COMMENTARY: Is the Climate Tide Turning Toward Adaptation? – Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

Since the debate over climate change began in earnest in the 1990s, two policy pathways were on offer. One, which came to dominate the global policy world, was to quickly and drastically lower global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. And two, which garnered much less attention, was to adapt to climate change and make humanity more resilient to any changes.

The tide may be changing to the latter path. Last year, Bill Gates, formerly a die-hard GHG mitigation advocate, penned an essay admitting that the climate change doomsday view is wrong and that “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.” More recently and closer to home, Macleans magazine published an article, which suggests how countries can adapt to climate change rather than forestall it.

According to the article, we should “discard the net-zero ambitions that have caused us to lose sight of the bigger picture.” The authors acknowledge, as we’ve long observed, that Canadian emissions are a small fraction of global totals, less than 1.5 per cent, and that “what truly matters” is not how much CO2 Canada produces but whether emissions globally are reduced. They observe that by increasing exports of LNG to replace dirty coal burned in Asia, Canada could help lower the world’s greenhouse gas emissions by as much as Canada’s emissions in total. The authors also observe that Canada can look to adapt to increased electricity demand by falling back on nuclear power: “Canada was once a leader in producing low-carbon electricity” and we’re “one of only two countries with a complete nuclear-fuel supply chain, but we haven’t built a new nuclear plant since 1993.”

It’s great to see more high-profile focus on adaptation to climate change, rather than continuing the quixotic pursuit of rapid “decarbonization.” As we recently observed in a series of essays published by the Fraser Institute, historically adaptation was humanity’s only recourse to abrupt or unexpected climate changes. As we document, regions struck by flooding learned to engineer water diversions of rivers, streams and even major sea-level rise or coastal land subsidence. Regions struck by drought learned to transport water from regions of surplus; regions with unbearable heat learned to engineer housing and cities to offer relief, and adapted their cultures to work when it was cooler, and avoid the heat when warmer. In another publication way back in 2011, I documented how regions struck by increases in severe storminess can learn to avoid building in vulnerable areas and use insurance systems to increase resilience to recover from unavoidable damage.

Whatever model of future climate change is right, wrong or overwrought, it is refreshing to see the discussion of adaptation appear in a high-visibility publication such as Macleans. Hopefully, some of its readers will begin to at least consider government policies favouring adaptation to a potentially warmer world (and tell their political representatives), rather than continuing to tilt at self-destructive GHG-emission control measures such as “net-zero 2050,” vehicle electrification, oil and gas sector self-destruction, and so on.

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