Author: Dr. Trevor Hancock

Published as “Conventional economic growth is unsustainable”

Dr. Trevor Hancock

7 June 2022

701 words

As I noted last week, the rising concern about the impact of humanity on the environment led to the first UN conference on the environment in 1972.  However, the issue of sustainability itself was barely touched on at the conference, with only one mention in the 80-page conference report.

Nonetheless, publications prepared for the conference, such as ‘Only One Earth’ and ‘The Limits to Growth’, as well as the conference itself, led to a much heightened awareness of the challenges we faced. As a result, in 1983 the UN established the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), known more commonly as the Brundtland Commission.

Thirty-five years ago, in its 1987 report ‘Our Common Future’ the Brundtland Report introduced to a wide audience the concept of sustainable development: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The WCED’s report led to the UN Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit), which opened in Rio de Janeiro on June 3^rd 1992, 30 years ago this month. The Rio Declaration’s first principle was “Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature”. But it then leapt into an internal contradiction that bedevils us to this day.

The second principle was:  “States have . . . the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies”. This was modified by a second sentence warning that they also had “the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States”. But in practice it seems the right was heard but the responsibility, conveniently, was not. Note, by the way, that it was not a responsibility to not cause damage to their own environment!

In addition to the Rio Declaration, the Summit also resulted in ‘Agenda 21’, a comprehensive agenda for change which described itself as “preparing the world for the challenges of the next century.” There was also a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a UN Convention on Biological Diversity and a Declaration on the principles of forest management

Unfortunately, as is too often the case, these fine ideas were not put into practice, certainly not to a sufficient extent. The ironic joke in the environmental community was that business and governments got the noun – development – and environmentalists got the the adjective. So it has been largely full speed ahead for development, with the NGO and community sectors struggling to make sure that development is actually sustainable.

It is not. If you want the evidence, look no further the world’s failure to meet most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted in 2000 by the UN’s member states. There were 8 MDGs, with 18 targets to be achieved by 2015. Looking back in 2018, when the data was in, Oxford University-based ‘Our World in Data’ (OWiD) found that of the 17 targets that were quantifiable, the world reached five: Poverty in developing regions was halved, the gender disparity in education in developing regions was closed, the global rates of infection from both malaria and TB were reduced and the proportion of people lacking access to safe drinking water was reduced by more than half.

But 12 targets were not met by 2015. In some areas there were improvements, sometimes quite marked improvements, even though the targets were not reached: “the share of people in hunger fell, the share of children in school increased substantially, more women got access to reproductive health and contraceptives, the maternal mortality nearly halved, and the global child mortality rate more than halved”, OWiD reported.

But while “substantial progress” was achieved in these areas it came at a cost. Where “the world failed most miserably” – you guessed it – was the environmental targets.  When it came to reversing the loss of environmental resources and biodiversity, OWiD notes there were “clear and alarming failures” across multiple indicators. As I will discuss next week, at the heart of that failure lies the simple fact that we continue to pursue a policy of conventional economic growth that remains persistently unsustainable. 

© Trevor Hancock, 2022

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Dr. Trevor Hancock

5 June 2022

700 words

Today – Sunday May 5^th – is the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the first UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in 1972 in Stockholm. The Secretary General of the Conference, Maurice Strong, was a Canadian who went on to become the founding Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme that was established as a result of the Conference. In this and many other ways the Stockholm Conference helped launch the modern environmental movement.

This is also almost exactly 30 years since the opening of the Rio Earth Summit on June 3rd 1992, which began to lay out an agenda for sustainable development. The Rio Summit was based on the work of the UN Commission on Environment and Development, whose 1987 report was released 35 years ago this year.

So in this and the next three columns I will revisit these important conferences and reports, reflect on the success and – mainly – the failings in implementing the environment and sustainable development agenda they outlined, consider where this leaves us, and contemplate the future we face and what we need to do to meet the challenges it poses – challenges that are far greater and more acute than they were 50 years ago.

One challenge that was not even on the agenda at Stockholm, surprisingly, was climate change; there was no reference to it or global warming anywhere in the Declaration, and only two minor and oblique references to CO₂ emissions among the 109 recommendations for action. This may seem odd, but, “climate change wasn’t getting the attention it could have, and there was a lack of urgency in discussions” throughout the 1960s, according to Alice Bell, co-director at the UK climate change charity Possible, writing in the Guardian in July 2021. Indeed, it wasn’t until around 1977/8 that the issue began to be taken seriously.  

However, there was specific reference in the Stockholm Declaration to “dangerous levels of pollution in water, air, earth and living beings; major and undesirable disturbances to the ecological balance of the biosphere [and] destruction and depletion of irreplaceable resources.” If we look at just those three issues – pollution, changes to the biosphere and resource depletion – it is clear that things have gotten a lot worse since 1972.

For example, plastics pollution was not even mentioned in the Conference report; Our World in Data (OWiD), which is based at Oxford University, reports that global plastics production in 1972 was 44 million tonnes, but reached 381 million tonnes in 2015. The Living Planet Index, which measures the abundance of vertebrate species, declined 68 percent between 1970 and 2016, the World Wide Fund for Nature reports, while we did not fully meet any of the 20 Aichi targets on biodiversity, established in 2011, and only partially met six of them. When it comes to resource depletion, 10 percent of the world’s fish stocks were over-exploited in 1974, but by 2017 that had risen to 34 percent, OWiD reports.

The Stockholm Declaration began by highlighting “the need for a common outlook and for common principles to inspire and guide the peoples of the world in the preservation and enhancement of the human environment”. But fifty years later, finding a common outlook, principles and agenda for our common future remains elusive. Indeed, in remarks to the UN’s Economic and Social Council in March, following up on “Our Common Agenda”, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres noted “a fundamental lack of solidarity in today’s world and in the mechanisms that are relevant for the global economy and the global financial system”.

The participants at Stockholm were clear: “Through ignorance or indifference we can do massive and irreversible harm to the earthly environment on which our life and well-being depend. Conversely, through fuller knowledge and wiser action, we can achieve for ourselves and our posterity a better life in an environment more in keeping with human needs and hopes.”

Obviously, the Conference participants expected we would choose the latter course. I think they would be bitterly disappointed that we have largely chosen the former, acting with indifference and – well, not so much ignorance as ‘ignore-ance’ – deliberately ignoring the evidence where it conflicted with short-term benefit and profit. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

© Trevor Hancock, 2022

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

24 May 2022

Dr. Trevor Hancock

703 words

Last week I discussed ‘natural’ carbon bombs; human-induced changes in natural systems (such as permafrost thawing, deforestation and loss of peatlands and marshes) that have the potential to result in rapid and large releases of greenhouse gases, or equally rapid and large losses of the carbon sinks that remove carbon from the air.

This week I examine what might be called ‘industrial’ carbon bombs; fossil fuel extraction projects, specifically those that will release at least 1 billion tons of CO₂ over their lifetimes. In an important May 11^th report, The Guardian noted: “Oil and gas majors are planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the 1.5°C climate goal. If governments do not act, these firms will continue to cash in as the world burns.”

The report is largely based on a study led by Kjell Kühne of Leeds University and published in Energy Policy. The study found there are 425 such projects around the world – 230 are coalmines and 195 are oil and gas fields, many already producing, but with 40 percent yet to start extraction. Between them these 425 projects accounted for 25 percent of global coal production and 45 percent of global oil and gas production in 2019.

Altogether they will emit 1,182 billion tonnes of CO₂ over their lifetimes. This will almost triple the 400 billion tonnes of allowable CO₂ emissions from 2020 onwards if we are to keep the global temperature rise to under 1.5°C. In fact, these projects alone are more than enough to reach the 1,150 billion tonnes limit on emissions needed to stay below a 2°C rise.

Ninety-three of the coal mines and 76 of the oil and gas projects were not producing in 2020, meaning they could and should be cancelled before they entered production (although doubtless some have begun producing by now). For those already in production Kühne and his colleagues propose they be put in ‘harvest mode’, allowing them to decline naturally by not investing any more money in them. They call this overall approach ‘defusing’ the carbon bombs

Canada, with 12 carbon bombs that could add 39 billion tonnes of CO₂ to the atmosphere, is the seventh largest carbon bomber, behind China, the United States, Russia, Saudi-Arabia, Australia and Qatar. The Guardian notes that together with the US and Australia, Canada is “among the countries with the biggest expansion plans, . . . the highest number of carbon bombs” and also gives “some of the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per capita.”

A list of Canada’s carbon bombs on the ‘Leave it in the Ground’ website (an NGO co-founded by Kühne) shows they are all in BC or Alberta. The largest by far is the Montney Play oil and gas field in Alberta and B.C., which is projected to produce 13.7 billion tonnes of CO₂ over its lifetime, followed by the Murray River Coal Mine in Tumbler Ridge B.C. (8.5 billion tonnes) and the Spirit River oil and gas field in Alberta and B.C. (3.0 billion tonnes).

Other BC carbon bombs include the Gething Coal Mine Coal (2.1 billion tonnes), the Liard Shale oil and gas field (1.2 billion tonnes) and Fording River Coal (1.0 billion tonnes). Not included in the list is the newly approved Bay du Nord oil field off the coast of Newfoundland. While not strictly a carbon bomb – it’s estimated 300 million to 1 billion barrels of oil would result in 130–430 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions when consumed – it is nonetheless a sign that the Canadian government does not get it and does not care.

Indeed, that was the focus of a powerful speech from Elizabeth May last week in Parliament, in which she accused the Minister of Environment and Climate Change of losing his moral compass by approving Bay du Nord and supporting the TransMountain expansion.

At a time when the World Meteorological Organization reported this month that several global climate indicator records were set in 2021, this is the worst possible time to be approving new carbon bombs and supporting existing ones with subsidies and other supports. In fact, Canada and BC need to defuse their carbon bombs as soon as possible. To fail to do so is morally reprehensible.

© Trevor Hancock, 2022

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as “When Canada permits loss of marshes, forests, it’s a carbon bomber”)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

17 May 2022

701 words

The concept of a carbon bomb is pretty simple: It’s a potential source of a large amount of CO₂ that could be released quite rapidly (or the loss of important carbon sinks), accelerating global heating and taking us beyond the 1.5°C and even the more damaging 2°C targets that have been internationally agreed.

Key to understanding the importance of carbon bombs is the concept of the carbon budget, which is the amount of CO₂ that can be released into the atmosphere globally without pushing global heating above 1.5°C. In its August 2021 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that to have a 66 percent probability of staying below a 1.5°C rise, we can add no more than 400 billion tonnes of CO₂ from the start of 2020 and 1,150 billion tonnes to stay below a 2°C rise.

Globally, we currently emit about 36 billion tonnes annually, so we will exhaust the allowable emissions to keep heating below a 1.5°C rise in “just 11 years if no reductions are made, i.e. the global carbon budget runs out at the end of 2030”, the IPCC stated. We have only 32 years at current emission rates if we are to keep below a 2°C rise.

The term ‘carbon bomb’ was initially applied to what might be called ‘natural’ carbon bombs. I put ‘natural’ in inverted commas because while coming from natural sources – permafrost, forests and peatlands and marshes – these carbon bombs are nonetheless created through human action. More recently it has been expanded to include fossil fuel projects that will emit more than 1 billion tonnes of CO₂ over the lifetime of the project; together they have the potential to take us well beyond these targets.

Human-induced global heating – which is more marked at the poles – results in thawing of permafrost, releasing large volumes of CO₂ and – even worse – the potent greenhouse gas methane. The amount of carbon locked up in northern permafrost is worrying. In a July 2011 article about the Polaris Project, a Woods Hole Research Center project looking at climate change in the Arctic, Dallas Murphy noted “there are very few mechanisms in nature that are capable – on short timescales – of transferring huge stocks of carbon from the land into the atmosphere.  Permafrost thawing heads the short list.”

In a 2019 review for the NOAA’s Arctic Program, Ted Schuur, a leading permafrost expert, noted these soils contain roughly 1.5 trillion tons of organic carbon, “about twice as much as currently contained in the atmosphere”. 
Moreover, about two-thirds of this carbon – 1,000 billion tons – is within the top 3 metres of the soil, so it is likely to be readily affected by thawing.
He reports that these regions are already releasing between 0.3 and 0.6 billion tons of carbon annually, which is equivalent to roughly 1 – 2 billion tons of CO₂. Ongoing and indeed increasing global heating will likely make this worse.

Other ‘natural’ carbon bombs include the release of carbon from deforestation together with the loss of the carbon sink potential of the intact forest, as well as the loss through development of peatland and marshes, which are important carbon sinks. Just last week the Cowichan- Koksilah salt marsh was featured in this newspaper. Nina Grossman and Hina Alam reported that a recent study led by UVic graduate student Tristan Douglas found the estuary “seizes and stores double the carbon dioxide of a 20-year-old Pacific Northwest forest of the same size.” 

But Douglas also warned that “the world has lost about 70 per cent of mangroves and about 30 to 40 per cent of all marshlands and sea grasses in the past 100 years, and will lose another 40 per cent if it’s a ‘business as usual approach’ in the next century.”

So when Canada permits deforestation or the loss of peatlands and marshes to development, it is in effect being a ‘carbon bomber’, not to mention adding the vast amounts of CO₂ and methane that will be released from permafrost in the North that is already starting to thaw. So much for ‘natural’ carbon bombs; next week I will focus on the fossil fuel carbon bombs, where Canada is a big and bad player.

© Trevor Hancock, 2022

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

19 April 2022

Dr. Trevor Hancock

698 words

BC likes to claim it has a wonderful, world-leading climate action plan. So it is perhaps surprising that the Sierra Club BC announced in February that it is taking the B.C. government to court “for failing to present plans to achieve several key climate targets, as required by its own climate change legislation.”

Represented by Ecojustice, their suit alleges not only that B.C.’s 2021 report, required by the Climate Change Accountability Act, “falls woefully short, by failing to include a plan for the 2025, 2040 and 2050 climate targets”, but that “it also omits the government’s plan to cut carbon pollution from the oil and gas sector, which could rapidly grow in coming years – fuelled largely by the B.C. government’s support for fracked gas.”

In fact, the Sierra Club BC notes, “the B.C. government continues to support and subsidize the expansion of fracking operations”, adding that the LNG Canada terminal in Kitimat “and other proposed LNG terminals would almost certainly make it impossible to meet 2030, 2040 and 2050 targets.”

One factor that helps increase production is the extensive subsidies and other financial supports the fossil fuel industry receives from the federal and provincial governments.  A February 2022 report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) found that among the provinces B.C. was the second highest subsidiser after Alberta, providing at least $492 million in royalty relief (more than Alberta), $232 million in various tax measures and $41 million in direct transfers, in the 2020/21 financial year.

While some of the tax relief and direct transfers may have been due to Covid relief, the IISD report notes that they could not count all the supports provided, as they are buried in other budget lines or programs. So their estimate is conservative, IISD states, and “provincial subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption are likely much higher.”

All in all, the report concludes, “provinces are diverting significant public funds to incentivize fossil fuel production that may not otherwise occur, and provincial governments are missing out on millions in uncollected royalty and tax revenue from fossil fuels” (although it is to be hoped that B.C.’s still to be completed royalty review may change that somewhat).

Unsurprisingly, this is aided and abetted by a large and active lobbying campaign by the fossil fuel industry. In 2021 the Wilderness Committee started it’s @BCGasLobbyBot, a Twitter bot account that lets the public know every time a new lobbying activity is registered. In December 2021, the Wilderness Committee reported that “In total, the gas industry lobbied the government 768 times as it prepared its royalty review.”

A particularly pernicious aspect of the industry’s lobbying is providing classroom ‘education’ materials to schools in BC. In March 2022 Open Letter to the B.C. Minister of Education, the B.C. branch of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, supported by almost 100 health, education, and other groups, called for a ban on such fossil fuel promotion.

Specifically, they called on educators and School Divisions across B.C. to “reject the use of the FortisBC Energy Leaders K-12 curriculum”, an industry-focused curriculum that “is carefully constructed to promote and normalize the use of fossil fuels to children of all ages.” The letter states “the lessons are solely focused on natural gas, normalizing its use” and falsely touting it as a clean and renewable energy source.” In particular, the letter adds, there is “no mention of the negative impacts of hydraulic fracturing, burning natural gas, or methane emissions on human health, climate change and the environment.”

Importantly, a March 2022 report commissioned by the IISD found that wealthy oil and gas producing countries such as Canada must reduce production by 74 percent by 2030 and phase out production entirely by 2034, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

So if we are to meet our obligations to future generations, private sector lobbying has to be reined in and fossil fuel subsidies and supports have to go, as do misleading private sector ‘education’ curricula for school children. Failure to do so will earn the B.C. government the sobriquet of being “dangerous radicals” engaged in “moral and economic madness”, as the UN Secretary General recently put it.

© Trevor Hancock, 2022

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

12 April 2022

Dr. Trevor Hancock

699 words

Right now, globally, we have experienced global warming of about 1.1°C, and we saw last summer here in B.C.  what that can mean. Two recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) paint a grim picture. And it’s probably worse than these reports state, because the IPCC necessarily presents a conservative picture as its reports have to be approved by all 195 government members of the IPCC. So think of what follows as the best-case scenario.

In February the IPCC Working Group 2 (WG2) reported on the impacts of climate change on people and the planet. Said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC: “This report is a dire warning about the consequences of inaction. It shows that climate change is a grave and mounting threat to our wellbeing and a healthy planet.”

The WG2 report also reports on the steps being taken to adapt to the changing climate, and on the vulnerabilities that are apparent. So far, noted the IPCC press release, “there are increasing gaps between action taken and what is needed to deal with the increasing risks.” Moreover, “these gaps are largest among lower-income populations.” As a result, “The world faces unavoidable multiple climate hazards over the next two decades with global warming of 1.5°C.”

Then this month, the IPCC Working Group 3 (WG3) released its report on mitigation – how we can reduce or stop climate change. The IPCC press release is clear: “Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C is beyond reach.” The report notes that “the continuation of policies implemented by the end of 2020” results in “global warming of 3.2°C by 2100.”

Keeping warming to “around 1.5°C requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by 43 percent by 2030”, while keeping it below 2°C also requires emissions to peak by 2025, and to be reduced by a quarter by 2030. But the IPCC notes that lifetime emissions from existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure will take us to 2 degrees. So as a May 2021 report from the International Energy Agency’s recommended, there should be no new investments in fossil fuels.

Less constrained as he is by the need to protect national fossil fuel industries, and able to speak instead in the interests of the world’s people and nature, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has been blunt in his response to these reports. Responding to the WG2 report, he called it “a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” In a speech in March he commented, “The 1.5-degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care”, adding “if we continue with more of the same, we can kiss 1.5 goodbye. Even 2 degrees may be out of reach.”

Then in a speech following the release of the WG3 report, he referred to it as a “litany of broken promises” and a “file of shame”, putting us “firmly on track towards an unlivable world”. And in a separate Tweet he stated: ““Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”

Meanwhile, back in Canada, in defiance of all logic and sense, both the federal and provincial governments continue to support fossil fuel expansion. A December 2021 report from the Canada Energy Regulator projects oil production will continue to increase until 2040, while gas production will increase by 40 percent by 2050. And just a day after the release of the WG3 report, the federal government approved the Bay du Nord deepwater oil  field. It beggars belief that Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault can say with a straight face the project  “is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.”

Here in B.C., the Sierra Club and Ecojustice are suing the government because it is “failing to present plans to achieve several key climate targets, as required by its own climate change legislation.” And it remains wedded to LNG and fracking, of which more next week.

So are our governments dangerous fossil fuel radicals, morally and economically mad, or both?

© Trevor Hancock, 2022

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as “Speeding development of non-profit housing is good for health)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

5 April 2022

701 words

Housing is fundamental to health. That should not be a surprise, especially in a country with Canada’s climate. The health impacts of being homeless or living in poor quality housing are well understood, and must be obvious to anyone.

But it is not just homelessness that is a concern, there is a much larger problem of affordability; lack of affordable housing can markedly affect people’s physical, mental and social wellbeing. In a July 2021 report commissioned by the City of Victoria, local housing and homelessness researcher Nicole Chaland noted: “Homelessness exists against the backdrop of the affordable housing crisis. Shortages of affordable housing for the lowest income group cause new inflows to homelessness and prevent exits from homelessness.”

She reported that according to 2016 census data 10,480 households in the CRD with an income of less than $23,536 met the definition for extreme core housing need by spending half or more of their income on rent; a further 2,500 households with incomes between $23,536 and $44,456 were also in extreme core housing need.

The situation is particularly severe in the City of Victoria. An October 2020 report from the CRD noted 61 percent of Victoria households are renters, the vacancy rate is low, rental costs have risen over the past 15 years and there has been “little development of new primary rental market units”.

The problem is simple, and hardly news; there is not enough affordable housing for low and moderate-income families in this region. Much of the blame must be laid at the feet of the federal government, which abandoned support for social housing in the early 1990s. This resulted in “drastic reductions in the amount of affordable housing available”,notes the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness.

In Canada, the right to housing has finally been legally recognized in the 2019 National Housing Strategy Act, notes the National Right to Housing Network. The Network adds: “This means recognizing that all people have the ‘right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity’”, as the UN puts it.

The Act “requires the government to implement reasonable policies and programs to ensure the right to housing for all within the shortest possible timeframe. It also means priority must be given to vulnerable groups and those in greatest need of housing”, and it establishes a National Housing Council and a federal Housing Advocate.

But securing the right to housing is not just a national problem, it is also a local one, as University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and his colleague Clayton Aldern point out in a recent interview with the Sightline Institute in Seattle about their book ‘Homelessness Is a Housing Problem’.

“Homelessness needs to be understood as a problem driven by a lack of access to housing”, they state. “It is a market failure. People are forced out of stable housing or are unable to access it when housing markets don’t provide sufficient and affordable options.” Put simply, inadequate increase in housing stock drive prices up, which is particularly problematic for low-income households.

So it is good news that the City of Victoria’s Rapid Development of Affordable Housing bylaw is going to a public hearing on April 14. The City notes they have heard the current approach, by adding time to the process, “adds risk to a project and increases costs and makes it challenging for non-profits to deliver homes to those most vulnerable in our community.”

So they propose changes to streamline the process specifically for the fairly small number of proposals each year for “housing that is wholly owned and/or operated by a registered non-profit residential housing society or government agency”.  

In essence, proposals for such developments that meet design guidelines, fit within existing residential zoning and do not exceed the density allowed by Official Community Plan could be approved by “the Director of Sustainable Planning and Community Development, and not go to Council.” Together, these changes will result in “time savings of three to nine months”.

This addresses one key aspect of affordability, and will help to improve the wellbeing of the most vulnerable and low-income people. It will be followed by policies for “villages and corridors” and the “missing middle”, which will help further.  More on that soon.

© Trevor Hancock, 2022

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Dr. Trevor Hancock

29 March 2022

700 words

Thursday April 7^th is World Health Day. The theme this year is ‘Our Planet, Our Health’. WHO wants to “focus global attention on urgent actions needed to keep humans and the planet healthy and foster a movement to create societies focused on well-being.” 

This theme is very timely, reflecting a growing global concern about what we are doing to the Earth, and what that means for humanity – not to mention what it means for all the other species with whom we share the Earth. The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said it well, succinctly and bluntly in December 2020: “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal.” He has talked since of the ‘triple crisis’ of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

The WHO “estimates that more than 13 million deaths around the world each year are due to avoidable environmental causes. This includes the climate crisis, which is the single biggest health threat facing humanity. The climate crisis is also a health crisis.” 

We have certainly experienced that here in BC. In the past year alone we have experienced a heat dome that contributed to the deaths of 525 people in a one-week period from June 25 – July 1^st, according to the BC Coroners Service; for comparison, the Service reported 2,224 deaths in all of 2021 from a suspected illicit drug overdose.  In addition, the heat caused the deaths of more than one billion seashore animals, according to UBC marine biologist Chris Harley.

Meanwhile fires entirely destroyed Lytton and killed two people there, while also burning buildings in other communities and causing much harm to our forests. In addition, massive floods – exacerbated by deforestation – inundated farms, killing tens of thousand of animals, and destroyed highways and other infrastructure.

And this is before climate change becomes really serious! In a March 21^st speech to the Economist Sustainability Summit, Mr Guterres told the attendees the world is “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe” and that meeting the goal of keeping global warming to under 1.5degrees C “is on life support. It is in intensive care.”

But the real threat is not just climate change, it is the combination of massive and rapid global ecological changes rooted in a way of life, driven by high-income countries, that is unsustainable.

Which is why the WHO wants to focus our attention on the urgent actions needed to create societies focused on well-being. The recent Geneva Charter from WHO defines such societies as “committed to achieving equitable health now and for future generations without breaching ecological limits”.

The WHO has some strong suggestions for what that means in practice, including keeping fossil fuels in the ground; stopping new fossil fuel exploration and projects; stopping fossil fuel subsidies and taxing the polluters. It also recommends repurposing agriculture subsidies towards sustainable and healthy food production and taxing highly processed foods and beverages high in salt, sugars and unhealthy fats – and much else besides.

Here in BC on World Health Day, Doctors for Planetary Health (D4PH) will be releasing and presenting to the BC government and all the MLAs its full Code Red Action Plan. Motivated by a concern for the wellbeing of the people of BC, and of the world, the Action Plan calls on the BC government to declare a climate and ecological emergency and develop and implement a transformative emergency plan; take action on climate change; protect and restore nature; create broad transformative change focused on human wellbeing in balance with nature and ensure a Just Transition.

In addition, an article by D4PH to be released on the Healthy Debates website will outline what health professionals can do in their roles as care providers, patient advocates, part of the health care system, and as citizens. And it will urge them to take the Planetary Health Pledge and share videos of themselves doing so, an initiative that is fast becoming a global movement.

The pledge is a commitment “to work to protect the health of people, their communities, and the planet . . . and all of its life forms for current and future generations”. It is a pledge that all our political and corporate leaders need to take, for our planet and our health.

© Trevor Hancock, 2022

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as “A progressive tax on all forms of wealth would reduce inequality”)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

22 March 2022

700 words

A few weeks ago, before Russia invaded Ukraine and began committing war crimes that have shocked the world (in a way that should have but, to our shame, did not shock the world when Russia did the same thing in Chechnya and Syria), I was writing about inequality and health, in the context of creating a Wellbeing society.

So even though innocent people are still being butchered by Putin and his terrorist army, I will return to this topic because the problem remains and must be addressed, both in Canada and globally.

To refresh your memory, the World Health Organization (WHO) is championing the creation of what it calls Wellbeing societies, in which equitable health is achieved within the ecological limits of the Earth. ‘Equitable health’ is not the same as equal health, but is about ensuring we all have a fair opportunity to be healthy, minimizing inequality as much as possible.

Inequality has health consequences: As the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health memorably put it in 2008: “Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale”.  Thus high levels of inequality are incompatible with a Wellbeing society.

But inequality does not just happen. Instead, as the World Inequality Report 2022 (WIR) noted: “Inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability.”  That political choice is not only killing people on a grand scale, it is creating much social strain and mental and physical ill health through poverty, marginalisation, social exclusion and alienation, resulting in what Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Angus Deaton calls the ‘diseases of despair’. 

The WIR notes “the period from 1945 or 1950 till 1980 was a period of shrinking inequality in many parts of the world”.  But at the same time, and perhaps contrary to our usual modern expectations, these were also times “of fast productivity growth and increasing prosperity, never matched since” for the countries of the West.

The report goes on to note: “The reason why that was possible had a lot to do with policy—tax rates were high, and there was an ideology that inequality needed to be kept in check, that was shared between the corporate sector, civil society and the government.”

That all changed with the advent of neoliberalism as the dominant ideology, first implemented by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA. As a consequence, the report notes, “contemporary global inequalities are close to early 20th century levels, at the peak of Western imperialism”. The result, says Deaton, a self-professed believer in social democratic capitalism who is now chairing a review of rising inequalities in the UK, is that “I think that today’s inequalities are signs that democratic capitalism is under threat”

To address this, as the 2008 WHO Commission put it in one of its three key recommendations, we have to “tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources”. Thirteen years later, the WIR made much the same point: “addressing the challenges of the 21st century is not feasible without significant redistribution of income and wealth inequalities.”

 So how should that be done?  The World Inequality Lab, source of the WIR, has what is really a very simple proposition: “a modest progressive wealth tax on global multimillionaires.” They point out that wealth – or at least, one form of it, namely property – is already taxed pretty much all over the world. But they point out it is a flat tax, not progressive – the very rich pay the same rate on their property as the average citizen. Moreover, much of the wealth of the very wealthy is in stocks and bonds and other forms of wealth, not property.

So their recommendation is to expand the property tax to encompass all forms of wealth, not just real estate, and to make it progressive. Such a tax, they find, ranging progressively from 0.6 percent to 3.2 percent of total wealth, would generate $1.74 trillion each year, or 1.6 percent of total global incomes, that could then be “reinvested in education, health and the ecological transition”.

As they note, “it would be completely unreasonable not to ask more of top wealth-holders in the future, especially in light of the social, developmental and environmental challenges ahead.”

© Trevor Hancock, 2022

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as “Freedom from regulation helps sharks at the expense of minnows”)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

15 March 2022

696 words

Last week I wrote about ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ freedoms in the context of the Ukrainian fight for freedom from tyranny, compared to the so-called ‘freedom convoy’ that is seeking, Putin-style, to impose their idea of freedom upon us. But there is a level of ‘unhealthy freedom’ that is far worse, in terms of direct health impacts, than that exhibited by these ‘freedom convoys’; the freedom of people and corporations to make money by harming others.

The most obvious example is the tobacco industry, which has until recently been left free to make money for its investors by selling an addictive product that, when used as intended, kills and sickens people in large numbers. But we have seen similar stories in many other industries, most notably in the recent epidemic of drug overdoses, due in large part to the massive marketing of opioids.

Then there are the alcohol, fast food and other industries that have large adverse health impacts; the fossil fuel industry that keeps trying to expand and still tries to confuse the public on the science of climate change – a technique they took directly from the tobacco industry; the pesticide and other chemical companies whose products harm the ecosystem as well as human health, and a whole host of other industries and products that quite legally do harm.

The freedom to harm others for profit is the sort of freedom espoused by libertarians and neoliberals. These freedoms, which Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in an April 2016 column, called the freedom of the pike (I would say ‘sharks’), often come at the expense of what he calls the minnows.

He wrote: “Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.”

These ‘freedoms’ have another consequence; we have become obsessed with the need to get stuff cheap – at any price. As Monbiot notes, it leads to driving down wages and benefits to reduce costs and increase profits. Bizarrely, the ‘right to work’ movement beloved of American Republicans and their supporters involves weakening the power of unions to protect the rights, wages and working conditions of workers, attracting investors to their state to employ people in low wage, low benefit jobs.

The minnows are seduced into supporting such laws, which create jobs but make them worse off while feeding the sharks. But it also strengthens their need to get stuff cheap, because their wages are low, making this a self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling process.

Another consequence of the need to get stuff cheap is shipping jobs off-shore to low-wage economies to reduce costs; the result is not just low wages, but no wages. But it’s not only jobs that get shifted offshore, so too are toxic production processes and dangerous work. Following the logic of neo-liberalism, they go to places where regulations are less stringent and less enforced, thus avoiding the expense of safer production, to the detriment of the health of the local population and the environment.

The neo-liberal sharks, it seems, have been successful in pulling off a neat trick. In the name of populism, they have established a powerful political movement that encourages the minnows to support policies diametrically opposed to their own interests. This is what happens when money becomes the prime value in society. We facilitate and support the system because we save or make money from it – and we don’t really care where it comes from or who gets hurt in the process, as long as it’s not us.

But as Monbiot warned: “Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts.” Neoliberalism erodes democracy, and it erodes the power of the state to aid the weak and vulnerable, to support their freedom to achieve a good life, to thrive. It is the freedom of the sharks, not the minnows.

© Trevor Hancock, 2022

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy