of the solution. And this notion can create an environment ripe for innovation and creativity — the foundational requirements of any prosperous and vibrant future.
Today the BC NDP delivered the budget for the next fiscal year. Below I reproduce the media release my office issued in response to it. As you will see from the release (reproduced below), I was pleased with Budget 2020 and I look forward to expanding on these initial remarks when I respond in the legislature hopefully tomorrow.
Media Release
MLA Weaver responds to 2020 Budget For Immediate Release February 18, 2020
Victoria, BC — The BC NDP’s 2020 Budget is one that invests in the people of British Columbia and charts a path forward for a sustainable economy that works for everyone.
“I’m delighted to see this government continuing to work towards lowering the cost of living for middle class British Columbians,” said Andrew Weaver, MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head. “Actions such as the elimination of MSP premiums which I have long advocated for, the construction of new affordable housing units, the raising of earnings exemptions for those on income and disability assistance, and increased funding for childcare and public education should ensure that the benefits of economic growth in BC are widely shared”.
While the 2020 budget introduces several changes that positively impact the lives of British Columbians now, it is also forward looking, making significant investments into the future of the province and in particular today’s youth. Funding dedicated to increasing the supply of teachers, counsellors, and psychologists contribute to the positive social and cognitive development of our children as they move through school.
The creation of the needs-based, up-front BC Access Grant should equalize post-secondary educational opportunities in the province by allowing students to focus on their studies without worrying about how they are going to pay for their tuition. New 24/7 mental health resources for students at post-secondary institutions should no longer place young adults in a position where they feel like they have to choose between their personal well-being and academic success.
“BC’s 2020 budget also makes necessary infrastructure investments, at a time when access to capital is cheap, to manage a growing population while, at the same time, transitioning the province to a low-carbon economy by linking capital expenditures to Clean BC,” adds Weaver.
The construction of new hospitals, bridges, roads, houses, and schools promise to create numerous good, well-paying jobs in all regions of our province in addition to alleviating strains on public services.
“Innovative design and the integration of BC engineered wood products and energy/energy conservation systems into these capital projects demonstrates British Columbia’s ongoing leadership in recognizing that the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions can be paired with job creation throughout the province,” notes Weaver.
Although the budget does continue to devote resources to projects which I continue to oppose, such as the Site C dam and LNG developments, I am pleased that the government is now demonstrating its commitment to the economy of tomorrow by supporting the emerging bioeconomy, the quantum computing sector, the agri-tech and life sciences. The continued backing of renewable energy projects, ZEVs, and electric aircrafts will make our economic growth largely sustainable.
At its heart, the 2020 budget is one that places people first while embracing the opportunities created by technological and climatic change, ensuring that BC is well positioned to thrive moving forward.
MLA Weaver will monitor the progress and implementation of these budget measures to ensure they benefit the people of British Columbia.
-30-
Media contact Judy Fainstein
Executive Director
Legislative Office of Andrew Weaver, MLA
+1 250-744-7615 | Judy.Fainstein@leg.bc.ca
As noted in the contest poster to the right, it encourages K-12 students to create visual artwork that explores the importance of community and democracy.
Contest winners will receive a trip to Victoria and their artwork will be displayed in the provincial Parliament Buildings.
