G8 Summit

Written - 13 July, 2008

The G8 summit last week demonstrated the absolute disconnect that government leaders have between economics and environment. During the summit, ‘leaders’ turned up the rhetoric about taking strong action on climate change, but in the same breath demanded an increase in oil production to help ‘stabilize’ the economy. The responsibility for climate control was again delegated to developing nations, not rich ones and the result is predictable: a lot of politics and no action.

What is morbidly fascinating about these meetings are the parallels that they have with climate change scenarios that incorporate social and economic factors into future environmental conditions. Several scenarios exist; in one, governments continue to focus attention on economic production and environmental considerations are given marginal priority. To deal with increasing unrest in developing countries, military budgets are increased and economic barriers create ‘high walls’ where rich nations isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Sound familiar?

In June, Harper announced that Canada’s military budget would increase to $30 billion per year from the current $12 billion over the next 20 years. In contrast, environmental budgets have totaled less than $3 billion over 7 years, the majority of this being rebates to consumers who purchase ‘eco-friendly’ cars. Parallel this with the US spending of one billion per day on war economics and it begins to look like pretty high walls for North America indeed.

Of course in the models, this scenario does not produce great results for curbing climate change and global emissions continue to climb because of global mistrust and lack of consensus. Researchers consider this the worst possible scenario for mitigating climate change, and in it the more disastrous climatic effects are accelerated from the already immanent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change timelines.

However, both Bush and Harper are skeptics about climate change and who cares about environment anyway – the economy is the most important thing today… way more important than the rights of the developing world to demand that rich countries take the lead in emissions reductions. But we won’t worry about that too much because we have invested heavily in our military to protect ourselves (or secure resources) if things go bad. Quite a philosophy to govern by, unfortunately this seems to be reality.