Home Truths

If you’ve ever taken on a reno, you’ll know all about competing pressures.

You’ll also have learned that there’s always more work to be done than there is money to pay for it. Sooner or later, there comes a time when you have to decide which projects you can afford, and which ones you can’t. 

But if you’ve worked on a real house, you will know that there’s one decision that isn’t a decision at all because it can’t be separated out from the rest. 

Your roof—literally and figuratively—stands above all else. If it fails, everything else fails too. The first rule of building is that you must never, ever, shortchange the roof. And now the analogy is clear:

If you let yourself ignore a leaky roof because you’re overstretched on account of re-doing the kitchen—then you’ll have made a decision you’ll come to regret. Certain realities just can’t just be avoided, like the primacy of climate. If the climate collapses, so does the economy. And that’s putting it mildly. 

Choosing to turn a blind eye on climate change so you can focus on the economy is exactly that—it’s choosing blindness over vision. The real solution is finding a way of fixing one without compromising the other. Luckily for us, that’s do-able.  We know it’s courting disaster to siphon funds out of the climate bucket in order to top up the economy.   But what about creating an economy that grows by fixing climate change? What about investing in things that help prevent global warming rather than making it worse?  That’s where you’d think the smart money would be going.

The need is clear enough, surely: a massive, breathtakingly global need; a market to beat all markets. 

So why aren’t we hurrying to fill it? Sadly, it’s same reason we can’t bring ourselves to see the leaky roof.

Rather than looking up and ahead at new possibilities like solar generation and power from wind, we’re too busy looking down at the tar we’re scraping off the ground in Athabasca. 

Oil, we reckon, made Saudi Arabia rich. It will make Canada rich too, whatever the cost to the global climate and the local environment. But the world is moving on from oil—if for no other reason that it has to. If Canada can’t come to grips with this reality we’ll be left behind, disregarded by the rest of the world for having done harm instead of good.

We can power our economy without blowing the budget on the tar sands. It’s just a matter of being smart in deciding our priorities.

It’s having the sense—and the strength— to acknowledge home truths.

 

Scott Gardiner