Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:01
is there such a thing as a good war according to seth klein there is especially when the enemy poses a threat to not just human life but the world as we know it for klein that enemy is
00:00:14
anthropogenic climate change and he says we need to rally the canadian government and its citizens in a war on co2 emissions klein in his book dug deep into the strategies used during the second world
00:00:26
war and discovered how wartime propaganda and community efforts can be repurposed today for a green new deal he contends a rapid transition to a carbon neutral or even a carbon zero
00:00:37
future as possible and that that transition will create jobs reduce inequality and tackle climate change so is klein's belief that we can come together to
00:00:48
mobilize in a wartime fashion misguided he says no just look to covet 19. the pandemic demonstrates something powerful can happen because when we name the crisis and then respond in a wartime scale action
00:01:01
we create a new sense of shared purpose a renewed unity and that liberates a level of political action that seemed previously impossible in other words klein says we can do this i invited seth klein the
00:01:14
author of a good war to join me for a conversation that matters about why it's time to mobilize the intellectual financial and natural resources of this country to defeat climate change conversations
00:01:27
that matter is a partner program of the center for dialogue at simon fraser university the production of this program is made possible thanks to the following in viewers like you please become a patron at conversations that matter dot tv
00:01:40
seth klein welcome you've got your book there a good war yeah it's it's an interesting title because you're using the word war which basically says there's an enemy and we have to defeat them what's the
00:01:53
enemy and why is it that we have to escalate the level of discourse to that of being on a wartime footage well so the book is about mobilizing for the climate emergency
00:02:05
and it invokes uh this wartime frame and says we need to go on to a wartime footing i should say i'm a very unlikely guy to have written a war story like i know because you're a pacifist well i've never called myself a pacifist but
00:02:18
when i was a kid i certainly cut my political teeth in the peace movement in the 80s and i am in fact the child of war resistors during vietnam my parents came that's why i'm canadian my parents came
00:02:30
in the late 60s pregnant with me and here you are right now and now it has the word that's right and so there's a couple of reasons one is and i should say too i when i originally set out to write the book
00:02:43
um you know it was to tackle what do we do about this gap between what the science says we have to do on climate and what our politics seems prepared to entertain and i was only going to have a chapter on the second world war because i had long been intrigued by
00:02:56
the second world war as this example of when we very quickly retooled the whole economy because i found it hopeful right like a lot of us wonder can we really do this in time and really our world war ii story says
00:03:08
actually yeah we can't because we've done it twice we had to mobilize up war production and then convert back to peace time all in the space of six years but as i delved more and more into that research
00:03:20
i kept seeing more and more parallels and then decided to structure the whole book around lessons from the second world war but the main reason i'm i'm invoking this is because
00:03:32
what we're doing now isn't working you know we've been at this for a few decades now with different governments saying it's time to tackle climate and all we have managed to do is basically flatline our emissions as a
00:03:46
country we have not bent the curve okay and so we've run out the clock on on incremental debates that have been distracting and i'm saying we need to shift gears
00:03:58
and adopt a wartime mindset to actually do this at the scale and speed we need to do it so how do we do that well this is where i i found all of this inspiration in our
00:04:10
world story so on the economic front uh first of all it's remarkable to me once i started to dig in that the speed and scope of what we did as a country and actually what we specifically did here in british columbia
00:04:22
i mean we we in those six years from a base of almost nothing right there's almost no military production in canada before world war ii we produce about 750 ships about 350 of
00:04:34
them right here in our own province where it seems we can't even build our one of our own ferries anymore 16 000 military aircraft producing the fourth largest air force in the world
00:04:45
uh 800 000 military vehicles more than germany italy and japan combined so how did we do that well i became quite fascinated by this guy c.d howe uh who was the
00:04:58
minister in the king government who oversaw all of this not a lefty by the way no you know on the right wing of the liberal party had come out of the private sector made a lot of money but he became really seized by this task
00:05:12
so he he was happy to give lots of contracts to the private sector but he i describe him as an engineer in a hurry um and he was an engineer by training and uh
00:05:23
so anytime the private sector couldn't quickly do what he needed done he created another crown corporation to do it he created 28 crown corporations in the course of world war ii across these areas to drive that change
00:05:37
he also what he basically did is he started by taking an inventory what do we need and what have we got what can we produce and then he set about filling the gap either through contracts to the private sector
00:05:50
or new crown corporations and then he carefully coordinated all the supply chains all the key inputs machine tools rubber silk oil coal timber all of them are being carefully coordinated
00:06:03
to prioritize wartime production he starts recruiting friends from the private sector including some prominent british columbians like macmillan h.r mcmillan woodward they all abandoned their private sector
00:06:15
posts to go become dollar a year men for cd howe overseeing much of this and i think that's what we need to do today we need to we need to take an inventory of how many solar arrays do we need how
00:06:27
many wind turbines how many electric buses how many electric heat pumps what's the new generation crown corporations we should be establishing to expedite doing that at scale
00:06:40
and deploying it at scale to actually decarbonize and electrify in the short window of time that we have okay so what is the biggest obstacle to being able to create that collective
00:06:52
effort because when we take a look at the second world war we had known enemies germany japan uh and so we could all agree that that was the enemy we could accept we didn't here's one of
00:07:05
the interesting things um you know i like myself included before i set out on this little journey i think we look back in the rear view mirror and we assume you know september 39
00:07:17
canada declares war everyone's ready to rally everyone understood the threat to be clear and present except that's not true i agree with you it's not true it's not true the country was quite divided on these things it was not a
00:07:30
country that was keen to go to war it wasn't especially in quebec especially in quebec but king himself didn't want to do this right up until the 11th hour roosevelt didn't want to go to war
00:07:41
either yeah well and we went two years before they did yeah right it took time to move us public opinion and unlike for us it ultimately took an attack on their soil yes um which is an
00:07:57
interesting point of comparison my point is something happened some combination of leadership because it took leadership and circumstance to ultimately
00:08:08
get a public truly mobilized now interestingly you know i wrote this whole book before the pandemic and and i shipped it off for a final copy at it three days before the pandemic and uh i thought we needed an historic
00:08:23
reminder of how quickly we're capable of pivoting and here we all are right well you got it um well so i think parts of it were pretty pressy and it's kind of i wrote a new epilogue in the book with for covid and
00:08:35
otherwise didn't touch the body of the book well and you've noted that you're going to continue to update your blog yeah i've been doing that online on my website um so it's always you know it's an it
00:08:48
your your question is how does it happen you know so it takes leadership finally getting it but at least we've now all gotten a taste in this pandemic ah yes this is what it looks and sounds and
00:09:01
feels like when a government actually treats an emergency as an emergency and it makes for such a stark contrast with the lackadaisical approach both our federal and provincial governments have taken on climate okay
00:09:13
so why is it that people have embraced the emergency that is covet 19. [Music] we're still in this tug of war between different camps
00:09:24
around climate yeah and until you get to that that critical point do you think that we can actually mobilize the government and then individuals to take on these well the
00:09:38
question is will it come in time i mean the curse of the climate crisis is that relative to covet and relative to the war moves in slower motion yes and that's a challenge um in both covet and the war you know
00:09:52
there are these instances where something clicks for the public right so in the war it's the fall of france in june of 1940 right that changes the popular zeitgeist
00:10:02
about just how serious this is um with covet i don't know maybe it was the cancellation of the nba season that's what i remember suddenly people were like what the nba's canceled this is serious
00:10:13
um uh but but right away too our governments to their credit have shown leadership on covid right when when our governments start having daily press briefings
00:10:26
when they invoke emergency acts as necessary when they strike special committees of cabinet to coordinate emergency actions when they commandeer buildings and assets as required or
00:10:39
supply chains they're signaling okay it's an emergency now you contrast that with climate where the messaging is totally confusing yes it is what does it mean for last
00:10:51
summer justin trudeau to pass a climate emergency motion in the house of commons one day and reapprove the trans mountain pipeline the very next day that's confusing or within our media landscape what does
00:11:03
it mean that we allow advertising by fossil fuel cars and gas stations we don't do that for tobacco so if you're someone in the public or a young person and you you're told on the one hand hey
00:11:16
this is an emergency on the other hand they're still advertising to you that's confusing that's not consistent messaging well it's muddied waters because smoking i can look at and go look you do that you're going to die
00:11:29
directly and you're going to impact me yeah okay we want to take on the fossil fuel sector hmm you're going to take it that way and you're going to give me what because solar and wind uh aren't going
00:11:42
to be up to the challenge of re completely replacing the easy access to energy that comes through the burning of fossil fuels and so this is where i think people start to get a little worried
00:11:53
hang on a second here you mean i can't drive my car i'm i can't heat my house i can't turn on the lights whenever i want to like well people rightly have all kinds of questions and they can't yet imagine and i would say this is part
00:12:05
of the failure of leadership they can't imagine what that alternative life looks like how do i get around what does my house look like how does it get heated how do i make a living can i still enjoy the leisure parts of
00:12:17
my life these are all entirely legitimate questions that our public institutions have failed to answer even though the answers are there i outlined them uh in my book and you know at the very basic level
00:12:33
you know i did i commissioned some original polling for my book from abacus research and i found some very hopeful stuff and you know the public gets the emergency and incidentally i've tried to recast
00:12:46
some of the the extreme weather events we've experienced as attacks on our soil let's think about them that way yeah um and they're ready for bold action actually the public is ahead of our politics in terms of that i was surprised to see
00:12:58
that you even mentioned in alberta the numbers are much higher than you so you mentioned quebec before so the the opinion polling nationally ranges from a high in quebec in terms of their readiness fraction right to a low in alberta but even in alberta
00:13:12
the level of support is remarkably high um but not to get to pollyanna about this the landscape is confusing so the good news is the terrain has really shifted in the last couple of years the student
00:13:25
strikes extreme weather events indigenous solidarity stuff all of that has shifted the terrain but at the level of basic climate literacy only about half of canadians can
00:13:39
correctly identify the main source of global warming as the as the as the combustion of fossil fuels namely coal for the production of electricity well yeah i mean not an issue in our province but it's certainly no but not globally
00:13:52
it is and globally so whatever whatever the fossil fuel is whether it's coal or gas or oil the public doesn't actually understand which is an incredible indictment of the fact that
00:14:05
our governments and the media have not done some of their basic job uh in terms of boosting that level of literacy and consequently you end up with confusing polling results
00:14:18
where people will say on the one hand i'm ready for action and i support the expansion of uh lng or or or the tar sands because why not okay so is the answer and i know that this is
00:14:32
what you're suggesting in your book that we mobilize the government get involved in r d the creation of these crown corporations that are going to put money and brain power behind
00:14:44
developing a wide range of solutions that are going to reduce our carbon footprint or do we also need to take a look at what's our population footprint uh because people consume energy the
00:14:57
more people there are the more energy that gets consumed cup there's a couple things in your questions so first of all what do i want from our governments right i i want to see them adopt an actual emergency wartime footing and
00:15:10
i think there are a few signs of when you know that that's happened we're getting a taste of that in the pandemic yes you adopt a wartime or emergency mindset that helps to liberate a kind of level
00:15:22
of collective purpose it makes new things possible you expect to see your government spend and invest to win right like we've seen in the pandemic like we saw in the war
00:15:35
yeah like we have decidedly not seen with respect to climate you would expect them to create new economic institutions to get the job done so that's what i mean by that new generation of uh of crown corporations and by the
00:15:48
way i still think there's a role for the private sector in all of this um but interest there was a huge role for the private sector in the second world war but what they didn't get to do was decide on the allocation of scarce
00:15:59
resources because you don't do that in an emergency um and and i think that's the mindset we need today you're secondarily bringing in the population question and you know it's the population needs
00:16:11
to level off at some point it will level off in the next uh in the next 40 years but but here's the thing i'm more interested in the issue of the distribution of
00:16:23
income because what we know is that the wealthiest uh 10 percent globally are responsible for by
00:16:34
far and away the majority of ghg emissions and in our own country the wealthiest 20 of canadians have about double the emissions of the poorest 20 of canadians right and the higher you go up the income ladder
00:16:47
the greater your runaway emissions so so what i'm actually saying in the book is part of the climate mobilization is also tackling inequality for two reasons actually
00:17:00
one is because inequality drives increase emissions ghg emissions but also because that's how you win that's how you mobilize people that is one of the key lessons from the second world war
00:17:13
is that inequality itself is toxic to social solidarity and society-wide mobilization if you're asking people to truly rally and common cause people need to know that everyone's in
00:17:26
and everyone's doing their part in the first world war there had been rampant profiteering it undermines social solidarity and undermined recruitment actually forced conscription onto the table um
00:17:38
kind of like we've seen in this pandemic where despite you know we're all in this together just a couple weeks ago my former colleagues at the canadian center for policy alternatives published a little paper that the wealthiest 20
00:17:51
canadians had increased their cumulative wealth by 37 billion dollars since the start of the pandemic wow now that that was illegal in the second world war the king government brought in an excess profits tax
00:18:04
he brought in increases both the individual taxes and the corporate tax rate went from 18 to 40 percent because that's how you signal to the population okay we're all in and on the flip side
00:18:17
our two first major social programs came in in the war unemployment insurance 1940 uh the family allowance in 1944 the whole architecture of the modern canadian
00:18:30
post-war welfare state is written in the marsh report during the second world war and is offered as a promise to canadians that not only are we asking you to rally in defense of democracy and against fascism
00:18:43
we're making a pledge to you that you're not going to come back to the same country you left that to me is the power of something like the green new deal it's not just about decarbonizing everything
00:18:55
and electrifying everything it's also about creating a better society that can actually and the promise of which gets everyone on the bus there's no doubt that if we can develop those technologies and innovations that
00:19:09
are going to change the way in which we produce the energy that's needed to maintain our quality of life canada and and all of us will benefit but if we go back to the war we can see that
00:19:21
uh yeah there was a price still of sacrifice that was made by the average person do you foresee that if we do as you suggest in the book well it's a mix by the way i mean interestingly the kind of sharing that
00:19:33
occurred you know there was rationing and so on and there was sacrifice in the second world war interestingly meat consumption went up in the war because lower income people under rationing could eat more meat than
00:19:45
they did before the war um so yes there's sacrifice there's also you know lots of people have written about how um at a kind of psychological level
00:19:56
people remember this period with great fondness that well because there was collective experience collective experience collective meaning and purpose um so part of what i'm arguing in the book
00:20:09
is that yeah this is going to be harder and more challenging than our governments are telling you our governments are basically telling you know this is pretty easy you can do it you don't have to make any hard choices and i'm trying to say no let's
00:20:21
tell the truth there are some hard choices we can't keep doing everything the same way but yeah but i'm also saying that when we start to paint that picture of what our neighborhoods look like when we're serious
00:20:34
about this what our transportation looks like what our health looks like that it's actually a better world it's a it's a it's a good life
00:20:45
and in some ways a more meaningful life than the one we'll be leaving behind well you present some really great ideas in here and as you say you uh you tell the truth um which is you know i applaud you it's a
00:20:58
it's a good book it's a it's a good bit of work and i'm sure that it was quite a bit thanks for coming in thanks yeah
00:21:16
[Music] you
End of transcript