Today the Vancouver Sun published an opinion piece I wrote in advance of the next provincial election. I am reproducing the text of this piece here so I am able to share it on my Facebook Page (which doesn’t allow news stories from Canadian Media to be published).

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Opinion Editorial

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As we approach the fall election, it is clear to me that Premier David Eby presides over a centrally controlled administration doing more harm across the province than good. Simply put, he has lost the plot of what it takes to govern by deciding to pander to his narrow base of support.

I abhor gamesmanship for political advantage and inflexible doctrines. My departure from academia to run for office in 2013 was predicated on a desire to positively impact the daily lives of my fellow British Columbians toward building a better future, and to change the political discourse on climate change.

Climate change is not something to fear or deny, but rather a grand challenge to be embraced as an incredible opportunity for innovation in mining, forestry, agriculture, manufacturing and the new economy.

While I never considered myself a politician (I much prefer the term “change maker”), I quickly understood that achieving progress requires bringing people with you. One cannot claim to be a leader by preaching what is “right” while willfully ignoring the voices you are supposed to represent.This simple concept helped me navigate negotiations for a confidence and supply agreement with NDP Premier John Horgan following the 2017 election. Collectively, we identified problems, developed a framework for potential solutions, and subsequently worked collaboratively through action, not rhetoric.

Did we agree on everything? Absolutely not. Yet I never wavered in my faith in Horgan’s sincerity to work for the benefit of all or his devotion to practising pragmatism over politics.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for David Eby.

Since assuming the premier’s chair in November 2022, radical ideological-driven activism, empty promises with destructive consequences, and out-of-touch hubris embody the hallmarks of his tenure.

Under Eby, government fiscal management is out of control, with two consecutive budgets since Horgan stepped down that raised spending by 14 per cent and 20 per cent respectively. Deficits over the coming three years will dwarf those the province experienced during the height of the pandemic, while the province’s debt has tripled since pre-pandemic levels in 2019-2020. In both cases, the increases far outpace the rate of inflation and population growth.

As a result, two major credit-rating agencies have downgraded B.C. since Eby became premier, which will inevitably result in increased borrowing costs and higher taxes.

I’m also troubled by the rise in hate crimes, particularly against the Jewish community, which has been met with nothing but token reactionary statements by the government. This was confirmed by the resignation of former NDP Finance Minister Selina Robinson, who felt that “it wasn’t safe” to use her voice as a Jewish member of the governing caucus, and that Eby’s response to growing antisemitism was “simply performative.”

I recently publicly opined that I was considering supporting John Rustad’s Conservative Party of B.C. in the October election, which brought a flood of inquiries on how that squared with my beliefs as a climate scientist.

I’ve had several discussions with Rustad, and while there are still gaps between our views on how to respond to the challenges and opportunities afforded by climate change, they are not as wide as some might imagine. In fact, there were similar gaps in the views held by Horgan and myself in the early days of our minority government.

Like Horgan, Rustad’s ability to listen and be open to input are the traits of effective leadership. My conversations with Rustad have given me a very different understanding of his policy proposals when compared to the recent attack messaging advanced by Eby’s government.

I remain unsure of how I will vote in the election. Yet I know with certainty that this is the most consequential decision for B.C.’s electorate in a generation, and it warrants careful consideration away from the noise of self-serving political interests.

In February I penned an article arguing that fear-based climate messaging often drives people to despondency and apathy rather than climate action. In this post, I’d like to offer a counter example of how positive, thoughtful climate messaging can inspire people to want to do better. I am grateful to the students and teachers at St. Margaret’s school, Minister George Heyman and the students in my EOS 365 (Climate and Society) class for participating and contributing to an intergenerational conversation on climate change on Monday, March 4, 2024.

EOS 365 (Climate and Society) is a course I developed at UVic and first offered in 2009. The lectures follow the chapters in the book Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World that I first published in 2008. In the course I survey the climate system and its interaction with past, present, and future societies, including the onset of agriculture/domestication of animals in the Holocene, the rise and fall of early civilizations, the Anthropocene and global warming. Early in the course I teach a module on science communication. I emphasize that if one wants to advance lasting climate solutions, then one must bring people with you rather than alienating those who may not wish to prioritize climate action.  I point out that politicians are elected to represent everyone, not just their support base, and so policy makers need to listen and respond to the views of all stakeholders.  

I also suggest to the students that whether or not society wants to deal with global warming really boils down to one question:

Do we the present generation owe anything to future generations in terms of the quality of the environment we leave behind. Yes? or No?

Science can’t answer that question. But science tells us why this is ultimately the question that needs to be asked. If the answer is yes, then we have no choice but to immediately take steps to decarbonize energy systems for the consequences of unchecked emission growth are profound (widespread species extinction and unparalleled geopolitical instability). If the answer is no, then who cares about global warming?

In class I also note that formulating climate policy is often inconsistent with a four year political cycle as the effects of the policy decisions made today will not be felt in the political lifetime of those making the decisions. Yet these same politicians will not be around in the future to be held accountable for the decisions they did or did not make. And so policies with demonstrable short-term outcomes often take precedence over climate policy. Allocating resources to advance short term “wins” will allow you to point to your political successes in a few years and proclaim “I was responsive to your needs; please re-elect me and I will do more”.  It’s next to impossible to do the same with climate policy. But I would argue that there is a moral and ethical imperative to advance climate solutions now if society believes in the importance of intergenerational equity.

Building on the themes of effective climate communication and intergenerational equity, I hosted an event in EOS 365 on March 4 inspired by the Grade 7 (and 8) students at St. Margaret’s School, Victoria BC. Four generations were involved in the conversation: 1) the St. Margaret’s students; 2) the UVic students; 3) the teachers from St. Margaret’s; 4) the Honourable George Heyman (Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy) and me.

On February 1 2024,  I attended St. Margaret’s Grade 7 Environmental Summit and was blown away by the insight and creativity of the students. The Grade 7 class had been learning about the socioeconomic and environmental ramifications of global warming. Students took on the role of an affected party (e.g. firefighter, fisher, pilot, business owner etc.) and researched how global warming was going to affect them.  I listened to numerous testimonies from the Grade 7 students who role-played their chosen characters and was taken aback by their insight and how effectively, and articulately they were able to communicate their stories.

The highlight of the event for me was was when the Grade 7/8 St. Margaret’s choir sang a rendition of an SOS from the kids in front of all those in attendance.

My March 4 class began with the St. Margaret’s grade 7/8 choir, led by Mike Keddy, setting the tone for the rest of our conversation by once more singing an SOS from the kids. At the end of the song, and as the final words “you can do better than this” were sung, Mike Keddy held up a Montreal Canadians pennant (indeed one can do better than that).

We were keeping things light and continuing the playful banter that had started at St. Margaret’s School when I noticed middle years teacher Michael Jones had decorated his classroom with some Edmonton Oilers swag. Michael arrived at my class wearing his Oilers jersey, while the TA for the class Katherine Martin proudly sported a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater. She was joined by  middle years teacher and fellow Leaf’s fan Meaghan Thompson who showed up with a Leaf’s cap.

And of course, while noting the obvious irony, I adorned my Oilers jersey.

We were honoured to have Minister Heyman attend the class. He had just announced that he was not seeking reelection in the next provincial election moments before we started, and EOS 365 was his first public appearance following that announcement. Once the choir had finished, Minister Heyman spoke about CleanBC and how is government was responding to the challenge of global warming and capitalizing on the opportunity it provides for innovation and creativity in addressing the challenge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Minister Heyman kindly agreed to allow the EOS 365 and St. Margaret’s students to quiz him in a “kinder and gentler” version of Question Period. First, a St. Margaret’s student read out their prepared script. Unfortunately, in the time available I could only select six students to speak: SO was the CEO of the world’s largest oil company; SW was the heiress to Lululemon; DS was a climate scientist; AM owned a Victoria-based construction contracting company; LA was a young cosmetic designer and owner of an eco-friendly company; TA was a Victoria-based frefighter.

In advance of the class I had given six EOS 365 students copies of the scripts that were going to be read out (see the instagram reel at the end of this post). All six of these students were from the first cohort enrolled in UVic’s new BSc in Climate Science degree program. Each of these students asked the Minister a thoughtful yet probing question that they had prepared in advance and based on the script they were given. The Minister responded in an equally thoughtful way. I role-played the Speaker, and offered the class a supplementary question which was subsequently posed to the Minister. And so we proceeded to explore how the BC government was responding to climate change in six unique sectors.

This particular class was perhaps the most enriching and rewarding experience I’ve ever had while teaching at the university level. And I started teaching in 1986! My sincere thanks to the students and teachers at St. Margaret’s School, the Minister and his staff, and the BSc in Climate Science and other students in EOS 365 for making this event so successful.

My hope in organizing this event was to demonstrate to my class how positive, hopeful, constructive and solutions-focused climate communication can inspire others to want to take climate action. Too often, activists use fear-based messaging, or outrageous acts of civil disobedience, like throwing soup on a priceless Van Gogh or disrupting traffic and creating chaos on local streets in an attempt to raise awareness as to the seriousness of climate change. As I have argued before, more often than not, such behaviour does little more than drive people to despondency and apathy rather than climate action.

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On May 31, 2023 and in what can only be described as a textbook example of ideological decision-based evidence-making, Trustees voted unanimously to cancel the school liaison officer (SLO) program in all School District 61 (SD61) schools (the only school district in BC to do so). The Vancouver School Board, which had previously eliminated school liaison officers in 2021, reinstated them in September 2023.

Remarkably, the SD61 decision was reached without consultation with any Police Board in the region or the leadership of either the Esquimalt or Songhees First Nations. In support of their decision, School Board Chair, and former BC Green candidate for Oak Bay-Gordon Head, Nicole Duncan demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of SLOs and the community policing model (ironically in a community she wanted to represent in the BC Legislature) by stating “Police are being asked to fill in gaps in student support and to take on roles that should be filled by individuals with specialized expertise, such as youth and family counsellors and social workers“.

The SD61 decision built on a bizarre press release issued by the BC Office of the Human Rights Commissioner on November 22, 2022: Letter to school trustees on human rights concerns with the use of School Liaison Officers in B.C. schools. While obviously an overreach of the mandate of the unelected BC Human Rights Commissioner, she stated “I strongly recommend that all school districts end the use of SLOs until the impact of these programs can be established empirically. ” I was serving on the the Oak Bay Police Board at the time and was very familiar with Oak Bay’s community policing model and the important preventative role that school liaison officers play in such a model. I had hoped the Human Rights Commissioner letter was supported by extensive research on SLOs in BC Schools. Sadly, all that I could find was a single report commissioned by her office known as the Samuels-Wortley report.

I thoroughly reviewed the Samuels-Wortley report. It provides a literature review of studies pertaining to SLO programs in Canada and the United States. First, it’s important to note that the author states on page 3 of her report “an extensive review of the literature reveals no peer-reviewed studies that explore the impacts of Canadian SLO programs on marginalized students.” In fact, one of the five peer-reviewed Canadian studies the author found pertaining to Canadian SLOs suggested positive outcomes when introduced as a component of a community policing model (Broll and Howells, 2019).

The US-based research reviewed in the Samuels-Wrotley report focussed on the “school-to-prison” pipeline, violence, US-based SLO training protocol etc. and cannot be generalized to Canada. Even the Toronto Police internal evaluation reviewed in the Samuels-Wortley report is not generalizable to Greater Victoria as they were assessing a targetted SLO program introduced after the fatal shooting of a student at a Toronto high school, not as a key component of a community-policing framework.

The SD61 decision was also supported by a thoroughly debunked letter from the Greater Victoria Teacher’s Association who had apparently not surveyed their members before coming up with their supposedly (but clearly not) researched ideological position. On the other hand, the Victoria Principals’ and Vice Principals’ Association, whose members are in charge of individual school management wrote a strong letter of support for SLOs to the Board of Trustees that was apparently ignored.

What’s most odd about the GVTA letter is that in April 2018, when I was serving in the BC Legislature as the MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head, Victoria Police cut their SLO program after not being given the resources to maintain their frontline services. By December 2018, the Greater Victoria Teacher’s Association began a campaign to get police liaison officer’s back in Victoria Schools that continued into 2019 as school-based incidents started to rise. The GVTA’s dramatic policy lurch strikes me as a textbook example of what happens when one or two idealogues start ramming through their agenda while claiming to speak on behalf of the collective.

Rather than choosing to consult with those delivering or providing oversight into the SLO program, School Board Trustees seemed to be swayed by those purporting to have uncovered gotcha evidence from FOI information they received. The egregious misinformation brought forward in this regard provided the “evidence” to support the ideological narrative needed to justify a predetermined decision (so-called decision-based evidence-making) to eliminate SLOs from SD61 schools. For example, on X (formerly known as Twitter), one activist offered gotcha ‘proof’ that VicPD were targeting members of the BIPOC community. They pointed out that 19% of all “youth suspects” arrested by VicPD were indigenous whereas only 5% of the population was indigenous. What they failed to point out was that the data they were looking at was aggregate rather than individual data. To illustrate this, suppose there were 100 arrests & one BIPOC individual committed 19 of them. Suppose the other 81 were committed by 81 different other folk. Then the statistic is only 1.2% of people VicPD labeled as “youth suspects” were BIPOC. Perhaps the activists would have served our community better if they educated themselves on the data before making incorrect assertions.

In another example, a powerpoint presentation to a School District committee on SLOs seemed to have been particularly influential even though none of the purported “gotcha” statistics were checked with VicPD and most were misinterpreted. Sadly with gangs now having increased access to schools, vulnerable youth become easy victims for grooming into gang life. But that’s not the only consequence of the irresponsible School Board decision. Here’s an incomplete list of what the Board has identified as services the SLOs used to provide that now fall into the responsibility of already overburdened principals and vice-principals, along with the District’s lone Safe Schools Coordinator. This list also illustrates the challenges faced by schools and students since the removal of the SLOs.

• Longer wait times accessing crisis support for students.
• Loss of student support as staff are pulled to support the critical student.
• Additional training cost for Non-Violent Crisis Intervention (CPI).
• Support for staff dealing with the crisis.
• Delays in receiving supports from police departments nonemergency calls.
• District Youth and Family Counsellor (YFC) and School-Based-Team (SBT) increased caseload.
• Alternatives are not available for a majority of activities.
• Additional program, training, and equipment costs.
• Information around community safety is not being shared in a timely manner.
• Reduction in pro-active and collaborative work around internet/social/media/cyber bullying.
• No longer an opportunity to build a positive relationship on a regular basis.
• Increase in vandalism and graffiti on school grounds.
• Students no longer have an opportunity to learn through a police focused lens.
• There is no longer an opportunity to build positive relationships between police and students on a regular basis.

The following programs or presentations are missing from this list that the District provided:

• Gangs in (BC)
• Personal Safety
• Female Personal Safety
• Halloween Safety
• Healthy/unhealthy Relationships
• Human Trafficking
• LGBTQ Presentations
• PARTY program
• Property & Vehicle Crime
• Shoplifting
• Stranger Danger
• Street Drugs
• WITS program
• Mentor individual students

While at present, the Board of Education is certainly within its right to ban SLOs from their schools, community safety falls within provincial and local government jurisdiction. My hope is that the province will step in to rectify what has happened in SD61 through the introduction of legislation or regulation to ensure that such ill informed decisions cannot occur in the future without either provincial approval or consultation with the affected police boards (charged with oversight of policing). Nobody’s interests are served when our collective safety is undermined by poorly thought through decisions that are grounded in nothing more than ideology and virtue signalling.

I wish to offer my sincere thanks to all police officers in our region for their continued service to our community. I can only imagine how decisions like this, based on nonsensical rhetoric and misleading information, affect your morale. Yet the same activists undermining our region’s policing would almost certainly be the first ones to call for your help when a problem arises. Finally, I can’t imagine how police officers feel as they go to pick their children up at school while dressed in uniform knowing that new school district policy requires schools to log when officers are on school property.

Shame on the Greater Victoria School Board.

This past weekend I received an email from a young adult from the US struggling with climate anxiety. Their email, and our follow-up conversation over Zoom, are what inspired me to write this piece.

As I wrote last year, one of the biggest surprises I found upon my return to the University of Victoria 1n 2021 after spending 7 1/2 years in the BC Legislature was the overall increase in underlying climate anxiety being experienced by students in my classes. I’ve been teaching at the university level since the mid 1980s. For most of this time, the students considered global warming to be an esoteric and highly uncertain distant future threat to others, somewhere else in the world – but not any more.

While I was not surprised that another young adult reached out to discuss their struggles with climate anxiety, their email was particularly thoughtful. It contained quotes that they had seen in the media or heard in conversations with their friends, and a link to a recent ITV Good Morning Britain interview with Canadian William Shatner, better known as Captain Kirk  from the Star Trek series.

Mr. Shattner is 92. He is passionate about climate change. Yet I struggle to understand what he was hoping to accomplish in the interview. It was over the top, outrageous and, in my opinion, utterly irresponsible. For example, when asked by the ITV reporter “So you don’t think it is an overreaction to say we’re digging our own graves“. Shatner responded incredulously “No, no, no it’s not dramatic enough.  We’re burrowing into our own graves” . “Really?“, the interviewer responded at which point Shatner lays into him: “I’m so unhappy that you don’t understand how imperative the situation is. We’re dying man, the seas are going to rise…  to me I’m stupefied that you as being a reporter aren’t filled with that passion“.

Later in the interview Shatner berates the reporter “you failed to grasp the dire situation. We’re talking about 20, 30 years.  We’re talking about .. are you married?“. “No”  the interviewer replied. “Are you going to get married? asked Shatner, “possibly” was the response. Shatner pushed further: “Do you want children?”, to which the reporter replied “possibly,  yes“.  Getting the answer he was obviously hoping for, Shatner  insisted “You want children. Your children are going to have difficulty LIVING. Do you understand that?”

But here’s the kicker, when the reporter asked Shatner “what sort of changes have you made in your life, because you are so passionate about the climate issue, what are you doing differently now that you perhaps weren’t doing 5,  10 years ago.” All Shatner could come up with in response was this: “I haven’t eaten meat in 6 months.  I was at a hamburger thing I got the other plant made vegan thing“. Really?

I am very disappointed in Mr. Shatner. He has a platform, a public profile and the potential to influence people of all ages. Yet he chooses to use this platform in a completely unhinged way to imply the world only has 20 to 30 years left because of climate change and other anthropogenic environmental influences.

Now I recognize some will just dismiss my concerns by saying he’s just an old guy with odd views that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Unfortunately, such views from his position of influence do a lot of damage and undermine the efforts of so many who recognize the seriousness of climate change yet reject his outlandish prognostications. His words would land like a 16 ton weight on younger generations. How dare he espouse his unhinged views about the end of the world when all he has done is not eaten meat for six months. The hypocrisy and demonstrable lack of leadership is shameful.

When I wrote a piece for in The Conversation last summer decrying an outrageous story  in the Guardian claiming  “Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests”, I appealed to Hannah Ritchie’s elegant framework for how people see the world and their ability to facilitate change.

Ritchie, a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School, lumped people into four general categories based on combinations of those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic about the future, as well as those who believe and those who don’t believe that we have agency to shape the future based on today’s decisions and actions.

Ritchie persuasively argued that more people located in the green “optimistic and changeable” box are what is needed to advance climate solutions. Those positioned elsewhere are not effective in advancing such solutions.

More importantly, rather than instilling a sense of optimism that global warming is a solvable problem, the extreme behaviour (fear mongering or civil disobedience) of the “pessimistic changeable” group (in which I include William Shatner) often does nothing more than drive the public towards the “pessimistic not changeable” group.

Mr. Shatner is not alone in channelling his own climate anxiety in ways that drive people to despondency and apathy (we’re all doomed and there’s nothing we can go about it – the red box). But unlike most, he speaks from a very large podium.

Next time Mr. Shatner wants to decry the state of the world from his personal, rather than scientific, perspective, perhaps he could tell us more about what he is doing about climate change from his position of privilege. Leadership involves demonstrating through your own actions what you are expecting in others. Failing that, Mr. Shatner’s is just taking a page out of Granpa Simpson’s playbook.

My colleagues Karin Kvale, GNS Science, New Zealand, Natalia Gurgacz and I published a piece in The Conversation last week. It is reproduced below as Facebook appears to be blocking the reposting of Canadian news articles.

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The Article

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The dual pressures of climate change and plastic pollution are frequently conflated in the media, in peer-reviewed research and other environmental reporting.

Organic carbon leaching from plastic pollution

In nature, plants make organic carbon (carbon-hydrogen compounds) from inorganic carbon (carbon compounds not bonded with hydrogen) through photosynthesis. Most plastics are made from fossil fuels, which are organic carbon compounds. This organic carbon leaches into the environment from plastics as they degrade.

Concerns have been raised that this could disrupt global carbon cycling by acting as an alternative carbon source for bacteria, which consume organic carbon.

A key assumption in these concerns is that organic carbon fluxes and reservoirs are a major influence on global carbon cycling (and atmospheric carbon dioxide) over human timescales.

It is true that dissolved organic carbon is a major carbon reservoir. In the ocean, it is about the same amount as the carbon dioxide (CO₂) held in the pre-industrial atmosphere. But there are key differences between atmospheric CO₂ and ocean organic carbon storage. One is the climate impact.

Atmospheric CO₂ warms the climate directly, whereas dissolved organic carbon stored in the ocean is mostly inert. This dissolved organic carbon reservoir built up over many thousands of years.

When phytoplankton make organic carbon (or when plastics leach organic carbon), most of it is rapidly used within hours to days by bacteria and converted into dissolved inorganic carbon. The tiny fraction of organic carbon left behind after bacterial processing is the inert portion that slowly builds up into a natural reservoir.

Once we recognise that plastics carbon is better considered as a source of dissolved inorganic carbon, we can appreciate its minor potential for influence. The inorganic carbon reservoir of the ocean is 63 times bigger than its organic carbon store.

Plastics carbon has little impact on atmospheric CO₂

We used an Earth system model to simulate what would happen if we added dissolved inorganic carbon to the surface ocean for 100 years. We applied it at a rate equivalent to the amount of carbon projected to leach into the ocean by the year 2040 (29 million metric tonnes per year).

This scenario likely overestimates the amount of plastics pollution. Current pollution rates are well below this level and an international treaty to limit plastic pollution is under negotiation.

We repeated the model simulation of adding plastics carbon both with strong climate warming (to see if plastics carbon might produce unexpected climate feedbacks that increase warming) and without (to see if it could alter the climate by itself). In both cases, plastics carbon only increased atmospheric CO₂ concentrations by 1 parts per million (ppm) over a century.

This is a very small increase, considering that current burning of fossil fuels is raising atmospheric CO₂ by more than 2ppm each year.

Direct emissions from burning plastic

We also examined the impact of plastics incineration. We used a scenario in which all plastic projected to be produced in the year 2050 (1.1 billion metric tonnes) would be burned and directly converted into atmospheric CO₂ for 100 years.

In this scenario, we found atmospheric CO₂ increased a little over 21ppm by the year 2100. This increase is equivalent to the impact of fewer than nine years of current fossil fuel emissions.

Relative to the current continued widespread burning of fossil fuels for energy, carbon emitted from plastic waste will not have significant direct impacts on atmospheric CO₂ levels, no matter what form it takes in the environment.

However, plastics production, as opposed to leaching or incineration, currently represents about 4.5% of total global emissions. As fossil fuel consumption is reduced in other sectors, emissions from plastics production are expected to increase in proportional footprint and absolute amount.

A legally binding plastics pollution treaty, currently under development as part of the UN’s environment programme, is an excellent opportunity to recognise the growing contribution of plastics production to climate change and to seek regulatory measures to address these emissions.

Limiting the use of incineration is another climate-friendly measure that would make a small but positive contribution to the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Of course, environmental plastics pollution has many negative impacts beyond climate effects. Our work does not diminish the importance of cleaning up plastic pollution and implementing stringent measures to prevent it. But the justification for doing so is not primarily grounded in an effort to cut emissions.