Populists Could Be the Nail in Our Planet’s Coffin

November 12, 2018 – Donald Trump believes that the climate is changing, always changing, and that humans have had no hand in it. That’s why he has no interest in adaptation or mitigation strategies for the United States or anywhere else on the planet. Being the second largest polluter on the planet, this blind disregard for the scientific conclusions about climate change is endangering all of humanity.

Trump is backed by fossil fuel interests who see any effort to reduce carbon emissions as a threat to their existence. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by the industry to influence politicians. The President is just another with his hand ready to take money from the industry and spread doubt about any scientific evidence that indicates his approach is bankrupt of reason and fact.

Enter Jair Bolsonaro, the new President of Brazil, a Trump acolyte, who has the backing of the agricultural and mining dons of his country with an eye on exploiting the Amazon rainforest. Bolsonaro, like Trump, has talked about pulling Brazil out of the Paris Climate Agreement signed in 2015. Brazil is the 11th largest carbon pollution emitter based on 2015 data. And since that date Climate Action Tracker indicates the country has seen accelerated deforestation growth of 30% which means the amount of carbon pollution is going up, not down. Now with Bolsonaro in charge and blatantly talking about exploiting the rainforest for the moneyed interests that back him, it would appear that emissions will only get worse.

With Trump and Bolsonaro at their country’s helms, the efforts to stop anthropogenic climate change are nearer to their death bed. And what is amazing is the willful behaviour of these political leaders to ignore facts that are critical to the safety and future of their citizens.

These two national leaders are not alone. In Canada, the federal government has enacted a price on carbon pollution. It is a levy that starts in 2019 at $20 CDN per ton. But provincial leaders in at least five of Canada’s ten provinces are opposed to carbon pricing. In Ontario with a newly elected populist Conservative, Doug Ford, the carbon cap-and-trade program implemented by the previous government has been quashed leaving industry holding nearly $3 billion CDN in what are now worthless carbon credits.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a not-for-profit science advocacy group located in the United States and founded in 1997, have expressed alarm at this rising tide of anti-science political leadership, largely right-wing and populist in flavour. UCS keeps a scorecard on political and industry leaders analyzing 28 metrics that include misinformation, and lack of disclosure on physical and environmental risks based on current policies. They also keep an accountability scorecard on the fossil fuel industry and it is interesting that the misinformation given out by the industry matches well with that presented to the public by Trump. No doubt if the UCS were to turn its attention to Bolsonaro and his agribusiness and mining backers, the scorecards would be similar.

The widening gap between scientists and politicians is a major concern for the people of this planet. We are being led down a garden path by incompetent leaders who refuse to take the science seriously because they don’t like what they are hearing. They don’t like that they have to tell the public that we have to make some hard choices to a sustainable environment for our children and our children’s children. Their political instincts have them mired in winning the next vote which is all about the here and now and not the future.

In a recent article appearing in The Guardian, Jonathan Watts writes, “The global instinct for radical change is right, but unless that is geared towards ecological rebuilding the world’s democracies may go extinct before the corals do.”