The Ministry for Ignoring Climate Change by David Millar
Chapter 1
‘Eddington? He’s what you might call pale green,’ said Paul Hawthorne quietly, wrinkling his nose and tipping his head slightly towards the man at the end of the room. His colleague Adam Winter looked puzzled.
‘Environmentally aware but a political realist. Take last month for example; he attended a rally for polar bears, and then voted to support a new oil pipeline the same afternoon.’
Winter blinked. ‘Polar bears? At a rally?’
Hawthorne stared at him. ‘Not at the rally, no,’ he hissed. ‘It was a rally in support of polar bears. To raise awareness of the shrinking sea ice they hunt on.’
‘Oh…’ It was Monday morning. He was feeling a bit slow.
The two men were standing at the back of a staff meeting convened to announce the appointment of the new Minister for Climate Change, the Honourable Nigel Eddington, a fortysomething MP getting his first cabinet position, and their new boss. Well, Hawthorne’s boss. Winter was further down the pecking order.
‘Anyway, he wants to meet with both of us right after this. Apparently he has some new ideas he wants to share.’
‘Hmm…’ frowned Winter, before smiling broadly and clapping enthusiastically and with complete insincerity as Eddington stepped up to speak.
Hawthorne might have his doubts but for now Eddington looked like a refreshing change from his predecessor, a man who appeared to regard climate change as more of a personal affront to his political career than a crisis for the rest of the planet. ‘MinCC’ was widely regarded as the kiss of death to any political career, unpopular with most of the electorate and near-impossible to show any results in less than several electoral cycles.
If Eddington was pale green, Winter was greener—he’d only been in the department six months. He wasn’t even Canadian. Lanky and in his early thirties, he was a self-confessed climate nerd. he had been working at the Department of Energy and Climate Change in London as part of a team coming up with ways to reduce carbon emissions, and this overseas posting was a significant opportunity for him. He had been seconded to the Canadians for two years on a UN initiative to share best practices on climate change policies.
Things had not been going well.
On the face of it his secondment made good sense. Canada had one of the worst records on the planet when it came to tackling climate change—fifty-first out of the world’s fifty-seven most carbon-emitting countries, whereas the UK ranked fourth, just a few places below saintly Sweden. So the idea was that he could give them some pointers on how it was done, assuming of course they wanted to listen.
The problem was, he was increasingly convinced that they didn’t. He had decided that the role of the Ministry was not to take action on climate change at all, but to provide a smoke-screen for inaction, to generate a steady stream of nice-sounding initiatives and press releases that gave the impression the government was doing something, whilst actually doing nothing at all. In other words, to ignore climate change rather than to fix it. Hence his hope that the arrival of a new, younger, greener Minister could only be a Good Thing.
He would therefore have been disappointed if he had known that Eddington himself didn’t identify as an environmentalist at all, but more as a manager and a problem-solver. His primary motivation was not to help the planet but his career, and he cannily saw the recent upsurge in voter interest in the environment as a way of achieving that.
Before moving into politics he’d been a management consultant and was hoping that he could bring some out-of-the-box thinking to the challenges of climate change and reducing CO2 emissions, then use that to demonstrate his skills for bigger jobs—defence, foreign affairs, maybe even finance. Nigel Eddington was ambitious and full of ideas. His critics felt he should sometimes focus more on the quality rather than just quantity.
Hawthorne was the most senior civil servant in the department—the Ministerial Permanent Secretary, in effect the Minister’s deputy. He was the one who could get things done—the one with the finely-tuned political antennae, someone who knew the right moment to pitch an idea to his Minister to get it accepted, or to discretely introduce doubts that would sink an undesirable one.
When he had first arrived Hawthorne had spent several weeks briefing Winter on the department’s activities, a process which had left Adam with a grudging respect for Hawthorne’s skills. What he still couldn’t decide was whether the lack of real results was down to the hard line taken by the prairie provinces, as Hawthorne claimed, or to skillful foot-dragging by Hawthorne himself.
Overall Winter feared it was going to be an uphill struggle to actually achieve anything. He hoped that the new Minister would prove him wrong.
- - -
Thirty minutes later the new Minister swept into the meeting room and enthusiastically shook their hands before dropping a handful of coloured pens and Post-Its on the table, taking a seat and waving for them to join him.
‘Winter. That’s rather appropriate, isn’t it?’ he grinned.
Adam gave him a weak smile. ‘Believe me, I’ve heard them all, sir.’
‘I was going to say you’ve brought the weather with you too, but you’ve probably heard that one. Anyway, I hear you’re from London---they’ve certainly got their act together on climate change. Remarkable progress on actually reducing emissions, down by forty percent in the last thirty years. Hopefully you can show us how they did it and how it can be applied here, eh?’
Without waiting for a response he swivelled to-wards Hawthorne and continued: ‘Now, the reason the PM has asked me to take over the department is that he wants to see progress on climate change, a fresh approach. The public perception is that too little is happening. He wants to see real progress in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Most importantly, people need to see that the Carbon Tax is delivering.’
He beamed at them. ‘Plus of course we need to pay more attention now that schoolchildren are starting to become politically active on climate.’
Hawthorne nodded sympathetically. ‘We all need to be thoughtful about the next generation, Minister.’
‘Absolutely! Absolutely!’ Eddington grinned mischievously. ‘After all, they get the vote at eighteen!’ he laughed. ‘Anyway, I’m looking to the two of you for some fresh ideas so let’s get the facts on the table, give me the inside scoop—hash out some ideas together.’ He rubbed his hands together enthusiastically and Winter started to feel more optimistic.
‘How about we start with the national emissions target that was agreed with the IPCC in Paris: we don’t seem to be making much progress on meeting it do we, so what can we do to fix that?’
‘Well, to start with the basics,’ began Hawthorne, flashing them both a reassuring smile, ‘the biggest issue is the target number itself. At the Paris Agreement three years ago your predecessor committed this country to reducing greenhouse gas emissions thirty percent by 2030. In my opinion he got in over his head, it became a stupid macho thing, and he committed us all to something that’s virtually impossible to achieve.’
Eddington seemed taken aback by Hawthorne’s bluntness. ‘I know it’s traditional to blame your predecessor but that’s a bit below the belt isn’t it? It doesn’t sound macho to me, just that he was trying to set high standards.’
Hawthorne pulled a face. ‘That’s one way of looking at it, Minister. But in a sense this is a numbers game. You’ve inherited a tough target. If there were a way of lowering that target, you’d have a much better chance of meeting it. It could be the difference between being seen as a success rather than as a failure.’
Eddington looked thoughtful. ‘But surely the target is based on the science?’
‘You would think so, but no. It was just a negotiation, a number. Canada accounts for only one and a half percent of global emissions. Whatever we do will not make any difference in the big picture. If our target was, say, twenty percent less, it’s much more likely we would achieve it, and that would in turn give a big moral encouragement to people to try harder.’
‘I guess that’s one way of looking at it.’ Eddington seemed unconvinced, although he was clearly considering Hawthorne’s point.
Hawthorne leaned forward. ‘The thing is, Minister, your predecessor got into a kind of, well, a pissing match with the Danish delegation. He was trying to impress this particular woman on their team. The EU was going for a forty percent reduction and she more or less agreed to go to bed with him if he could get Canada to match it. She was daring him that he didn’t have the authority to commit to it. There is no scientific logic to the target. Only a…psychological one.’
‘You’re not serious?!’ laughed Eddington, incredulous.
‘Oh, the Nordic countries are just brutal at these climate negotiations, they’ll do anything—I remember there was this Norwegian girl at the Doha meeting…’ began Winter, before thinking better of it.
‘Consider this,’ continued Hawthorne. ‘We’re an arctic country, covered in snow five months of the year, temperatures down to minus twenty for weeks on end. Even with good insulation it takes a lot of energy to keep homes warm. More to the point almost eighty percent of our electricity already comes from non-fossil fuel sources, we simply don’t have that much scope for burning less gas or coal. Thirty percent just made no sense—even our own scientific advisors were against it, and they’re usually the ones pushing for more ambitious numbers.’
Eddington shrugged. ‘Okay, it might be a stretch but it’s still good for the planet though isn’t it? I mean, ideally we’d have a one hundred percent cut in human CO2 emissions, wouldn’t we?’
Winter looked alarmed. ‘Ah, not really Minister...a complete ban on man-made emissions might suit the rainforests and plant life, but it would be pretty detrimental for humans, obviously.’
Eddington seemed surprised. ‘Oh?’
‘We breathe out carbon dioxide, Minister. A complete ban would mean we could only ever breathe in, never out.’
‘Serious?’
Was Eddington pulling his leg, or had he somehow skipped basic biology at school? He really wasn’t sure. ‘Plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen. Animals—including us humans—inhale oxygen and exhale CO2.’
Eddington nodded sombrely as if Winter had just imparted some deep scientific secret to him.
‘Actually its cattle that are more of the problem,’ continued Winter. ‘The average cow emits around a hundred kilos of methane per year, but methane is twenty times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. So eating beef is actually really bad for the environment, not just the methane they produce but the fact that in order to make cattle ranches they often cut down carbon-absorbing forests. It’s a sort of double whammy.’
‘Cows emit methane? Really? How?’
Winter wondered if he was pulling his leg. Evidently biology was not the new Minister’s strong suit.
‘They, er, fart it, Minister.’
‘Oh, yes of course…’, he grinned sheepishly. ‘Maybe we could reach our emissions target simply by banning cattle?’ He tapped the table thoughtfully with his pen. ‘Or…how about if we replace all those cattle ranches in Alberta with solar panel farms? The farmers would still be farmers— technically anyway—but solar panels instead of cattle.’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘What do you think of that?’
Hawthorne looked thoughtful. ‘Well, Minister, it might take a while to persuade the country to go vegetarian…you know how people love their steak, not to mention cream in their coffee.’
‘And I suspect it takes a lot less people to look after a field of solar panels than of cattle, if you include the whole field-to-table food-chain,’ added Winter. ‘You might be inadvertently creating an unemployment problem.’
Eddington nodded thoughtfully and then scribbled ‘Cattle farms → Solar farms’ on one of his Post-its and stuck it on the whiteboard behind his head. ‘Let’s park that one for the moment. The main thing I’m concerned about right now is that our emissions are going up not down. We need to bring in some quick targeted pieces of legislation to cut emissions in factories, promote the switch to electric vehicles, phase-out coal-fired power stations. Get things moving.’
Hawthorne smirked as if about to explain the cruel realities of life to a teenager proudly clutching their first pay cheque and naively thinking it was all theirs.
‘Admirable thoughts, Minister, but the challenge is that you’re the Minister for Climate Change—not for Industry, or Transport, or Energy. You can’t just legislate in another Minister’s portfolio.’
‘No, of course not, but the cabinet are on the same page on this. We just need to plant the seeds, show them what to do. Ask for their cooperation.’
Hawthorne smiled again. ‘Are you sure they’re on the same page, Minister?’ He glanced at Winter. ‘Do you have any idea how long it would take the Minister for Energy to get approval to flood a valley to construct a new hydro dam, for example? It can be decades—not to mention the amount of public abuse and aggravation he’s going to get in the process. It would literally be a suicide mission for him to do what’s really required to meet the emissions targets.’
‘Suicide mission? Isn’t that a bit strong?’
‘Political suicide, I didn’t mean it literally,’ replied Hawthorne grumpily.
‘Actually you did say ‘literally’,’ pointed out Winter, immediately wishing he hadn’t. Hawthorne glared at him.
Eddington stood up and drew a rough outline of Canada on his whiteboard. ‘Bit of a digression, but I’ve got an idea about that I’d like to run up the flagpole with you guys and see if you salute it, so to speak. The arctic coastline is the part of Canada most affected by climate change, right? Rising sea levels are flooding Inuit villages, the shrinking sea ice means polar bears are starving, and thawing permafrost threatens to release gigatons of methane into the atmosphere.’ The other two nodded. ‘So why not turn all that to our advantage and build a massive combined solar-wind energy farm up there? In the summer you have twenty-four hour daylight so it’s ideal for solar, and in the winter it’s more windy so ideal for turbines. And it’ll be dark so no one will notice they’re there.’
He drew what looked like a line of daisies stretching across the top of Nunavut. ‘We put them all along the coast—almost no one up there to complain but anyway they should be sympathetic so it’s easier to get public approval. Ten thousand wind turbines all along the arctic coast. Mission accomplished!’ He put the marker pen down with a flourish.
Winter and Hawthorne looked at one another. It was hard to know if this was the musings of a genius or just hopelessly naïve. Probably the first daydreams of laying a transatlantic cable or putting a man on the moon had started the same way, so maybe they shouldn’t be too harsh.
‘It’s certainly ambitious,’ replied Hawthorne cautiously. ‘It would be a huge engineering project of course. You’d be talking tens of billions of dollars and decades to complete. But in principle, if it could be done, it would indeed be a tremendous achievement. A bold and career-defining act for sure.’
'And it would solve the problem of Inuit unemployment at a stroke,’ grinned Eddington.
‘As long as they had a head for heights,’ replied Winter dryly.
‘What’s more, we could use the Carbon Tax to pay for it,’ continued the Minister, on a roll. ‘How’s that going by the way? Is it persuading people to live low-carbon lifestyles?’
Winter winced. This was what he’d spent most of the last week studying. ‘Yes and no. There’s been an increase in sales of low-energy lightbulbs, but that’s because the old thermoluminescent ones were banned. And roof insulation and double-glazing too, but again that’s mostly because the cost is subsidized—in effect you pay people to buy them.’
‘But at least people are switching,’ replied Eddington. ‘How about electric vehicles?’
Hawthorne nodded. ‘Sales are doubling every year, but it’s still early days—still fewer than half of one percent of all new cars sold are electric.’
‘Which might not sound a lot, but at that rate they’ll account for more than half of all new vehicles sold within ten years,’ chipped in Winter encouragingly.
‘Excellent! And the revenue raised? Can we point to some good things it’s being spent on?’
‘It generates about ten billion dollars a year—although of course it’s not intended as a source of revenue, its function is simply to deter people from burning fossil fuels,’ said Hawthorne cautiously.
Eddington persisted. ‘But all the same…’
Hawthorne looked evasive and chose his words carefully. Winter had learnt that when Hawthorne wanted not to say something he used longer and more convoluted sentences.
‘Well, parliament took a multi-faceted approach to determining the metrics by which provincial governments decide how Carbon Tax funds are deployed. In principle it could be lots of things… developing carbon-capture technology, improved public transportation, education about carbon tax objectives, initiatives to motivate carbon-light lifestyles, and so on.’
‘Okay, but what’s it actually been spent on?’
Hawthorne looked increasingly uncomfortable. ‘Er, well, the main deployment avenue so far has been to return it to taxpayers in the form of rebates.’
Eddington raised his eyebrows. ‘We’re raising taxes simply to give it back? How does that help solve climate change?’
‘The refunds are remitted to different socio-economic groups within the contributor spectrum.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You take from the rich and give to the poor,’ explained Winter, becoming equally frustrated with Hawthorne’s evasiveness. ‘Which sounds a bit odd, but offering rebates makes the Carbon Tax far more acceptable to the public—even though most people have no idea how much they’re getting back. It creates a sort of feel-good factor.’
Eddington rolled his eyes. ‘Okay, okay…but what else is it spent on? Are there any projects that actually reduce emissions?’
‘Green infrastructure and energy-efficiency initiatives,’ replied Hawthorne smoothly.
Eddington still looked puzzled.
‘Better public transport and LED streetlights,’ translated Winter.
‘So the Carbon Tax is just a convoluted way to encourage people to take the bus?’
‘That would be a bit of an over-simplification,’ winced Hawthorne, disappointed by this dumbing down of his elaborate explanation. ‘But I guess some people might see it that way.’
‘So if we were to phase out the rebates, or get the Min of Transport to pay for the buses, we should be able to afford the ‘northern power project’?’
Hawthorne nodded slowly. ‘I suppose it might help dispel the bad press the Carbon Tax has gotten so far. People would see they were getting something concrete for their money. They could watch as their millions were steadily poured into it.’
‘Absolutely!’ enthused Eddington, missing Hawthorne’s sarcasm completely.
‘I guess it would be more concrete than some of the projects that have been suggested,’ added Winter, hoping Hawthorne would appreciate his continuing the joke.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Oh, giant space shades, genetically-engineered cattle that fart oxygen instead of methane, spraying white paint on the sea ice, seeding the oceans with iron filings to make them more productive—there’s no end to the wild ideas people have come up with. Just look on the internet!’
‘Really?’ Eddington leaned forward and Winter realized with alarm that he’d inadvertently piqued his interest.
‘Needless to say they’re all non-starters,’ he added quickly. ‘Completely bonkers, most of them.’
Eddington looked at him thoughtfully before looking again at his sketch on the whiteboard. He stood up and walked around the table and stared out of the window, thinking.
‘Okay. I take your earlier point about the emissions target being arbitrary, and in an ideal world we’d push to have it lowered, but what’s done is done. We need to focus on policies that give at least the appearance of being able to meet them within the lifetime of the next parliament.’
‘The appearance?,’ interjected Winter in alarm.
‘Poor choice of words. We need policies that could, in theory, achieve the goal. All due respect but we won’t get there fast enough by increasing electric vehicle sales by a couple of percent per year. We need something bold that could, if successful, be a true game-changer. A policy that we can all confidently get behind and defend.’
Confused, Winter glanced at Hawthorne who, ever the professional civil servant, had a serene expression on his face.
‘That bold vision is going to be the Northern Power Project, NorPow. Adam, I want you to run the calculations on how much our carbon emissions would be reduced if we built ten thousand combination wind and solar farms along the coast. If my gut is right that should just about supply the country’s energy needs, in which case the problem is solved, right?’
Winter realized he’d been wrong-footed.
‘Wait, what? Solved?’
‘Of course! If we can actually make it government policy to switch from coal and gas to arctic wind and solar, then CO2 levels will reduce and climate change will be eliminated.’
‘Well, maybe, eventually…’
Eddington gave him a supercilious smile. ‘That’s the great thing about our system in Canada, Adam. Once its government policy you know it will happen.’
‘But making it policy doesn’t in itself mean it will actually happen, does it, Minister?’ interjected Hawthorne, apparently also alarmed.
‘I don’t understand you,’ replied Eddington, frowning. ‘It will be policy, and therefore under our control. If it’s under our control we can ensure it happens.’
‘But what I mean is there’s no guarantee that even if we build all this that it will actually work, is there?’ repeated Winter, feeling a little panic-stricken at the prospect. ‘I mean that by switching our energy generation one hundred percent to this…’ he waved at the board, ‘northern power project, that it will actually reduce CO2 levels!’
Eddington cocked his head on one side, that slightly condescending smile again. ‘Don’t you have faith in the models Adam? Are you telling me the science is wrong?’
‘Well, no, but…’
‘So if the models are correct and we build the thing then carbon levels will drop, won’t they? It’s common-sense.’
Winter thought it was far from commonsense, but he didn’t say so.
‘Look, we’re reducing an uncontrollable problem—the climate—to a controllable one, government policy,’ continued the Minister. ‘If its policy then it will happen, it must happen.’ He sighed, clearly a little exasperated that his underlings did not see his point. ‘In effect, by creating a policy which the science and the models say will reduce CO2 emissions, we will control the climate. No if’s or but’s.’
He looked at the two of them. ‘Well I think this has been very productive,’ he concluded, rising from his chair. ‘I’m having lunch with the PM next week so I shall float some of these ideas past him. Now if you’ll excuse me…’
Back in Hawthorne’s office a few minutes later Winter looked at Hawthorne.
‘Oh God, he’s like a child! We should have tried harder to discourage him. Knocked his ideas down and kept him on the straight and narrow. Now he’s convinced he’s got a magic bullet that can solve climate change. We both know that’s impossible.’
‘Not at all,’ smiled Hawthorne winking mischievously. ‘I think we should give him all the encouragement he needs. This country needs a bold vision. Besides, it’ll distract him from the real agenda, eh?’
Not for the first time, Winter had the feeling that things at the Ministry were not all that they appeared.
(c) David Millar 2020
Chapter 1
‘Eddington? He’s what you might call pale green,’ said Paul Hawthorne quietly, wrinkling his nose and tipping his head slightly towards the man at the end of the room. His colleague Adam Winter looked puzzled.
‘Environmentally aware but a political realist. Take last month for example; he attended a rally for polar bears, and then voted to support a new oil pipeline the same afternoon.’
Winter blinked. ‘Polar bears? At a rally?’
Hawthorne stared at him. ‘Not at the rally, no,’ he hissed. ‘It was a rally in support of polar bears. To raise awareness of the shrinking sea ice they hunt on.’
‘Oh…’ It was Monday morning. He was feeling a bit slow.
The two men were standing at the back of a staff meeting convened to announce the appointment of the new Minister for Climate Change, the Honourable Nigel Eddington, a fortysomething MP getting his first cabinet position, and their new boss. Well, Hawthorne’s boss. Winter was further down the pecking order.
‘Anyway, he wants to meet with both of us right after this. Apparently he has some new ideas he wants to share.’
‘Hmm…’ frowned Winter, before smiling broadly and clapping enthusiastically and with complete insincerity as Eddington stepped up to speak.
Hawthorne might have his doubts but for now Eddington looked like a refreshing change from his predecessor, a man who appeared to regard climate change as more of a personal affront to his political career than a crisis for the rest of the planet. ‘MinCC’ was widely regarded as the kiss of death to any political career, unpopular with most of the electorate and near-impossible to show any results in less than several electoral cycles.
If Eddington was pale green, Winter was greener—he’d only been in the department six months. He wasn’t even Canadian. Lanky and in his early thirties, he was a self-confessed climate nerd. he had been working at the Department of Energy and Climate Change in London as part of a team coming up with ways to reduce carbon emissions, and this overseas posting was a significant opportunity for him. He had been seconded to the Canadians for two years on a UN initiative to share best practices on climate change policies.
Things had not been going well.
On the face of it his secondment made good sense. Canada had one of the worst records on the planet when it came to tackling climate change—fifty-first out of the world’s fifty-seven most carbon-emitting countries, whereas the UK ranked fourth, just a few places below saintly Sweden. So the idea was that he could give them some pointers on how it was done, assuming of course they wanted to listen.
The problem was, he was increasingly convinced that they didn’t. He had decided that the role of the Ministry was not to take action on climate change at all, but to provide a smoke-screen for inaction, to generate a steady stream of nice-sounding initiatives and press releases that gave the impression the government was doing something, whilst actually doing nothing at all. In other words, to ignore climate change rather than to fix it. Hence his hope that the arrival of a new, younger, greener Minister could only be a Good Thing.
He would therefore have been disappointed if he had known that Eddington himself didn’t identify as an environmentalist at all, but more as a manager and a problem-solver. His primary motivation was not to help the planet but his career, and he cannily saw the recent upsurge in voter interest in the environment as a way of achieving that.
Before moving into politics he’d been a management consultant and was hoping that he could bring some out-of-the-box thinking to the challenges of climate change and reducing CO2 emissions, then use that to demonstrate his skills for bigger jobs—defence, foreign affairs, maybe even finance. Nigel Eddington was ambitious and full of ideas. His critics felt he should sometimes focus more on the quality rather than just quantity.
Hawthorne was the most senior civil servant in the department—the Ministerial Permanent Secretary, in effect the Minister’s deputy. He was the one who could get things done—the one with the finely-tuned political antennae, someone who knew the right moment to pitch an idea to his Minister to get it accepted, or to discretely introduce doubts that would sink an undesirable one.
When he had first arrived Hawthorne had spent several weeks briefing Winter on the department’s activities, a process which had left Adam with a grudging respect for Hawthorne’s skills. What he still couldn’t decide was whether the lack of real results was down to the hard line taken by the prairie provinces, as Hawthorne claimed, or to skillful foot-dragging by Hawthorne himself.
Overall Winter feared it was going to be an uphill struggle to actually achieve anything. He hoped that the new Minister would prove him wrong.
- - -
Thirty minutes later the new Minister swept into the meeting room and enthusiastically shook their hands before dropping a handful of coloured pens and Post-Its on the table, taking a seat and waving for them to join him.
‘Winter. That’s rather appropriate, isn’t it?’ he grinned.
Adam gave him a weak smile. ‘Believe me, I’ve heard them all, sir.’
‘I was going to say you’ve brought the weather with you too, but you’ve probably heard that one. Anyway, I hear you’re from London---they’ve certainly got their act together on climate change. Remarkable progress on actually reducing emissions, down by forty percent in the last thirty years. Hopefully you can show us how they did it and how it can be applied here, eh?’
Without waiting for a response he swivelled to-wards Hawthorne and continued: ‘Now, the reason the PM has asked me to take over the department is that he wants to see progress on climate change, a fresh approach. The public perception is that too little is happening. He wants to see real progress in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Most importantly, people need to see that the Carbon Tax is delivering.’
He beamed at them. ‘Plus of course we need to pay more attention now that schoolchildren are starting to become politically active on climate.’
Hawthorne nodded sympathetically. ‘We all need to be thoughtful about the next generation, Minister.’
‘Absolutely! Absolutely!’ Eddington grinned mischievously. ‘After all, they get the vote at eighteen!’ he laughed. ‘Anyway, I’m looking to the two of you for some fresh ideas so let’s get the facts on the table, give me the inside scoop—hash out some ideas together.’ He rubbed his hands together enthusiastically and Winter started to feel more optimistic.
‘How about we start with the national emissions target that was agreed with the IPCC in Paris: we don’t seem to be making much progress on meeting it do we, so what can we do to fix that?’
‘Well, to start with the basics,’ began Hawthorne, flashing them both a reassuring smile, ‘the biggest issue is the target number itself. At the Paris Agreement three years ago your predecessor committed this country to reducing greenhouse gas emissions thirty percent by 2030. In my opinion he got in over his head, it became a stupid macho thing, and he committed us all to something that’s virtually impossible to achieve.’
Eddington seemed taken aback by Hawthorne’s bluntness. ‘I know it’s traditional to blame your predecessor but that’s a bit below the belt isn’t it? It doesn’t sound macho to me, just that he was trying to set high standards.’
Hawthorne pulled a face. ‘That’s one way of looking at it, Minister. But in a sense this is a numbers game. You’ve inherited a tough target. If there were a way of lowering that target, you’d have a much better chance of meeting it. It could be the difference between being seen as a success rather than as a failure.’
Eddington looked thoughtful. ‘But surely the target is based on the science?’
‘You would think so, but no. It was just a negotiation, a number. Canada accounts for only one and a half percent of global emissions. Whatever we do will not make any difference in the big picture. If our target was, say, twenty percent less, it’s much more likely we would achieve it, and that would in turn give a big moral encouragement to people to try harder.’
‘I guess that’s one way of looking at it.’ Eddington seemed unconvinced, although he was clearly considering Hawthorne’s point.
Hawthorne leaned forward. ‘The thing is, Minister, your predecessor got into a kind of, well, a pissing match with the Danish delegation. He was trying to impress this particular woman on their team. The EU was going for a forty percent reduction and she more or less agreed to go to bed with him if he could get Canada to match it. She was daring him that he didn’t have the authority to commit to it. There is no scientific logic to the target. Only a…psychological one.’
‘You’re not serious?!’ laughed Eddington, incredulous.
‘Oh, the Nordic countries are just brutal at these climate negotiations, they’ll do anything—I remember there was this Norwegian girl at the Doha meeting…’ began Winter, before thinking better of it.
‘Consider this,’ continued Hawthorne. ‘We’re an arctic country, covered in snow five months of the year, temperatures down to minus twenty for weeks on end. Even with good insulation it takes a lot of energy to keep homes warm. More to the point almost eighty percent of our electricity already comes from non-fossil fuel sources, we simply don’t have that much scope for burning less gas or coal. Thirty percent just made no sense—even our own scientific advisors were against it, and they’re usually the ones pushing for more ambitious numbers.’
Eddington shrugged. ‘Okay, it might be a stretch but it’s still good for the planet though isn’t it? I mean, ideally we’d have a one hundred percent cut in human CO2 emissions, wouldn’t we?’
Winter looked alarmed. ‘Ah, not really Minister...a complete ban on man-made emissions might suit the rainforests and plant life, but it would be pretty detrimental for humans, obviously.’
Eddington seemed surprised. ‘Oh?’
‘We breathe out carbon dioxide, Minister. A complete ban would mean we could only ever breathe in, never out.’
‘Serious?’
Was Eddington pulling his leg, or had he somehow skipped basic biology at school? He really wasn’t sure. ‘Plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen. Animals—including us humans—inhale oxygen and exhale CO2.’
Eddington nodded sombrely as if Winter had just imparted some deep scientific secret to him.
‘Actually its cattle that are more of the problem,’ continued Winter. ‘The average cow emits around a hundred kilos of methane per year, but methane is twenty times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. So eating beef is actually really bad for the environment, not just the methane they produce but the fact that in order to make cattle ranches they often cut down carbon-absorbing forests. It’s a sort of double whammy.’
‘Cows emit methane? Really? How?’
Winter wondered if he was pulling his leg. Evidently biology was not the new Minister’s strong suit.
‘They, er, fart it, Minister.’
‘Oh, yes of course…’, he grinned sheepishly. ‘Maybe we could reach our emissions target simply by banning cattle?’ He tapped the table thoughtfully with his pen. ‘Or…how about if we replace all those cattle ranches in Alberta with solar panel farms? The farmers would still be farmers— technically anyway—but solar panels instead of cattle.’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘What do you think of that?’
Hawthorne looked thoughtful. ‘Well, Minister, it might take a while to persuade the country to go vegetarian…you know how people love their steak, not to mention cream in their coffee.’
‘And I suspect it takes a lot less people to look after a field of solar panels than of cattle, if you include the whole field-to-table food-chain,’ added Winter. ‘You might be inadvertently creating an unemployment problem.’
Eddington nodded thoughtfully and then scribbled ‘Cattle farms → Solar farms’ on one of his Post-its and stuck it on the whiteboard behind his head. ‘Let’s park that one for the moment. The main thing I’m concerned about right now is that our emissions are going up not down. We need to bring in some quick targeted pieces of legislation to cut emissions in factories, promote the switch to electric vehicles, phase-out coal-fired power stations. Get things moving.’
Hawthorne smirked as if about to explain the cruel realities of life to a teenager proudly clutching their first pay cheque and naively thinking it was all theirs.
‘Admirable thoughts, Minister, but the challenge is that you’re the Minister for Climate Change—not for Industry, or Transport, or Energy. You can’t just legislate in another Minister’s portfolio.’
‘No, of course not, but the cabinet are on the same page on this. We just need to plant the seeds, show them what to do. Ask for their cooperation.’
Hawthorne smiled again. ‘Are you sure they’re on the same page, Minister?’ He glanced at Winter. ‘Do you have any idea how long it would take the Minister for Energy to get approval to flood a valley to construct a new hydro dam, for example? It can be decades—not to mention the amount of public abuse and aggravation he’s going to get in the process. It would literally be a suicide mission for him to do what’s really required to meet the emissions targets.’
‘Suicide mission? Isn’t that a bit strong?’
‘Political suicide, I didn’t mean it literally,’ replied Hawthorne grumpily.
‘Actually you did say ‘literally’,’ pointed out Winter, immediately wishing he hadn’t. Hawthorne glared at him.
Eddington stood up and drew a rough outline of Canada on his whiteboard. ‘Bit of a digression, but I’ve got an idea about that I’d like to run up the flagpole with you guys and see if you salute it, so to speak. The arctic coastline is the part of Canada most affected by climate change, right? Rising sea levels are flooding Inuit villages, the shrinking sea ice means polar bears are starving, and thawing permafrost threatens to release gigatons of methane into the atmosphere.’ The other two nodded. ‘So why not turn all that to our advantage and build a massive combined solar-wind energy farm up there? In the summer you have twenty-four hour daylight so it’s ideal for solar, and in the winter it’s more windy so ideal for turbines. And it’ll be dark so no one will notice they’re there.’
He drew what looked like a line of daisies stretching across the top of Nunavut. ‘We put them all along the coast—almost no one up there to complain but anyway they should be sympathetic so it’s easier to get public approval. Ten thousand wind turbines all along the arctic coast. Mission accomplished!’ He put the marker pen down with a flourish.
Winter and Hawthorne looked at one another. It was hard to know if this was the musings of a genius or just hopelessly naïve. Probably the first daydreams of laying a transatlantic cable or putting a man on the moon had started the same way, so maybe they shouldn’t be too harsh.
‘It’s certainly ambitious,’ replied Hawthorne cautiously. ‘It would be a huge engineering project of course. You’d be talking tens of billions of dollars and decades to complete. But in principle, if it could be done, it would indeed be a tremendous achievement. A bold and career-defining act for sure.’
'And it would solve the problem of Inuit unemployment at a stroke,’ grinned Eddington.
‘As long as they had a head for heights,’ replied Winter dryly.
‘What’s more, we could use the Carbon Tax to pay for it,’ continued the Minister, on a roll. ‘How’s that going by the way? Is it persuading people to live low-carbon lifestyles?’
Winter winced. This was what he’d spent most of the last week studying. ‘Yes and no. There’s been an increase in sales of low-energy lightbulbs, but that’s because the old thermoluminescent ones were banned. And roof insulation and double-glazing too, but again that’s mostly because the cost is subsidized—in effect you pay people to buy them.’
‘But at least people are switching,’ replied Eddington. ‘How about electric vehicles?’
Hawthorne nodded. ‘Sales are doubling every year, but it’s still early days—still fewer than half of one percent of all new cars sold are electric.’
‘Which might not sound a lot, but at that rate they’ll account for more than half of all new vehicles sold within ten years,’ chipped in Winter encouragingly.
‘Excellent! And the revenue raised? Can we point to some good things it’s being spent on?’
‘It generates about ten billion dollars a year—although of course it’s not intended as a source of revenue, its function is simply to deter people from burning fossil fuels,’ said Hawthorne cautiously.
Eddington persisted. ‘But all the same…’
Hawthorne looked evasive and chose his words carefully. Winter had learnt that when Hawthorne wanted not to say something he used longer and more convoluted sentences.
‘Well, parliament took a multi-faceted approach to determining the metrics by which provincial governments decide how Carbon Tax funds are deployed. In principle it could be lots of things… developing carbon-capture technology, improved public transportation, education about carbon tax objectives, initiatives to motivate carbon-light lifestyles, and so on.’
‘Okay, but what’s it actually been spent on?’
Hawthorne looked increasingly uncomfortable. ‘Er, well, the main deployment avenue so far has been to return it to taxpayers in the form of rebates.’
Eddington raised his eyebrows. ‘We’re raising taxes simply to give it back? How does that help solve climate change?’
‘The refunds are remitted to different socio-economic groups within the contributor spectrum.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You take from the rich and give to the poor,’ explained Winter, becoming equally frustrated with Hawthorne’s evasiveness. ‘Which sounds a bit odd, but offering rebates makes the Carbon Tax far more acceptable to the public—even though most people have no idea how much they’re getting back. It creates a sort of feel-good factor.’
Eddington rolled his eyes. ‘Okay, okay…but what else is it spent on? Are there any projects that actually reduce emissions?’
‘Green infrastructure and energy-efficiency initiatives,’ replied Hawthorne smoothly.
Eddington still looked puzzled.
‘Better public transport and LED streetlights,’ translated Winter.
‘So the Carbon Tax is just a convoluted way to encourage people to take the bus?’
‘That would be a bit of an over-simplification,’ winced Hawthorne, disappointed by this dumbing down of his elaborate explanation. ‘But I guess some people might see it that way.’
‘So if we were to phase out the rebates, or get the Min of Transport to pay for the buses, we should be able to afford the ‘northern power project’?’
Hawthorne nodded slowly. ‘I suppose it might help dispel the bad press the Carbon Tax has gotten so far. People would see they were getting something concrete for their money. They could watch as their millions were steadily poured into it.’
‘Absolutely!’ enthused Eddington, missing Hawthorne’s sarcasm completely.
‘I guess it would be more concrete than some of the projects that have been suggested,’ added Winter, hoping Hawthorne would appreciate his continuing the joke.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Oh, giant space shades, genetically-engineered cattle that fart oxygen instead of methane, spraying white paint on the sea ice, seeding the oceans with iron filings to make them more productive—there’s no end to the wild ideas people have come up with. Just look on the internet!’
‘Really?’ Eddington leaned forward and Winter realized with alarm that he’d inadvertently piqued his interest.
‘Needless to say they’re all non-starters,’ he added quickly. ‘Completely bonkers, most of them.’
Eddington looked at him thoughtfully before looking again at his sketch on the whiteboard. He stood up and walked around the table and stared out of the window, thinking.
‘Okay. I take your earlier point about the emissions target being arbitrary, and in an ideal world we’d push to have it lowered, but what’s done is done. We need to focus on policies that give at least the appearance of being able to meet them within the lifetime of the next parliament.’
‘The appearance?,’ interjected Winter in alarm.
‘Poor choice of words. We need policies that could, in theory, achieve the goal. All due respect but we won’t get there fast enough by increasing electric vehicle sales by a couple of percent per year. We need something bold that could, if successful, be a true game-changer. A policy that we can all confidently get behind and defend.’
Confused, Winter glanced at Hawthorne who, ever the professional civil servant, had a serene expression on his face.
‘That bold vision is going to be the Northern Power Project, NorPow. Adam, I want you to run the calculations on how much our carbon emissions would be reduced if we built ten thousand combination wind and solar farms along the coast. If my gut is right that should just about supply the country’s energy needs, in which case the problem is solved, right?’
Winter realized he’d been wrong-footed.
‘Wait, what? Solved?’
‘Of course! If we can actually make it government policy to switch from coal and gas to arctic wind and solar, then CO2 levels will reduce and climate change will be eliminated.’
‘Well, maybe, eventually…’
Eddington gave him a supercilious smile. ‘That’s the great thing about our system in Canada, Adam. Once its government policy you know it will happen.’
‘But making it policy doesn’t in itself mean it will actually happen, does it, Minister?’ interjected Hawthorne, apparently also alarmed.
‘I don’t understand you,’ replied Eddington, frowning. ‘It will be policy, and therefore under our control. If it’s under our control we can ensure it happens.’
‘But what I mean is there’s no guarantee that even if we build all this that it will actually work, is there?’ repeated Winter, feeling a little panic-stricken at the prospect. ‘I mean that by switching our energy generation one hundred percent to this…’ he waved at the board, ‘northern power project, that it will actually reduce CO2 levels!’
Eddington cocked his head on one side, that slightly condescending smile again. ‘Don’t you have faith in the models Adam? Are you telling me the science is wrong?’
‘Well, no, but…’
‘So if the models are correct and we build the thing then carbon levels will drop, won’t they? It’s common-sense.’
Winter thought it was far from commonsense, but he didn’t say so.
‘Look, we’re reducing an uncontrollable problem—the climate—to a controllable one, government policy,’ continued the Minister. ‘If its policy then it will happen, it must happen.’ He sighed, clearly a little exasperated that his underlings did not see his point. ‘In effect, by creating a policy which the science and the models say will reduce CO2 emissions, we will control the climate. No if’s or but’s.’
He looked at the two of them. ‘Well I think this has been very productive,’ he concluded, rising from his chair. ‘I’m having lunch with the PM next week so I shall float some of these ideas past him. Now if you’ll excuse me…’
Back in Hawthorne’s office a few minutes later Winter looked at Hawthorne.
‘Oh God, he’s like a child! We should have tried harder to discourage him. Knocked his ideas down and kept him on the straight and narrow. Now he’s convinced he’s got a magic bullet that can solve climate change. We both know that’s impossible.’
‘Not at all,’ smiled Hawthorne winking mischievously. ‘I think we should give him all the encouragement he needs. This country needs a bold vision. Besides, it’ll distract him from the real agenda, eh?’
Not for the first time, Winter had the feeling that things at the Ministry were not all that they appeared.
(c) David Millar 2020