One of the reservations New Society Publishers had about publishing Urban Meltdown was that it offered the reader little hope. It was too depressing. New Society was about reality but a reality that people could cope with in a positive way. They advised me that I should try to leave the reader with a sense that something could be done to stop global warming. I re-read my manuscript and agreed with them. There’s no point in leaving the reader balanced on the edge of a cliff face with no place to go but down.

The reality is that it is possible for us to wrench the world back towards eco-sanity. (By eco-sanity I mean stop destroying the habitat, not just polar bears but everything humans need to exist.) There are many solutions easily  within our grasp: stop consumer driven growth (do we need swifers?), develop 360 degree manufacturing, tax diesel and gasoline so that long haul is out and local haul is in, put that tax money into less destructive infrastructure like inter-city rail (freight and passenger) and intra-city rail (streetcars). This is all pretty simple, doable stuff; hence we have reason to be hopeful. But where I differ from New Society and still do is that I don’t have much confidence these things are going to happen because I see no evidence that the political level is ready, capable or even organized to do anything but – ‘business and politics as usual’.

Let me give you one example. I have a colleague on Ottawa City Council. He’s a bright, sensitive man. He’s read Jim Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency: Confronting the Converging Crises of the 21st century”. He believes Kunstler is correct and ‘off-line’ often agrees with me. But at the Council table, he votes against city light rail and has never met a road expansion he didn’t think the city needed. I used to ask him why and always got the same response. He represents a rural/suburban area of the city and his constituents want him to vote for roads and against rail. He believes the responsible thing to do is vote with the wishes of his constituents. Even though he knows, long term, it’s all wrong for them. (I have tried to convince him unsuccessfully that it’s also wrong in the short term.)

My sense of it is that politicians at all levels will only wake up to the gravity of the crisis before us only when there are climate driven crises of such proportions, they are forced to change. But by then it will be too late. We will have missed our window of opportunity which was ten years ago, eight years ago, two years ago, and belatedly right now.

The two most plausible North American disasters which will force politicians into actually changing the public paradigm within which we all live are 1) water shortages in the southern United States so severe that millions of people will be forced to move, 2) that Miami and southern Florida will get the same hurricane treatment as New Orleans. Both of these scenarios are eminently plausible.

The greater problem climate change poses is not just about a couple of natural disasters, neatly boxed into a few years and a few States like the prairie drought was the dirty thirties. Climate change is a global phenomenon; it won’t just be the southern United States which will be hammered. A global phenomenon means every corner of the human habitat will be struggling in some way or other to overcome their own challenges. Once begun these climate crises will accumulate one after the other in a cascading effect that will be the climate equivalent of governments everywhere trying to fight a world war on many fronts. Not surprisingly, they will be unable to bring the focus or the resources to bear to really address any of them.