An Intergenerational Crime

My daughter Caitlin is the light of my life.

Like most parents, I love and cherish my child. I want her to have a luminous and exceptional future. Her adult life should flourish in a world that is equitable, inclusive, and sustainable.

Caitlin is not responsible for climate change, but she may ultimately be among those suffering most from it.

As I write this, NASA has published a study predicting that parts of Canada will experience massive ecological change by the year 2100, resulting in almost 40 percent of land-based ecosystems undergoing changes in reaction to rising levels of greenhouse gases.

Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology say the changes would result in humans and animals adapting and relocating, and some species of wildlife would not survive.

Much of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, where grasslands meet boreal regions, are expected to experience some of the most dramatic effects. Prairie grasslands would move northward, pushing the boreal forest further northward as well.

Although Canada contributes about 1.7 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) – an organization within the United States Department of Energy – has released preliminary CO2 emissions estimates showing Canada to be the world’s fourth highest per capita emitter, trailing only Saudi Arabia, United States, and Australia.

The International Energy Agency says Canada’s CO2 emissions rose 20.4 percent between 1990 and 2009.

A Government of Canada website openly states my country had the second highest level of GHG emissions per person among G7 countries in 2005 (22.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per person) and that per capita emissions rose 7.6 percent between 1990 and 2005.

The recession and financial crisis that has encompassed the globe since 2007 caused those emissions to drop, but Environment Canada is predicting these emissions will rise as output increases from Alberta’s tar sands developments.

Canada continues to give subsidies estimated to be worth at least $1.4 billion annually to oil and gas producers, although some modest reductions were advanced in the 2011 budget.

In 2004, Canada’s GHG emissions embodied in exports were 184 MtCO2e and in imports 160 MtCO2e, for a net export of 0.75 tCO2e per capita. This made Canada the only net exporter of carbon dioxide emissions within the G7 countries, a position that is unlikely to change if planned shipments of Alberta bitumen and liquefied natural gas from shale are allowed to Asia and to the United States.

The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy says Canada will pay a price for increased worldwide greenhouse gas emissions – predicting that the impact on the Canadian economy could be $5 billion by the year 2020 and reaching between $21 and $43 billion per year by 2050. NRTEE reached the conclusion that “ignoring climate change costs now will cost us more later.”

The Canadian Public Health Association says bluntly: “If nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, changes in the earth’s climate could result in significantly increased health risks, and even deaths.”

Recent findings published in CPHA’s Canadian Journal of Public Health (CJPH) indicate that close to 8 percent of non-traumatic mortality in Canadian cities is attributable to air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels. A related study showed that the increase in hospital admissions for children with asthma in recent years is directly related to worsening air pollution.

The David Suzuki Foundation says that while there is a growing and incomplete awareness among the public about the effect of increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, “there is even less understanding of the health impacts of climate change.”

In spite of peer-reviewed scientific reports from more than 2,000 climate scientists (97 to 98 percent of who believe climate change is human-induced) about the serious consequences of a warming Earth, Canada has no federal energy policy or comprehensive climate change legislation. 

It is clear that climate change brings with it more frequent violent weather events including floods, droughts, and heat waves. Global warming will severely impact the economy that Caitlin will work in and expose her to higher risks from infectious diseases and cause threats to her food supplies. 

This is not something a father would wish for his daughter and I am angry and frustrated that more is not being done by my provincial and federal governments to ensure that Caitlin has a less troublesome and more prosperous future.

For children in other parts of the world, the present is even bleaker – the World Health Organization says 7.6 million children under five years of age died in 2010 – nearly 21,000 children each day and almost 900 every hour – many of who were victims of pneumonia, malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, and cholera.

115 million children (one in four) under five years of age worldwide are underweight. And WHO says about 178 million children globally are too short for their age group (stunted) compared to the WHO child growth standards, with such stunting being a key indicator of chronic malnutrition.

As growth slows down, brain development lags behind and as a result stunted children are more likely to learn poorly. Stunting rates among children are highest in Africa and Asia.

Maternal mortality is declining but 358,000 women died in 2008 as a result of complications during pregnancy and childbirth. 2009 saw an estimated 33.3 million people living with HIV (23 percent higher than 1999), 2.6 million new infections, and 1.8 million HIV/AIDS-related deaths, leaving many children orphaned.

I’ve heard about the need to eradicate poverty in the world all of my adult life and slow progress is being made to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, yet the statistics are staggering:

    •    1.44 billion people are living under the international poverty line of $1.25 a day. The economic crisis was expected to push a further 64 million into extreme poverty in 2010.
    •    925 million people suffered from chronic hunger in 2010 – 178 million of them children.
    •    3.6 billion people do not have access to essential modern energy services.
    •    1.4 billion people live without electricity.
    •    1.1 billion people live without access to clean water.
    •    More than 2.6 billion people still lack access to flush toilets or other forms of improved sanitation, according to The Millennium Development Goals Report 2011.
    •    2.8 billion people have to cook on fires fuelled by wood or dung.
    •    Worldwide, among children of primary school age not enrolled in school, 42 per cent – 28 million – live in poor countries affected by conflict.
    •    In developing regions, the number of urban residents living in slum conditions is now estimated at 828 million, compared to 657 million in 1990 and 767 million in 2000.
    •    In Africa, a child dies from a mosquito bite every 30 seconds.

If the richest countries in the world would donate 0.7 percent of their annual Gross National Product (that’s 70 cents out of every $100) to the extremely impoverished nations of Africa, South America, Asia and the Caribbean, this funding could save lives and act as an economic stimulus to move these countries up the ladder of development.

In a late 2011 article, Bloomberg Markets Magazine revealed that the U.S. Federal Reserve gave beleaguered banks $1.2 trillion on just one day, December 5, 2008. The Fed committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

If that’s not enough, the article reveals that banks worldwide earned an estimated $13 billion in undisclosed income by taking advantage of below-market rates on emergency Fed loans from August 2007 through April 2010.

The banks were bailed out in days; world nations began talking about tackling climate change in 1988 and we still don’t have a legally binding agreement to bail out the planet.

Where is our sense of outrage about such statistics? We should be standing up like the fictitious TV news anchorman Howard Beale in the movie Network who urged people to go to their windows and yell “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Decisions we are making today will affect the generations of tomorrow, but they are also impacting today’s children. Climate change and global warming are not beliefs; scientific evidence proves they are occurring.

The amount of future warming is still largely in our hands but we must begin making better decisions today. Lower emissions of greenhouse gases will lead to less warming and less severe impacts.

Not acting is also a choice – one that condemns future generations to serious impacts. If you need any motivation, listen to Anjali Appadurai – a British Columbia student at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbour, Maine, who spoke on behalf of the youth of the world at the 2011 Durban COP-17 climate change conference – on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko3e6G_7GY4.

She tells delegates that they have been negotiating all her life and in that time have failed to meet pledges, missed targets and broken promises.  She urges delegates to “respect the future of your descendants” and “Get it done!”

 It is clear that we adults must “get it done”, but how do we change? How do we individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of – our behaviour?

As Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.” 

Kahneman told Time magazine: “We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments. We exaggerate how knowable the world is.”


Our rational, experiencing selves want to believe that economic growth and the pursuit of more will buy us something called happiness; that is the mantra of Madison Avenue and the fossil fuel industry.

Listening to our rational selves often causes us to make mistakes because we don’t know any better.

Our intuitive, remembering selves tell us a different story; our well-being depends on our loved ones being protected from risk and harm. Listening to our reasonable selves instinctively informs us no one can save our children but ourselves.

In the introduction to his book, Kahneman writes: “Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit from the informed opinion of others.” 

We’ve been thinking slow about climate change; it’s time to think fast.

Changing ourselves and our world is within our reach. It is up to each of us to develop a culture of responsibility to today’s youth and tomorrow’s children. To do otherwise, David Suzuki says, is to commit an “intergenerational crime” to coming generations.

RESOURCES

• The Millennium Development Goals Report 2011 is available at http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Resources/Static/Products/Progress2011/11-31339%20%28E%29%20MDG%20Report%202011_Book%20LR.pdf

• The Bloomberg Markets Magazine article is at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/secret-fed-loans-undisclosed-to-congress-gave-banks-13-billion-in-income.html

•Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is published by Doubleday Canada. His interview with Time can be found at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2099712,00.html

Michael Jessen is a Nelson eco-writer and owns the consultancy Zero Waste Solutions. He is also the Energy Critic for the Green Party of British Columbia and can be reached by e-mail at zerowaste@shaw.ca