We shouldn’t worry about climate change. Climate scientists taught me that. Them, and the ugly freight train I suddenly see barrelling down on me.

I first glimpsed it in December. I felt a Zeitgeist shift, like the continent-wide peace of Christmas Eve, except hellish, with wacky weather headlining everywhere.

Then, energy company CEOs called for emissions caps, George Bush mentioned climate change respectfully, and Canada’s Conservative environment minister claimed to “get” science. Where I live, University of Victoria lecture halls were overflowing for climate change talks by IPCC report co-author and ocean-atmospheric scientist Andrew Weaver, engineering professor Ned Djilali, and political-environmental theorist Kara Shaw. Soon, I noticed other journalists commenting on the Zeitgeist shift, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report splashed down.

We could all sense it now: People care. Action is nigh. “Thank goodness they’re getting it,” declared the internationally-sought interviewee Weaver to the daily Victoria Times-Colonist.

That’s when I realized we were really in trouble.

Because people aren’t actually “getting it” now, any more than they were not “getting it” before. After all, the basic facts of climate change are patently simple. Carbon dioxide holds heat. We’ve been dramatically increasing the amount of it in the atmosphere. That’s affecting climates, which could be very dangerous. What functioning adult has ever not “gotten” that? The real issue has always been that sciences of natural and living systems usually deal in probabilities, not absolutes, therefore many people simply choose what to believe, based on political or personal preferences.

Weaver should know this better than anybody. And indeed, amidst the daunting need for immediate 50-90% emissions reductions, he, Djilali and Shaw all frequently described our energy challenges as a “social problem”, and expressed exasperation with media workers, politicians, corporate money and pundits obscuring facts. Yet, none of the lecturers tackled this “people problem” head on; they all seemed to be assuming that science and creative collective will would ultimately light the way out.

Yet that’s a bizarre premise. When yesterday’s climate change dismissers suddenly become believers, will that mean they’ve all also miraculously been converted into committed environmentalists who’ll make all future decisions with extraordinary scientific acumen?

More likely, they’ll act pretty much as they always have. But in response to climate change alarmism, they’ll fast-track even bigger environmental disasters.

It’s already happening.

Key pundits in the U.S. arch-conservative movement have switched from attacking climate change science to attacking plans for conservation and eco-energy as “climate McCarthyism” and “eco-Inquisitions” driven by “eco-chondriacs” and the “Enviro-Industrial Complex” (see also here and here). Amidst window-dressing positives, Canada’s federal Conservatives have already largely retreated from mandating eco-energy, conservation or emissions caps, while the Liberals failed for a decade to bring them in. Nevertheless, these two parties still lead in the polls. Are people “getting” anything?

Swiftly, it’s becoming clear where this ringing freight train is headed. Canadian Conservative natural resources minister Gary Lunn has called out for new nuclear power plants. Media list nuclear as a positive alternative alongside solar, wind and tidal power. Support for revitalizing the nuclear industry is rising across North America, Europe and Asia. Why? Because most eco-alternatives work best at the micro-level within strategic community re-designs. But nuclear energy promises heavy duty electrical streams with no need to significantly restructure our lifestyles–or even conserve. Basically, nuclear power is the honkin’ SUV of energy alternatives, a kind of “screw ‘em all” vehicle full of popular options.

But growing up near the nuclear hotspot Great Lakes region, I’ve seen how nuclear plants guzzle government subsidies, and produce extremely costly electricity. I’ve seen radioactive releases occuring routinely, and accidents happening annually, monthly, even weekly-depending on thresholds for public disclosure. Worse, Canada already has hundreds of millions of tonnes of low-, mid- and high-level radioactive waste–by far
the worst per capita polluter in the OECD and second only to the U.S. in total annual tonnage. The Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization struggled for three years and 450 pages to recommend how to safely store these wastes, and came up with nothing better than basically burying them as deep as possible, then frequently un-burying, re-containing and re-burying them, all while praying for no earthquakes, floods or people misreading the “Forbidden Zone” signs 100,000 years from now.

But if climate science could become controversial, just wait. Already “Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy” have been on CBC helpfully explaining that worries about radioactivity are based in junk science. Sound familiar? Similarly, Lunn has pronounced nuclear power a proven “clean” energy source-just months, mind you, after he committed another $520 million to try to make Ontario’s Chalk River nuclear site “clean”.

Though multi-billion dollar plants are too dear for most provinces, British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell has made some promises in a similar spirit. His “hydrogen highway” will likely increase emissions, but instead of BC cars, out-of-province hydrogen producers will take the blame.

So if we don’t want our climate change solutions to further degrade our environment, then we must recognize the root problem: People.

And science can’t help us. When it comes to our environment, we de-prioritize facts which don’t reinforce our favourite economic or political beliefs. And we’re rarely committed to erring on the side of caution, if that means we’ll have to make sacrifices ourselves. Skyrocketing CO2 is just one result of that. We’re also burning through resources, impoverishing our children’s children. Air pollution is killing hundreds of thousands of people annually. Are these not urgent crises? In fact, short-sighted development and chemical-based farming could render climate change a minor secondary concern-without healthy soils, we’ll all starve, anyway.

It’s easy to imagine where this train’s taking us: Environment harsher, resources scarcer, rich exploiting poor for what’s left. It’ll be exactly like what we’re already doing, except more post-apocalyptic, desperate and vicious.

So don’t worry about climate change. Let’s deal with the real problem.

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Originally published in Focus March 2007.