Have We Done Enough To Fight Climate Change?

She proceeds to show through calculation that Canada is in fact not close to halfway to reaching its targets. Either way, May points out, “by the deadline year of 2020, we will have failed to achieve the [Copenhagen] goal.”

Although Canada did reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, the decrease can primarily be explained by the world-wide recession, according to May.

Josh Laughren, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s climate change and energy program, confirms the urgency of action when it comes to global warming.

Emitted greenhouse gases, accumulating in the atmosphere at an increasing rate around the world, are changing our planet’s heat-balance, leading to an overall greater temperature, he says.

While “greenhouse gases are a good thing and a warmed climate is a good thing, it’s the rate and degree of change that are of concern,” Laughren says, adding that climate change could produce “potentially devastating consequences for all life on the planet, including our own.”

And yet, it seems that the rate and degree of interest in climate change is slowly passing us.

While polls and global activity show cognizance of a need for change, not nearly enough action is being taken to stop a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius, according to Laughren.

Laughren addresses this apparent human apathy when it comes to climate change. He explains that part of the reason for inaction is the distance between the present and the visible effects of such a present, 50 years from now.

“Our brains as a species have not evolved to deal with problems far into the future… it is a genuinely new challenge for our species,” Laughren says.

But this explanation does not account for the hundreds, thousands even, of advocacy groups around the world who have seen a fuzzy but frightening future, and who are fighting climate change.

When it comes to a lack of effectiveness of those groups, “there’s also a huge lot of people making a lot of money under the current system who are very loath to change,” Laughren says.

“An entire economic system has been built up on the burning of fossil fuels… it’s a hell of a ship to turn around. There is an incredible amount of inertia in the system.”

Nevertheless, if apathy and inefficiency do not loosen their grip and allow for us to take the bull by its horns, then we may soon enough not be in a position to care about our economic systems.

The Northwest Passage has been passable in the summer for several years already, and arctic communities are relocating because of melting permafrost. We’re seeing storms, droughts and flooding being exacerbated by climate change.

Even today, if over-pollution were to stop this very second, we would find ourselves with a 0.8 degree change, says Laughren. In a more realistic tone, if we were to massively decrease our pollution starting today, we would still be locking ourselves into well over one degree of increase – and we’re very close to two.

Though this may not seem like much of a change, Laughren says that a change of 6 degrees makes it hard “to even imagine a stable, well-functioning society as there is now.”

The Atmosphere as a Public Good

Sumeet Gulati, an associate professor at University of British Columbia, provides a reason for slow action regarding climate change that is very similar to Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons.”

Hardin, an American ecologist born in 1915, published several articles about the inability to sustain a public resource. In a 1968 article for Science magazine entitled The Tragedy of the Commons, he addressed the relevance of public ownership when it comes to pollution.

“The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them,” he wrote. “Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest,’ so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.”

This is exactly how the countries of the world are behaving with regard to greenhouse gases.

As Gulati explains, there is an idea that any action against climate change provides benefits not only to the acting country but to the rest of the world as well. No country wants to find itself spending money that benefits the world while other countries remain on the cheaper, more pollutant path.

“They want a free ride; let someone bear the costs and you get the benefits,” says Gulati, who specializes in agricultural economics.

As Hardin would argue, Gulati blames this problem primarily on the fact that the atmosphere is a common good; no specific person is responsible for it, and yet all stand to lose from it.

The tragedy of the commons in the atmosphere sees all countries continuing to pollute excessively in expectation that other countries will stop doing so first; but no country has stopped yet.

The problem is accentuated by the fact that not all countries suffer from global warming to the same degree at the same time. Though every country, every city, emits greenhouse gases separately, they all mix together once they are in the atmosphere.

“The atmosphere doesn’t care where the carbon molecule was emitted,” explains Laughren. “Arctic countries are hit first and hardest.”