Deconstructing Federal Conservative Climate Policy

Andrew Scheer recently rolled out the federal climate change policy---the one that his party is going to run one in this fall's election. With regard to the climate emergency, it's total flaming nonsense. But I do think it's useful to read because it tells a lot about the Conservative party and how it's leadership thinks.

When I Googled "Conservative party Canada climate plan" the first page that showed up wasn't the plan, but rather a "sign up page" designed to grow the Conservative database.

If you want to actually look at the plan, you have to click on another (quite tiny) URL that's in the middle of the request to sign up so you can be constantly bombarded with requests for money. Seeing this, I couldn't help but think that the party really doesn't want anyone to actually read their policy paper---it's just enough to have a press conference so you can say you have one. But anyone who might be interested in it should be snapped up as quickly as possible.

Foolish me, I followed that teeny, tiny lettering and actually found the pdf in question. There was a lot of baffle gab about how great previous Conservative governments have been for the environment, but the first thing that caught my eye was this graph. It purports to show how Canada is pretty much irrelevant in the whole climate emergency.

From the introduction of A Real Plan to Protect Our Environment

Wow, it looks like Canada is pretty small potatoes when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. But it all comes down to what you want to show, and what you want to hide. Canada has a small population compared to China, India, the US, and, Europe. How about we show a more relevant number, such as how much CO2 gets emitted per person?

From the Economics Help website. Fair Use provision.
(Yeah, I'd suggest the Conservative Party could use some
help with its economics home work.)

It turns out that we aren't modest little guys with no responsibility for frying the planet. Instead, we're the sloppy ass, ignorant jerks that waste far more than almost everyone else in the neighbourhood.

I'd suggest that a modern nation, which is a leader in developing high-tech industry, with one of the highest standards of living, could do more to cut it's greenhouse gas emissions per capita than countries like China or India, which are still trying to make sure that all their citizens have enough to eat. Frankly, trotting out the old "but China and the US emit more" canard means to me that the Conservatives have decided that they just don't have to make sense. Instead, they are just trying to parse out the fraction of the population who simply don't care about either the climate, other people---or even making any sense for that matter---so they can sign them up on their database and whip them into a frenzy by voting day.

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I'm getting sick of writing post after post about how awful the Conservatives are right now. It makes me feel that somehow I'm not being "fair" or "balanced". But the fact of the matter is that currently they have their heads shoved up their butts in a truly spectacular way. These are not ordinary times. I have always tried to be as honest and objective as possible in everything I write---and it is just a fact that there is something really wrong right now with conservatives all over the planet. 

Anyway, if you like this tedious cataloging of how far the right wing has gone down the toilet, consider subscribing through either Patreon or Pay Pal. 

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After this, the plan spends a great deal of space complaining bitterly about the Liberals and then goes on about a report created by the Parliamentary Budget Office report that states that if a carbon tax ALONE WITH NOTHING ELSE BEING DONE BY ANY LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT IN CANADA (something the Conservatives routinely fail to mention) was used to reduce Canada's carbon emissions to the Paris Agreement targets, it would have to rise to $102/ton. And they say themselves that this would translate into an increase of 23 cents per litre on gasoline and cost the average family $1,000 per year.

Let's look at those two numbers. First, according to Statistics Canada the highest monthly average retail gasoline price for May of 2019 was in Vancouver and was $1.69/litre. So add 23 cents, and you get $1.92/litre. How does that compare to prices in other countries? It turns out that there are something like 40 nations across the world that already pay that much---or more---for a litre of gasoline. And some of them are pretty nice countries: Spain, New Zealand, Switzerland, U. K., Ireland, Germany, Sweden, France, Finland, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Iceland, Norway, and, a whole lot of other places.    

As for that average figure of $1,000/year for the average family, I couldn't quickly find a number that averages household income (averages are pretty much useless in an age where the top 87 Canadian families own as much as the lowest 12 million individuals). But I did find a Statistics Canada number for median (that is the number where half the population make less, and, half more) household income:  $76,600.

Just to put that $1000 into a context, I went to a travel cost estimator site and it asked it to estimate a modest trip for two from Guelph to New Orleans for one week in January. That came in at a little over $2600. $1,000 to prevent runaway climate change, a decent future for our children, and, preventing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of millions of people seems like a real bargain! And don't forget that this number of $1,000/household is an average. People who are wealthy do things that create a lot more carbon emissions (like flying to New Orleans for a week) than lower income people. And, there is no reason at all why a government cannot come up with progressive programs that help the poor deal with the increased costs that come from a carbon tax. (Although I wouldn't hold my breath if the Conservatives get elected.) Yet this is the worst case scenario that the Conservatives could come up with their attack on the Liberal carbon tax?????? Where's the commie hordes coming for your house? Or the scorched earth? (Oh---wait, that's what's going to happen if climate change isn't dealt with.)

If you don't already know, this gif comes from the movie Apocalypse Now, which was
based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness.

You have to wonder if Scheer and his crew have just given up on trying to make any sense at all. Maybe they've assumed that they've lost the entire "pay attention to what's going on" fraction of the population and have invested their whole campaign into "angry idiots who couldn't figure out the details if their life depended on it" contingent.

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One last thing that really bugged me about the Conservative plan is the way it relies upon "cornucopianism". That's the goofy idea that whatever problem comes along, those marvelous scientists will be able to invent something to fix it.

A cornucopia. Line drawing by Scott Foresman.
Public Domain image c/o the Wiki Commons.

The cornucopia was an ancient symbolic representation of "plenty". When you see it in art the idea is that it suggests that you needn't worry about not having enough to eat---because for some reason you have access to endless bounty. 

In a similar way, the Conservative climate change policy is that no one needs to learn to live more frugally, or, make any changes in how they live at all. They have unbounded faith that the scientists---ie: the same guys who are screaming and wailing that we have to do something fast about climate change---will invent something that will magically solve the problem without anyone having make the slightest effort. Here's how the brain trust behind Andrew Scheer describe the situation:

Green Technology, Not Taxes is the best way to lower Canada’s emissions. A Real Plan to Protect Our Environment supports green technology innovation, development, and adoption here in Canada, without making life more
expensive with new taxes.

The Trudeau Liberals put a carbon tax in place to make driving your car and heating your home more expensive, hoping that you, the consumer, will seek different, cleaner alternatives. Here is the catch: cleaner, more affordable alternatives don’t always exist. Many commuters in the GTA often do not have another option but to drive their car to work and back home to Penticton, BC their families. Seniors in rural British Columbia often have no other option but to heat their homes with affordable and reliable natural gas or propane. Middle-class families just trying to pay their bills do not always have the flexibility to make different choices, and sometimes, those choices simply aren’t available to them. In the end, Trudeau’s Carbon Tax takes money out of your pockets and puts it into the government’s coffers.

There is a better way to fight climate change and reduce our emissions. We can encourage and support the development of green technology to make environmentally friendly alternatives available. We can do this without making the lives of Canadians harder and more expensive.

(p-12 of A REAL PLAN to Protect Our Environment)

Oh those poor conservatives. They've never heard of insulation, public transit, heat pumps, etc, so they just don't have a clue about how people---ordinary, hard-working Canadians---could possible figure out how to cut down on the amount of energy they use driving cars and heating their homes.

Tell your Conservative friends. This is a "bus". It's an alternative to having to buy a car. It
can take you to work, shopping, etc. And it costs a whole lot less than a car.
Original TTC picture, cited in CBC News story. 

Paying too much money for heating? There's this new, high-tech technique known as "insulation". Here's a Liberal, commie, hippie, bastard undermining the free enterprise system by trying to cut the amount of groovy, clean, Albertan-friendly natural gas he burns. Image used under Fair Use provision, from that notorious commie rag, Canadian Woodworking and Home Improvement. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---the climate emergency must be dealt with!

Post-Denialism, or, Can There Be an Environmental Morality?

During this Spring's floods I noticed something really quite remarkable about our dear Premier. Unlike other Conservatives, he's simply given up on trying to deny the existence of the climate emergency.

Instead, what he does is confuse people about what policies his government is pursuing. That means that he can cut provincial funding that is designed to deal with flooding, while at the same time looking like he really cares in photo ops. He can also say that Ontario is doing a great job in reducing carbon emissions but without pointing out that he rode to power by smearing the Liberal electricity policy. (You know, the policy that actually allowed Ontario to become the first major jurisdiction in North America to eliminate their coal-fired generators.)  He also ignores the fact that he has eliminated Ontario's participation in the cap-and-trade system designed to further cut emissions.

This is an interesting development because it's an example of something sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris calls "post-denialism".

You may have heard the famous quote that says "Hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue". This means that one only feels the need to be a hypocrite if one feels ashamed---or at least believes that one is expected to feel ashamed---to do a particular bad thing. For Kahn-Harris, he would paraphrase that quote from Francois de La Rochefoucauld as "denialism is the homage people pay to whatever they are denying".

Keith Kahn-Harris, image from his Twitter Feed.
Used under the "Fair-Use" copyright provision. 

As Kahn-Harris says, the key to understanding something like Holocaust denial is that the person doesn't really believe that the mass murder of Jews never happened. What he really wants to say is that their murder was a good thing and that the Third Reich was a great idea. The denier doesn't say this, however, because that is a profoundly unpopular point of view. So instead, he creates some sort of convoluted and lame argument that the Holocaust never happened. This creates a semblance of intellectual legitimacy that he and his fellow apologists for the NAZIs can hide behind.

In much the same way, people have traditionally attempted to deny the reality of the climate emergency because they had to "pay homage" to the fact that most people would admit that runaway climate change would be a very bad thing. But Doug Ford seems to have gotten to the point where he can admit that climate change exists and is "a thing"---but he just doesn't care. If he was alone in this, I wouldn't really care all that much. But he is surrounded by a political party filled with "enablers" who allow him to continue with his policies. And beneath them, there are lots of voters who supported him and gave him a majority government. What's going on here? Don't these people actually care about their children's future?

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I found out something this week. It turns out that you don't have to go through Patreon in order to make a monthly payment to "The Guelph-Back-Grounder", instead you can also do it directly through PayPal. (Thanks to Kathleen for not only being so awesome, but finding a new way to do it!) This means that you can pay directly in Canadian currency. Whatever way you choose to subscribe, however, it is much appreciated.

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The important thing to understand is that morality---what we call "right" or "wrong"---is an enormously complex issue. Unfortunately, you wouldn't know this if your only experience with moral decision-making was based on the institutions that govern our lives. Let me illustrate with an example.

Our criminal justice system is based on the notion that each individual goes through life freely choosing all their behaviours using a totally dispassionate cost-benefit analysis. Everyone---no matter what their personal history or genetic make-up---has exactly the same ability to rationally do a cost-benefit analysis of all their actions, all the time. This means that if someone does a criminal act, they do so fully aware of the consequences of being caught and freely chooses to do it. That means, that if someone chooses to break the law they can be deterred from doing so in future by punishing them with a jail term. And after they have received that sentence, they will realize that the price of getting caught and punished outweighs the benefit of committing the crime. This means that everyone who is caught and punished never commits a crime ever again.

Of course, the reality is totally different. But why?

To understand that, I'd suggest that people look at the history of criminal justice in our culture. Let's start with the gladiatorial combats in the Roman Arena. Most of the people who fought and died there were convicted criminals or prisoners of war. And the most common sorts of fights were ritual reenactments of early battles between the Romans and other cultures. As such, they were theatrical attempts to get the audience to feel what it means to be a member of Roman society. Because people are actually fighting for their lives, and, participants are going to actually die, it was very easy to become emotionally engaged with the spectacle. (Incidentally, this is why popular movies have lots of sex and violence---it's a short cut for directors to get audiences to pay attention.)

In much the same way, Anglo-Saxon "jurisprudence" often consisted of trial by combat or ordeal. The former consisted of a ritual duel where combatants representing two different sides would fight using a variety of weapons in a specified way. The idea was that "God" would reveal who was right according to who won. A trial by ordeal involved one person choosing to do some specifically painful act---such as grasping a hot piece of metal. The idea would be God would reveal guilt or innocence by whether or not the man could perform the task or would survive the consequences.

In both of these cases, the important issue is that a "combat" has been done and it was done theatrically to appeal to the emotions of an audience. We still have such a thing in our modern system. Instead of having two people going after each other with swords or pole axes, we have lawyers jousting with words. And instead of asking people to grab red hot metal bars, we expect them to dump all their wealth on the balance in the form of lawyer's fees and submit to years of litigation. If they have the "guts" and "stamina" to handle this ordeal, they may have been proved to be in-the-right.

In the past people enjoyed the theatrical event of executions. In our more modern era people are restricted to purging their emotions through dramatic recreations---witness the enormous number of crime-based television shows. In addition, our politicians use the punishment of the guilty to "whip" their followers into a frenzy of support, and, the media use the same spectacle to get maximum "clicks". (Check out this example of the Conservatives and CBC doing a ritual dance around the corpse of a little girl.)

  

In effect, our criminal justice system is not primarily about either morality or even changing human behaviour. Instead, it is a type of theatre designed primarily to arouse and channel people's emotions in ways that strengthen ordinary citizen's support for the various institutions of the state: the police, the government, political parties, and, the media. Criminals and victims are pretty much not more than sock puppets that these different "powers and principalities" manipulate to create the "passion-play" that keeps our society working.

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What has this got to do with the climate emergency? Well, I'd argue that whether or not we destroy the planet is a moral issue. Depending on how you construct your ethical worldview, it is either a crime against future human beings, or, it is a crime against the entire ecosystem. Either way, it is a very, very, bad thing to do. And yet, lots of people seem to be treating the whole issue as just another "ho hum" event. Why?

I'd suggest that it's because morality only "works" for most people if they can channel their emotions into it. And the way our society codifies and controls these emotions is through creating elaborate "passion plays"---just like our criminal justice system. And for many people, their emotions have already been "captured" by other things. It's like a type of love. We don't just love everyone, instead most of us have to love a specific person or persons: our partners, our children, our extended family. If we really stretch it, we can love an institution---like the church or the military, or, something more tribal, like our ethnic identity or country. But very few people can love everyone and everything. That sort of thing we may pay lip service to, but in practice it's reserved for "saints".

In our society I'd suggest that a lot of people who are interested in the conservative way of looking at the world have had their emotional attention "caught" by a specific definition of "freedom". This can be small "boutique" freedoms like the "right to bear arms", or, a strange type of religious freedom that involves inflicting your views on others. But more commonly, it boils down to an emotional attachment to "the free market" or a personal identification as "someone who pays their own way".

My experience with a lot of business people is that they often see what they are doing as some sort of "greater calling" that makes them feel like they are participating in something noble and good. I believe that this is related to why so many young people are so attached to the writings of Ayn Rand. As teenagers we are genetically programmed to separate ourselves from our parents and develop our own personalities and worldview. (Just like when kittens are weaned they go through a stage where they are programmed to wander great distances in order to find their own "territory".) For adolescents going through this phase, many of us feel that we are like the characters of her novels---great men and women who are working to create something good and noble by pursuing our own particular drives and ambitions, but who are thwarted by a society that keeps trying to keep them from doing what they want. Unfortunately, a significant fraction of the population never grows out of this adolescent phase and doesn't develop any sort of personal sense of responsibility towards others and the common good.

If you want to understand how these people view themselves and their ideals, take a look at the following YouTube clip from "The Fountain Head". If you think, as I do, that the dialogue sounds pretty lame, just remember that when I was younger I thought it was profound. And generations of idealistic young people have gone through a "phase" of also thinking that it's profound. (Heck, the "prog-rock" band Rush built a huge following with their albums praising Ayn Rand.)

If you have really bought into this ideal of total freedom divorced from any responsibility to other people, then the climate crisis sounds like an insane fever dream. Any program that involves everyone pulling together to learn to live more lightly on the earth sounds like a totalitarian nightmare that should be fought tooth and nail---no matter what the cost.

Another conservative "passion play" involves the glorification of self-reliance. This is the pride that right-wing conservatives feel when they are able to "get the job done" even though it is hard. Take a look at this truck advertisement and see how it glorifies the stoicism of "hard working American men" (I hadn't remembered the guy with the bandaged eye or the fellow in a wheelchair lifting himself up with a block and tackle before I looked at it again.)

If you've been raised to glorify self-reliance and stoic acceptance of "the way it is", then any attempt to suggest that society should give the disadvantaged "a leg up" or that there should be some attempt to right past wrongs, is just "queue jumping".  And adding environmental protection to the "design criteria" is just "making things needlessly harder". Both of these things are the ultimate sins in the stoic, self-reliant worldview.

From what I can see, people like Doug Ford and his supporters have their own set of morality that is "clogging" their ability to understand the moral imperative that we need to collectively do something about the climate emergency. That is what has fueled climate denialism for decades. That's why Ford can stand in the midst of terrible flooding, admit that it is probably the result of climate change, and, still work to sabotage any attempt to prevent future disasters. It's simply that he thinks it would be immoral (ie: opposed to Ayn Rand's understanding of "freedom" or a Chevvy truck commercial's vision of "self-reliance") to do so. 

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I would suggest that this is the real backdrop to climate denialism, just as support for the NAZI agenda is what really motivates Holocaust denial. And Dr. Kahn-Harris would argue that both groups have increasingly dropped denialism because they believe that the recent world-wide success of right-wing populism--Donald Trump in the USA, Brexit in the UK, and, Ford in Ontario---has destroyed the last vestiges of the post-WWII consensus about what is "decent and proper" in public discourse. This allows people to come out of the woodwork to declare that "the Jews will not replace us" and "climate change is causing flooding and forest fires---but we're not going to do anything to stop it because that would interfere with the free market".  That's what Kahn-Harris means when he says we are entering into the period of "post-denialism".

Oddly enough, Dr. Kahn-Harris thinks that post-denialism is a good thing. In his opinion once people really understand what is going on, a lot of "enablers" will gag and quickly drop their support. (After all, the moral universe of radical freedom and stoic self-reliance is pretty lame if you put even casual thought into them.) They want their children to actually have decent lives and for the climate not to go totally berzerk. Popular opinion in Ontario would seem to support this hypothesis. According to the latest poll numbers I see:

Among decided and leaning voters, the Liberals were at 39.9% support, the NDP at 24.2%, the PCs at 22.4% and the Greens at 12%.

I can only hope that this trend continues and that the entire political class learns a lesson from it.

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

Just What Does a "War Footing" Mean?

Unlike Guelph, various levels of government around the world have recently proclaimed that we are facing a "climate emergency". While our Council recently voted against doing this, I thought it might be useful for readers to understand what might actually happen if a government passed such a resolution and really lived up to the rhetoric. Luckily, we have an excellent analogy to a genuine "all hands on deck" response to the climate emergency. And that was the decision of various Allied powers to change their economies to a "war footing" in WWII. By looking at that, I think we begin to see what a real commitment to averting a climate disaster might actually look like.

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Let's start with Great Britain. Almost as soon as the war began, German U-boats started sinking British shipping. The British government was absolutely terrified about this, because the country was so dependent on trade. Here's a quote from a Wikipedia article:

At the start of the Second World War in 1939, the United Kingdom was importing 20,000,000 long tons of food per year, including about 70% of its cheese and sugar, nearly 80% of fruits and about 70% of cereals and fats. The UK also imported more than half of its meat, and relied on imported feed to support its domestic meat production. The civilian population of the country was about 50 million. It was one of the principal strategies of the Germans in the Battle of the Atlantic to attack shipping bound for Britain, restricting British industry and potentially starving the nation into submission.

Rationing in the United Kingdom 

It wasn't just a matter of British ships being sunk by the NAZIs, it was also a question of increased demand for shipping in general. Ships were needed to bring in weapons and raw materials too. Moreover, they would also be needed to send supplies to allies---such as those horrific convoys through the Arctic to the Soviet Union or through the Mediterranean to Malta. 

And it was also an economic issue too. Britain needed it's foreign currency reserves to buy hardware from other countries---especially the USA. For example, in 1939 the British realized that they didn't make any submachine guns, but that the army desperately needed them. The only one they could find to buy was the Thompson (the "Tommy Gun" used by gangsters), which cost an astounding $209/per unit in 1939. (It came down in price pretty dramatically as production went onto a war footing. And the British eventually designed and built the STEN gun---which only cost $11. But both of these facts "buttered no parsnips" in 1939.) When you are throwing away your gold reserves on tanks, ships, guns, and, planes, any money you can save by growing your own food is going to be tremendously important.

What the government decided to do was two-pronged. First, they introduced rationing to control what people ate, and, they put a lot of energy into agricultural outreach to dramatically increase domestic food production.

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The key thing I want readers to understand about food rationing in Great Britain was how incredibly all-pervasive it was. For example, you were not allowed to shop at any business you wanted. Instead, you had to register with the ones you used regularly and never go anywhere else. To a large extent, this was to allow grocers to exert some control over supplies in order to divide up scarce resources fairly. For example, if a shipment of something rare came in---for example, fresh apples---they could be limited to so many per customer. The business could do this because it could judge how many customers it had. And being able to limit in-demand items, the grocers could stop hoarding. In exchange, the average customer wouldn't have to kill herself in order to get to the store first---before the good stuff got all sold out.

Another example was that bakers were only allowed to make one particular type of bread, the "National Loaf". This was brown bread---which was more nutritious, more filling, and, wasted less flour. For similar reasons the only cheese produced was cheddar.

Luckily, there is a series of excellent YouTube videos that explains the British rationing experience by having a fellow "eat his way through" a week of war time rationing. (You can see it here.  If you are getting the email version of this blog, it strips out the YouTube videos.)

You might think that cutting people's access to food would damage their health, but the government put into practice some pretty effective "safety valves", to prevent what could have been "inevitable" problems. 

For example, as far as people who ate there, restaurants were exempt from the standard rationing regime. This didn't mean that the wealthy ate like kings and the poor starved, however. This is because the restaurants were forbidden to charge above a certain price for food. This meant that they could only purchase and sell food that was cheap and in relatively good supply (think bread, potatoes, common veggies, etc.) This meant that while there might still be food to put on the table, it would only be made from ingredients that were plentiful enough to still be cheap.

What this meant in practice was that at the most swanky restaurants the wealthy gentry got into of bringing in rabbits, pigeons, deer, trout, etc, to the restaurant and having the chefs there cook it for them. (Any wild game you caught yourself was exempt from rationing.) Everyone else learned to eat things like the National Loaf, potato soup, and, Woolton pie.

This last item was a concoction that was a "pseudo meat pie" that was concocted mostly of root vegetables, baked in a potato pastry crust, and, flavoured with imitation meat gravy. (I've heard it wasn't too bad but terribly bland---the British had yet to discover spices and it's cuisine had relied heavily on meat to add flavour.)

Woolton pie, image used under the Fair Use rule, from the Love Food recipe site.

The government was concerned about workers and the poor "falling through the cracks" of rationing, and, also the extra burden they were putting on households by mobilizing the entire population into the workforce. (When mom comes back from a hard day building Wellington bombers, I doubt if she's going to be too interested in slaving over a hot stove.) So they set up "British Restaurants" where a filling, nutritious (if often bland and boring) meal could be provided for a trivial amount of money---and no ration coupons. In effect, if you ate at a British restaurant or a workplace canteen (these were much the same), you could double your rations. As you might imagine, they were immensely popular.

Working stiffs at a British Restaurant in 1943.
Photo by Jack Smith for the British Ministry of Information.
Image c/o Wiki Commons.

One of the amazing things about this system was how incredibly effective it was. Not only did it prevent the sort of starvation that was common in Europe and Asia, it actually improved the health statistics for the average British citizen!

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The other side of the equation was food production. And again, the striking thing about this was how tremendously intrusive the government was in the farming sector. For example, they set up a system of what we would call "Agricultural Extention Officers" but they called "War Ags". But unlike ours, which merely give suggestions to farmers. In WWII Great Britain, these "Ags" would mark you according to certain criteria. And if you got a failing grade they'd take your farm away from you and give it to someone else that they thought would be more productive! That was the "stick" that made farmers pay attention to these government officials and actually do what they were told. 

And what they told people to do was increase the production of things like wheat, potatoes, sugar beets, milk, and, flax. They expected farmers to plough down their pastures, get rid of most of their livestock (the govt wanted dairy cows---for children's milk, but not sheep, pigs, or, beef cows.) They also wanted farmers to use new "modern" technology---like silage, combine harvesters, balers, various types of tractors (often rented to the farmer on a per-day basis by the Ministry of Agriculture), etc, in order to save manpower, and, cut down on feed grown for horses. The pressure that the War Ags put on farmers got to the point where they used every scrap of land available---growing hay on the sides of roads, in cemeteries, collecting nettles and cutting down tree branches to feed dairy cows ("pollarding"), etc.

Again, if you have the time and are interested, there is an excellent series of YouTube videos about the British Agricultural system in WWII. (Here's the link for email subscribers.)

Food production wasn't just left up to farmers. People were encouraged to grow as much of their own food as possible. 

Londoners growing vegetables in Kensington Gardens during the Second World War.
Public Domain Image, c/o the UK National Archives.
Original photo from Imperial War Museum, item D8334.

This went beyond growing veggies. For example, people were encouraged to form a a "pig club".

The idea was that while it made no sense for farmers to grow feed specifically to raise pigs, it was reasonable for households to pool their kitchen scraps and weeds from the garden to feed just one hog. The government encouraged this behaviour, but they brought in specific regulations. For example, the government specifically declared that it owned half the pig, which meant that the members of the club got only half of the pig they raised. Moreover, the pig could not be slaughtered unless a police officer was present to ensure that things were all done on the "up and up". (These rules didn't cause as much upset as you might imagine, as the government's half of the pig was specifically set aside for the people who'd been displaced by bombing---especially the children.)

As with food rationing, these Draconian policies proved tremendously effective in boosting wartime production. Wheat boomed to the point where by 1943 50% of wheat for bread was produced locally and potatoes increased by 87%---a tremendous improvement over pre-war levels. Unfortunately, however, the UK was still dependent on imports of food from Commonwealth and Empire nations. And because Britain was assigned top priority over Empire nations, some of colonies in Asia, Africa, and, various islands suffered starvation because they were denied imports that they had become dependent on because of colonial trade patterns. As many as 3 million subjects in places like East Africa and the Bengal died of starvation because of a decision to ship food to the UK instead of using it to deal with local shortages. 

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I put a lot of work into writing these in-depth, "back-ground" stories. I think it's only fair that people support this work. It doesn't take a huge commitment. If all my readers were willing to subscribe through Patreon and give me as little as one or two dollars a month, I'd be making a tidy income off this blog. The new technology that Patreon uses makes these "micro payments" totally easy. And if you are afraid of getting "locked into" a monthly payment that's hard to get out of (I know about that sort of thing---it's happened to me) all you have to do is pay through PayPal. With PayPal all you have to do is go on line and cancel your payment---you don't have to change your credit card number, pay the bank to stop a payment, or, anything else complicated to do. If you don't want to make commitment, all you need to do is toss something in the PayPal tip jar---you can do that with just your credit card, no PayPal account needed.

I am making a commitment to never put the Back-Grounder behind a paywall, no matter how much support I get. So if you subscribe, you're also supporting all the people who can't afford to subscribe. I think that this is a pretty good deal. If you don't, why not contact me and tell me why? 

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"Wartime footing" didn't just apply to "little people" like workers or farmers, either. The government also stepped in and bossed around big business too. In 1939 Canada created the "Department of Munitions and Supply", which was put under the control of C. D. Howe. Just to give you an inkling of how all-powerful this department became, Minister Howe became known as "the Minister of Everything".

C. D. Howe---"the Minister of Everything".
Public domain image, c/o the Vancouver Archive.

Howe had a history of knowing how to "build things from scratch", as he'd started both the CBC and Air Canada before the war.

The way he managed the Canadian economy was by tapping into what he considered the best business managers in the nation and having them agree to become "dollar a year men". That is to say, they were loaned to the nation by their businesses (which continued to pay their previous salary), and the government paid them one dollar a year---just to get them officially on the payroll. They were then used to create an integrated, centrally-controlled economic system that was designed to do three things:  produce war materials, dramatically grow Canadian manufacturing capacity, and, do it without creating inflation or war profiteering.

His ministry did this by creating 28 Crown corporations that "filled the holes" in Canadian industry. Howe was given enormous power by Parliament to

“mobilize, control, restrict or regulate to such extent as the Minister may, in his absolute discretion, deem necessary, any branch or trade or industry in Canada or any munitions of war or supplies.”

Arming the Nation, by Dr. Jack Granatstein, p-5.

And he did. Howe created things like artificial rubber plants and machine tool factories so it could supply industry with things that the Canadian economy had never made before. This allowed the government to create whole new production lines for things that had always been imported before. The results were impressive. There were a few "home runs"---it's been said that the British army ran on "Canadian Military Pattern" trucks, and, Canada built 122 anti-submarine Corvettes and 410 merchant ships. (Pretty astounding numbers given that there was almost no ship building industry at all in 1939.)

There were also a few "base hits". Canada tried to build it's own tanks---the "Ram"---but they weren't really able to compete with the American Sherman in either quality or price. But the Ram was re-purposed into the "Kangaroo", which became a very successful armoured troop carrier. When Howe saw his first Lancaster bomber on a trip to Britain, he insisted that Canada should build them too. He gave the contract to the Hamilton National Steel Car plant, but there were problems with production. Howe had the management changed and it became "Victory Aircraft" for the duration of the war. Only 430 Lancasters were produced---most too late in the war to be of much use. But they did build almost 3200 Avro Ansons. (A training and "communication" {cargo and transportation} aircraft based on a pre-war airliner.)

Much of this production came about because the "dollar a year" executives developed a "sub-contracting" production system. This involved splitting a project into bits and pieces which were then subcontracted to smaller firms spread all over the country.  (It also had political advantage of ensuring that the entire country---not just Central Canada---benefited from the war-time boom.) This was a considerable increase in organizational complexity because it required strict quality control (to make sure that the subcontracted parts actually fit together as designed) and co-ordination (to make sure that giant, complex machines didn't sit half-built because a specific part hadn't shown up on time.) This is where the expertise and authority invested in Howe and his executives were essential---the war simply could not allow major projects to become tangled up in "red tape" or Parliamentary wrangling. 

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None of this tremendous intrusion into people's lives would have been possible if people weren't willing to make the personal sacrifices. This didn't "just happen", but was the result of two things: a commitment to make sure no one profited unduly from the war, and, a massive public education campaign.

WWI political cartoon.  Public domain image c/o BBC News.

The conventional wisdom about WWI was that a lot of money was siphoned off due to profiteering. And in 1938 there had been the so-called "Bren gun scandal" that involved the Ministry of Defense being involved in helping the Inglis company of Toronto secure what we would call a "no-bid contract" to build BREN light machine guns for both the British and Canadian military. The Conservatives whipped up people's concerns to the point where the then Minister of Defense, Ian Alistair Mackenzie, resigned. In response, the Liberal government passed the "Defense Purchases, Profits Control, and, Financing Act" which created a clear chain of command and set out guidelines to prevent profiteering. Which, in turn, created the "Minister of Everything". (Once Germany invaded Poland it became clear to all and sundry that it was a very good idea to have a factory building machine guns in Toronto, so the "Bren Gun Scandal" quickly fizzled out.)

Another part of this "we're all in this together" campaign was the creation of wage and price control mechanisms aimed at making sure that inflation was kept to a minimum. Wages were relatively easy to regulate, but prices were a different matter as a lot of the "day-to-day" stuff was locally produced and hard to keep an eye on. To this end, the government mobilized customers to keep an eye on the businesses they dealt with in order to keep them "on the up-and-up". 

An advertisement by the Canadian government advising consumers that they should
now be paying less for milk than before. From the website "Life as a Retailer".

This helped control inflation but it also told the average citizen that the government was keeping an eye on business so it wouldn't jerk them around. This sort of thing does an enormous amount to get the ordinary person supportive of the common project. 

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This raises another important issue. As is abundantly clear from the recent sleazy campaigns to spread fake news over social media, propaganda works incredibly well to mold public opinion. The difference between the war years and today is that the government was then using it to get people "pulling together" in a common cause, whereas now we have a wide variety of players---including White Nationalists, Incels, Climate Change Deniers, Anti-vaccers, and, various foreign secret services---who are using it to divide people and whip them up into a frenzy against one another. 

These positive and unifying messages ranged from the merely practical. 

To support to specific campaigns like car pooling and scrap drives.

To the genuinely inspirational. 

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This last image of Winston Churchill pointing at the viewer, telling her that it isn't enough to just want to win the war, but that she needs to work at being a good enough person to actually deserve to win really strikes home to me. Doing all this research about the the WWII home front, I was deeply impressed about how much the British people actually deserved to win the war. Almost the entire nation pulled together in a level of deep, selfless commitment that seems almost impossible to believe nowadays. Almost everyone pitched in and did their bit, really. 

Without this incredible mobilization of the entire people, it's easy to believe that there would have been mass starvation in Great Britain and their war effort would have fallen to pieces. But it didn't, and to use another phrase from Churchill, it really seems to have been their "finest hour". Contrasting it nowadays with many people's almost total indifference to the public weal literally brings tears to my eyes. 

But there is a side to this tremendous mobilization that we also need to remember. There were legal sanctions against people who fought against the public good---and they were enforced. As I mentioned above, if you wouldn't "get with the program" you would have your farm or business taken away from you. Moreover, if you aided and abetted the enemy or its agenda, you would be arrested and put in jail. 

A rally in Great Britain with Oswald Mosley inspecting some of his
para-military "black shirts". Public domain photo c/o The History Press.

Sir Oswald Mosley was a ex-elected member of Parliament who was leader of the British Union of Fascists. He had good connections with European Fascists---he and his second wife married in Germany, with Hitler as a guest---and supported a corporatist economic and social policy. In practice, his party went out of its way to bait Jewish people and progressive organizations, which led to the "Battle of Cable Street".  (Some AntiFas of today cite that as an inspiration for their activities.) When war broke out, he was loudly in support in a peace deal with Hitler. British intelligence considered this a threat to the war effort, so his party was outlawed and he was put in prison under the War Measures Act.

This might seem draconian to modern ears. But at the time it made a lot of sense. In country after country small fascist parties had offered significant support to the invading Germans. For example, in Norway a collaborator government under Vidkun Quisling  became the Norwegian voice for German policy. And in France a local, Fascist paramilitary group "the Milice" helped round up resistance members and Jews in aid of the NAZIs. All over Europe local Fascists recruited members to join local SS regiments that fought and committed atrocities for the Germans. The UK was concerned that at least some of the British black shirts would be willing to offer similar "aid and comfort to the enemy".

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What can we learn from the above history lesson? 

First, I'd suggest that contrary to what a lot of people have said over, and over, and over, and over, and over, again---it is possible to mobilize the citizenry to do great things. "Human nature" doesn't make it physically impossible for society to quickly self-organize so we can collectively prevent or deal with massive problems. So it is totally possible for the nations of the world to declare a climate emergency and go on a war footing in order to quickly decarbonize the economy and retrofit our society in order to deal with the effects of climate change. It all comes down to a question of political will. 

Second, this mobilization can't be done without the government really stepping in and intervening in people's lives. It is possible to get most people "with the program", but there have to be real consequences for people who simply refuse to do their bit. I suspect that this isn't just a case of catching the odd individual who is sabotaging the work of everyone else, but probably more a case of people being not willing to pitch in if they can see others getting away with being "free riders". If the government creates negative consequences for people who won't do their share---and is seen to be doing so---then people will be more willing to participate because it is "fair". 

Here's a YouTube video that illustrates this problem very well. 

As I mentioned above, the British "War Ags" can and did take away farms from people who wouldn't listen to advice about how to expand production; C. D. Howe took away a factory from executives who were doing a crappy job building airplanes; and; British Intelligence put local Fascist sympathizers in prison. Moreover, the government let people know how much they should be paying for necessities---like milk---and wanted to hear from them if they saw businesses charging more. 

If we want people to really pull together about climate change then the government is going to have to step in and motivate people to all work together in order to get rid of fossil fuels and deal with the natural disasters that come from climate change. That could mean rationing gasoline and jet fuel so we can "ratchet down its use". It could also mean banning the importation of products that use too much carbon to import---we might have to get used to not having out-of-season fruit and veggies that were trucked thousands of miles to the grocery store.

It could also involve a new "Minister of Everything" getting a crew of "dollar a year people" to "rejig" the auto industry away from building cars and instead building a comprehensive public transit system. They could also work to build the new industries that will produce the solar panels, windmills, and, super-efficient machinery that will be needed to build a truly sustainable economy. We could also see a massive public works campaign that aimed to insulate every building up to a certain minimum standard of efficiency within a short period of time. We would also need to create enormous public works programs to protect coastal cities from flooding, and, to relocate people and industries from areas that will flood or burn out on a regular basis as the climate changes. Moreover, we will need an absolutely enormous amount of effort aimed at restoring devastated ecosystems in order to rebuild the carbon sinks and ecological resilience that has been badly damaged by hundreds of years of allowing "the invisible hand" of the marketplace squeeze the life out of Mother Nature.

I have mentioned this idea to several friends and some of them replied "Well, that was possible then---but it's impossible now because things are so much more complicated." It's true that we live in a more complicated world, but we also have computerized tools that will make some things just as more easy to do than they used to be. For example, if we were to seriously ration gasoline to cut down on emissions as a transitional measure, then it would be so much easier to organize car pools nowadays due to the use of cell phones. The same thing could be said about quickly introducing bus-based public transit between cities once people found that they had to leave their cars in the driveway much more often.

The point to remember is that each individual person doesn't have to know how each element of the economy is going to change. No one can. But if we unleash the intelligence and creativity of hundreds of thousands of people united in this one goal, we will find that we can accomplish amazing things---just like the way our parents and grandparents turned enormous, complex societies on a dime during WWII.

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In the climate emergency context, I would suggest that the closest analogy to locking-up Oswald Mosely and the Union of British Fascists might involve going after some of the social media companies that have allowed climate change deniers, anti-vaccers, white nationalists, and other malefactors free reign to lie to the general public. The recent meeting in Ottawa of The International Grand Committee on Disinformation and ‘Fake News’ is an excellent first step.

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Great Britain was put on "war rations" and lived with a planned economy for all of the Second World War. You might be excused for thinking that people would be in a huge rush to get rid of all that once the war was over. The Conservative party campaigned on that. But oddly enough, Labour ran on the opposite. They said that people still needed to pull together to "win the peace" just as they'd won the war. They said that the country needed to keep rationing and using a controlled economy to build a new world that included things like a national health service. 

Indeed, there was a lot of truth to this. The UK was effectively bankrupt after the war, as the United States almost immediately started demanding repayment of the loans it had given to Britain to fund its war effort. Moreover, the Allied powers who were now occupying Western Europe and large parts of Asia had the responsibility of feeding millions of people---many of whom were displaced people living in refugee or POW camps. Agriculture and industry were both destroyed anywhere the Axis had held power. Britain now not only had to feed it self, but also many other people too! 

Ordinary voters understood this, and Labour won a smashing victory over the Conservatives even though they were led by the immensely popular Winston Churchill. As a result, the "war footing" and rationing continued for years after the war, with the final ration regulations disappearing in 1954.

Canada didn't have anywhere near the problems that the UK did. We weren't an occupying power, so we had no similar huge obligations. In addition, all those nations of the world with wrecked industry and agriculture were over-joyed to buy stuff from us. This meant that all those war industries set up by C. D. Howe were able to quickly transition to making consumer goods. John Inglis and Company in Toronto stopped making Bren guns and products for domestic use. (I own an Inglis washing machine.) The Victory aircraft factory in Hamilton went back to being the "National Steel Car" plant, which is now a tremendously successful business that sells freight cars to railways all over North America. And those factories in Ontario that had built the trucks that the British army had ridden to victory formed the basis for the car industry that has provided good paying jobs for generations of workers.

In much the same way, I think that a successful "War Footing" to deal with the climate emergency would only last a few years. But once we had made the transition to a sustainable world, I'd suspect that we would find that a lot of things had changed for the better in ways that most of us couldn't imagine before we started the process. If you'd told the average worker in Great Britain during the Great Depression that in 20 years the UK would have a universal, free healthcare for everyone---plus a lot of other significant social programs---he'd have thought you were dreaming in technicolour. And if you'd told Canadians who grew up in a country where most people really were just lumber jacks, miners, or, farmers that after only six years of planned economic growth that we'd be a major manufacturing powerhouse---and eventually get all the same significant social programs as the UK---they'd had laughed in your face.

But the facts speak for themselves. There's no reason at all---except a failure of vision---that we cannot do much the same thing with regard to the climate emergency. It just comes down to a question of political will.  

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!