Open letter to The Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of the Environment, Government of Canada

Saturday, 05 July 2014

Dear Minister Aglukkaq,

Qanuippit? I am sure that you are as concerned about the effects of climate change as I am. After all, it is your constituents, your people, who are feeling the effects of the rapid loss of sea ice and permafrost, far more than most Canadians. Perhaps you are not aware though, that the Arctic is losing summer ice faster than even the worst case predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

We are no longer working from computer models, but from actual measurements of land, air and sea. We can no longer take refuge in “not in my lifetime” for the changes are happening before our eyes. Glaciers in Greenland have receded farther in the last ten years than they had in the 100 years preceding[i]. Indeed, while eastern North America felt the coldest winter in decades, northern Greenland temperatures were 6 degrees above normal and other parts of the world had record-breaking warm temperatures. Andean mountains that even 10 years ago were topped by glaciers are now bare. Now we are learning that the Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing as well.

Even more alarming is the risk of methane release from the Arctic seabed, where hundreds of gigatons of methane hydrate are stored in the permafrost sediments[ii]. Methane is 35 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide measured over 10 years. For the past 15,000 years the gas has remained frozen thanks to the ice cover. But as summer sunlight warms the sea, combined with storms, especially in the very shallow, seismically and tectonically unstable East Siberian Arctic Shelf, massive quantities could be released into the atmosphere in great volumes, which would trigger an irreversible cycle of catastrophic global warming[iii]. 

Something like this has happened before. At the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago, the huge release of methane and carbon dioxide from melting permafrost caused by volcanic activity in the Arctic resulted in the extinction of 95% of all life on Earth.[iv] We too are vulnerable: acidifying oceans, loss of ground water and arable land, deforestation and mass extinction are already at advanced stages. Famine, mass migration, disease and war are the logical outcomes if we continue as we have been.

The bears, seals, fish, humans, microbes, birds, water, insects and whales are deeply connected. What is done to one is done to all; when ecosystems die, we die. In your heart, Ms. Aglukkaq, you know that this is true. To believe that great wealth can insulate those who benefit financially from this crisis is a delusion - the present crisis is global.

Former US president Ronald Reagan once said, in reference to the cold war between the West and the Soviet Union, that if the Earth were threatened by an invasion from space, the people of the world would cease fighting each other and unite in a common cause. Well, the Earth is threatened, but the threat is not from aliens. To prevent this catastrophe, slowing the rate of carbon emissions will not be enough; we must begin to remove carbon from the atmosphere and reverse the process of global warming.

To accomplish this heroic task will require the collaboration of the best minds in the world.  Governments, industry and all sectors of civil society from all nations must come together and mobilize as if for war.  

To finance this effort, we must shift our focus from maximizing profit by any means to using every means to profit from carbon reduction. In addition to currently proposed carbon and speculation taxes, monetary policy must change from the creation of money through debt, which dictates perpetual economic growth even at the expense of the planet’s life support systems and destruction of human well- being, to a system of “demurrage” or negative interest.[v] This policy would make the storage of wealth uneconomical and free up the enormous capital required to recover the losses of the past century[vi]. In conjunction with monetary policy, international law must be amended to protect the sustainability of the biosphere, including making ecocide a crime on the scale of genocide and crimes against humanity[vii].

Funding must be re-allocated immediately from fossil fuel extraction to research, development and manufacture of renewable energy sources.  Industries must be designed and placed so that the waste products of one will be the raw materials of the next, and so on, for zero waste manufacturing. The objective of manufacturing must become durability and ease of repair, which will be economically desirable in a demurrage-based monetary system. Mass consumerism will be replaced with an economy based on shared resources and human interaction.

The most efficient carbon sequestration process would be the regeneration of the 75% of the planet’s forests that have been lost over the past century, and this must be done on a massive scale, from the rainforests to the boreal. Food bearing trees may be preferred. In cities, we need to convert all waste land into green space, including sustainable, urban agriculture, green roofs and conversion of industrial lawns to food production. In rural areas the recapture of arable land, 30% of which has been lost to development and desertification over the past 40 years, must become a priority. None of these initiatives will be possible without effective water management programs to preserve and protect the aquifers, rivers and lakes, which must involve enlightened agricultural and industrial policies.

If we humans can land on the moon and come back, build marvels of technology, perform miracles of surgery and medicine and create systems of global governance, we can reverse this process of destruction.  We can do this and still increase our well-being. The crisis we are in is primarily a crisis of failure of imagination.

It is an epic struggle never before engaged upon in this planet’s history that, if successful, could lead to the kind of world we all dream of; the kind of communities we long for, in which decision making at all levels is devolved to those who are directly affected by the consequences of their actions, where stewardship of resources is returned to those who have the cultural experience to manage them. This would include restoration of the commons, where sharing will be more valued than ownership, and will lead to a more peaceful, harmonious world where we can collaborate on happiness instead of competition.  In such active self-reliant communities, where citizens work together for common cause, we can expect levels of obesity, diabetes, drug addictions, violence and depression all to be reduced.

The IPCC has stated that a concerted effort to turn the climate around could cost a mere $200 billion, a small fraction of the world’s military budget, with little change to human well-being. However, a recent article in the scientific journal Nature estimates the loss to the global economy of not acting now, at the present rate of global warming, to be $60 trillion.

“People are calculating possible economic benefits in the billions of dollars and we’re talking about possible costs and damage and extra impacts in the order of tens of trillions of dollars,” said Chris Hope, professor at Cambridge’s Judge Business School and IPCC Report author, in an interview with The Financial Times.

Am I being alarmist? If you were standing in the middle of a road and I saw a truck bearing down on you, and I screamed at you to get off the road, would that be alarmist? The truck might swerve or brake in time, but you wouldn’t continue to stand in the road and hope for the best. If the chance of catastrophic change is even 50%, we would be foolish not to act now.

The world needs to get together and act now to do everything we can to stop this extreme danger. As the most Arctic of circumpolar countries, Canada can and should be a world leader in this struggle.  Canada then would once again take its rightful position as a leader among nations.

Respectfully,

David Burman DDS, PhD, and many others.

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