What Am I Bid for Your Loved Ones’ Lives and Safety?
What Am I Bid for Your Loved Ones’ Lives and Safety?
We’ll get faster climate action and deeper emission cuts when decision-makers conclude that it costs more to do nothing. Aren’t we there yet?
Amid the swirling, raging news coverage as Hurricanes Helene and Milton laid waste to much of the southeastern United States, one short snip stands out: the report that nails and other debris left over from the first hurricane were still strewn about everywhere as the second one intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours.
The Washington Post reported that nails, wrecked stoves, and concrete slabs were primed to become dangerous projectiles, literally moving at hurricane speed, a deadly risk for anyone who refused to evacuate ahead of the storm. (Not to mention the peril for thousands of inmates in Florida counties that chose not to evacuate them.)
I haven’t seen any casualty reports from Hurricane Milton involving flying nails or plaster, although CNN News Anchor Anderson Cooper was bonked on the head [video] by debris during a live stand-up broadcast from the scene. (CNN said he was okay afterwards.) The deep and probing question that followed was not whether countries need to start getting serious about their global climate commitments, but whether TV personalities like Cooper should stop showing up at the scene when locals have been warned that the coming storm is not survivable.
But there are two much more useful questions we can ask about the serious prospect of flying nails and concrete slabs. The first comes from one of my daughter’s friends, who looked at the news reports on Milton and asked:
Isn’t there a rule that you can’t have a second hurricane until you’ve had a chance to clean up from the first one?
Yes, there used to be!
And the second one, courtesy of The Climate Auctioneer:
What am I bid for the lives and health of the people you care about most who might be in the way of the next hurricane, wildfire, heat wave, or climate-induced power outage?
“1 dollar bid, now 2,
now 2, will ya give me 2?2 dollar bid, now 3,
now 3, will ya give me 3?3 dollar bid, now 4,
now 4, will ya give me 4?”
The Climate Auctioneer
The background to that answer comes from the Michigan Auctioneers’ Association and its explanation of the auctioneer’s chant, “that rapid-fire, quick-cadence combination of numbers, words, and sounds that keeps an auction clipping along” and is weirdly irresistible when you hear it in person.
“Fascinating, sure. Remarkable, undoubtedly. Exciting, obviously,” the MAA modestly proclaims.
In one instance six years ago, the chant was used for a much more pressing purpose than just selling more stuff after Laura Loomer—the far right agitator and self-declared “white advocate” now accompanying Donald Trump on his campaign plane—tried to disrupt a U.S. congressional hearing with her wackadoo conspiracy theories. The video clip gives you an idea of what the auctioneer’s chant actually sounds like, after then-Rep. Billie Long (R-MO) used it to shut Loomer down.
Take Long’s epic performance a half-step farther, transplant it to Canada, and allow me to introduce…(drum roll, please)…The Climate Auctioneer.
The idea popped into my head a few days ago when a colleague told me about his condo building’s recent discussion on whether to install a local solar+storage system. No one was concerned about whether the system would work. Not everyone was sold on the cost.
Enter The Climate Auctioneer with these fictitious offers.
Welcome, ladies and gents. We’re opening bids on this lovely and functional medical device. It keeps your grandparent alive and living at home as long as the power stays on. This amaaazing offer includes an emergency battery that will keep the device running for 18 hours—18 hours, ladies and gents—if the power goes out. Now, what am I bid for the local solar+storage system that will keep that battery powered, and your grandparent out of the emergency room or the morgue, in a more serious grid failure?
“1 dollar bid, now 2,
now 2, will ya give me 2?
The Auctioneer continues:
Thanks for staying with us, folks, because you won’t want to miss this very special item. This apartment building elevator is a sight to behold. It’s fast. It’s quiet. It’s always on. It never quits. As long as the power stays on. You’re stepping onto this elevator with your lovely grandchildren. They’re four and seven years old, your reason for living. What am I bid for the certainty that they won’t be stranded for anxious minutes or terrifying hours if your building’s clunky, old emergency diesel generator fails while the power is out? If your building even has a generator?
“1 dollar bid, now 2,
now 2, will ya give me 2?
Now, sitting here in a city that has seen several severe wind storms in recent years, remind me again why a local solar+storage system is too expensive? Tell me in what universe that math makes sense?
Widen the lens just slightly, and ask yourself: What would it have cost to stop so much of Jasper and Fort McMurray, Alberta, Lytton, British Columbia, and Upper Tantallon and Hammonds Plains, Nova Scotia, from burning to the ground? To protect the 619 people, most of them too poor or marginalized to find cooling, who died in the B.C. heat dome in 2021?
To avert the vastly more severe, constant climate impacts like drought, famine, heat, sea level rise, coastal flooding, climate-induced wars and migration, and so much more affecting developing countries in the global South? The countries that contributed a relative thimbleful of the climate pollution that is superheating the atmosphere and driving the crisis?
What’s the full cost, the real cost, when G20 countries’ fossil fuel subsidies outpace their renewable energy funding by a three-to-one margin?
Or when the fossil lobby and its network of friendly columnists and “news” sites claim we can’t afford the transition out of energy sources that fry the planet, send debris flying at wayward TV personalities, and (hypothetically) endanger our grandparents or strand and terrify our grandchildren when used as directed?
The Solutions Are Here
I’ve recently begun hearing influencers outside the “bubble” of climate concern saying we’ll pick up the pace on climate solutions when it costs us more to do nothing. Their implication is that that time is now. I can’t remember the last time I heard a more promising, hopeful statement about widening the constituency for getting climate change under control.
There’s a subtle but hugely important shift embedded in this line of thought. For years and decades, the lead argument for emission reductions—pitched too often at a 50,000-foot level—has been that climate change will bring devastating human and environmental impacts if we don’t get it under control. That’s true, of course, and we’re seeing it in real time.
But now, we can make the bulletproof case that the climate solutions we need are practical, affordable, and ready for prime time. That it costs us vastly less—in economic and financial terms, as well as human, social, and environmental ones—to get at the root causes of this hideous, global, fossil-fuelled emergency and get on track to solve it, once and for all.
That reducing carbon emissions and boosting climate resilience needn’t even be the primary reason for a business, a municipality, an institution, or a whole economic sector to take action. Not as long as they deliberately pursue more immediate goals like housing supply, affordability, poverty reduction, food security, job creation, or productivity and prosperity through a climate lens.
But in this moment, the economic dimension is especially important when one of the newer, invariably false lines of attack against a rapid energy transition is that we can’t afford it.
So…what am I bid?
Great Performance. Limited Results.
Unfortunately, The Climate Auctioneer doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the day-to-day response to climate change.
Big financial institutions like the Royal Bank of Canada laudably embrace climate solutions, but still pour the lion’s share of their climate-related investment into fossil fuel extraction.
The revolving door between pension fund boards and the oil and gas executive suite is still humming along smoothly.
And Ottawa’s recent climate announcements have been increasingly performative, with recent big policy reveals like the Green Buildings Strategy and the Canada Public Transit Fund either under-delivering, or operating on a longer timeline than a precarious and unpopular federal government can likely hope to deliver on.
The federal government’s long-awaited sustainable finance taxonomy, unveiled with great fanfare at last week’s responsible investment conference in Toronto, is the latest example.
Years in the making, the taxonomy is meant to help investors differentiate green or “transition” investments from projects and companies whose environment and climate commitments are more spin than substance. With dozens of countries around the world already using or developing their own taxonomies, Canada has been under serious pressure to catch up—and get its own taxonomy right.
But you’ll find no hint of that urgency in the two years it’s taken the government to act on the recommendations it received from its own Sustainable Finance Action Council in September, 2022. And in the end, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s big announcement was that the first pieces of the taxonomy will fall into place in another year or more, after an independent, third-party body is formed to develop them.
The finance sector leaders who’ve advocated fiercely for the taxonomy are taking a victory lap, and so they should—this was almost certainly the best they could get under the circumstances, and when you win (when you win anything), you pause to say thanks.
But the reality is that, by the time the first installment of the taxonomy is due to be released, Freeland will almost certainly be an opposition MP if she seeks and wins re-election. Her successor in Finance will have been propelled into power by a ridiculous three-syllable rhyme that is now poised to blow up a decade of halting but discernible progress in national climate policy.
Which brings us back to a question that resonates from Florida to North Carolina, from B.C. to Alberta to Nova Scotia, and from Parliament Hill to countries around the world facing their own various versions of the climate emergency:
Wouldn’t you say we’ve reached and passed the point where we can’t afford not to get this done?
Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.
Chart of the Week
Rural Municipalities Decry Oil Industry ‘Handouts’ Amid Escalating Well Cleanup Costs
U.S. LNG Exports Carry 33% Higher Climate Impact Than Coal, Howarth Paper Concludes.
‘Scarcity Mindset’ Has 14% Fewer Canadians Citing Climate as Top Priority
Canada’s Wildfire Risk to Surge with Rapid Climate Change, Study Warns
TRIPLE FAIL: Sustainable Aviation Fuels Threaten Farmland, Food Prices, Farm Advocate Warns
CBC Expands Climate Coverage, Ducks Role of ‘Climate Emergency Broadcaster’
New Investment Speeds Development of 100-Hour Battery for Local Energy Storage
AI Could Drive Clean Energy Boom as Investors Question Climate Footprint
Could All Florida Gas Stations Run Out of Fuel Due to Hurricane Milton? (Rigzone)
‘Hype’ meets reality as Canada’s plans to export hydrogen to Germany stall (Globe and Mail)
U.S. Supreme Court clears way for Biden limits on methane and mercury pollution (Washington Post)
Canadian Natural Resources signs deal to buy Chevron’s Alberta assets for US$6.5B (Globe and Mail)
Three Mile Island owner seeks taxpayer backing for Microsoft AI deal (Washington Post)
Shipping Climate Goals at Risk as IMO Fails to Take Improved Energy Efficiency Seriously (Clean Shipping Coalition)
Indian companies move in as US cuts China out of its solar industry (Financial Times)
Colombia adds nature to the mix with its US$40B energy transition plan (Climate Home News)
Grassland birds in crisis on the Canadian Prairies, conservationists warn (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
A top energy strategist is optimistic about climate change. And he has the data to back that up (The Associated Press)
Is climate anxiety a pressing problem, or a luxury? (Grist)
Greenpeace Africa in disarray as restructuring meets resistance (Climate Home News)
Well...the balance in this line of work does tend to pivot day by day and week by week from more positive to less. The two common denominators we try to observe: follow the story wherever it leads, and *always* try to point to the next thing we can do to build solutions.
Nothing like some positive stories in a time of political and environmental crisis