We all hold on to shibboleths – long-standing beliefs accepted by a particular group of people that are often no longer true.
Like many in the environmental movement, I long thought of political conservatives as a nemesis for the environment. I came by this association honestly: from my grandfather, who co-founded the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the predecessor to the left-leaning NDP, to my mother, who once told me that if we elected the Progressive Conservatives in the 1988 federal election, they would chop down all our trees.
Later, however, after I co-founded Corporate Knights magazine and launched a survey, asking leading environmentalists who had been the greenest Canadian prime minister and U.S. president in history, I was surprised that on both counts, conservative leaders won the green star: Brian Mulroney and Theodore Roosevelt. I remember how moved Mulroney was, when I contacted him to inform him of this recognition from what were normally hostile quarters (reportedly, he considered his “Greenest Prime Minister in Canadian History” award as his most cherished honorific). I was also moved by how prominent environmentalists, including David Suzuki and Elizabeth May, took to the airwaves when Mulroney was crowned the greenest PM, free of any enmity for him, to celebrate the genuinely good things he had done on acid rain and for the ozone layer. It was a nice example of love triumphing over hate.
If there is one thing we know, it is that the environment cannot be a political football. It has to be a trans-partisan issue in which every party and leader can imagine themselves as heroes, especially now in these times that require heroic and sustained climate action.
My old boss Ralph Nader formed the Critical Mass Energy Project in 1974 as a national anti-nuclear umbrella group, which was largely successful in stopping the expansion of nuclear power. Many environmentalists oppose nuclear energy because of the radioactive waste that sticks around for thousands of years. I was always skeptical about nuclear power because of the high costs (due in part to a web of regulatory requirements), but I was also rankled by how the nuclear lobby dismissed renewables. While I still don’t think building new nuclear is the way to go (it takes too long and costs too much), I am in favour of extending and keeping existing emissions-free nuclear online (see Eugene Ellmen’s exploration of the topic).
Many people were involved in the creation of Canada’s carbon tax, including myself. I co-authored a $100-billion carbon tax plan in 2007 launched alongside members of Parliament from three of Canada’s four national parties (guess who was missing), which almost immediately inspired John Baird, then the Conservative environment minister, to coin the attack line “a tax on everything.” Later, at a meeting of decision-makers in Winnipeg, I put forward the idea for a made-in-Canada carbon tax where the money stayed in the provinces, which was welcomed by Gerald Butts, the future principal secretary to the current Liberal prime minister, as “bad policy but good politics” and in 2018 became the law of the land.
Unfortunately, the carbon tax (as our director of research notes) is tailor-made for dividing people, which certain politicians (not just conservative) have gone to town on. And many of the biggest polluters managed to insert fine print that exempted them from paying much at all. It’s little wonder that many big polluters, from Exxon to Suncor, supported a carbon tax, and environmentalists were slow to appreciate this. Although it seemed like a wonderful idea to many political stripes at the time, the love affair with the carbon tax has not panned out, partly because it is individualist and punitive in nature and does not tap into the cooperative “build it together” spirit that is required to lay out the solutions to power a climate-friendly civilization.
Not all shibboleths are long-held. Some are being formed as we speak, as the meat-industry lobby foments the belief that plant-based foods are too processed and expensive to be an effective climate solution. More on that in our “plant power” package.
For the sake of the planet, it’s time for all of us to shed the shibboleths that no longer serve the higher good, to come together in protecting the only home we have from spiralling into climate chaos.
Rather than ostracizing, demonizing or lionizing, the path forward for climate action can be more inclusive, open-minded and clear-eyed, but focused on the practical nuts and bolts and love of the future we can build together.
Toby Heaps is the co-founder and publisher of Corporate Knights.
