In the film The Dark Knight, there’s an exchange between Bruce Wayne and Alfred Pennyworth about limits. Specifically, Alfred warns Bruce that he needs to “know his limits.” Bruce first rejects this idea, claiming that “Batman has no limits.” When Alfred points out that, while that may be true, Bruce Wayne does have limits, Bruce counters that he “can’t afford to know them.”

“And what’s going to happen on the day that you find out,” Alfred asks.

“We all know how much you like to say ‘I told you so,’” Bruce says.

“On that day, Master Wayne,” Alfred says, “even I won’t want to.”

People within the green movement have been talking about limits for years. On a finite planet like ours, there are limits to growth, whether you’re talking about energy generation, the economy, or how much we can squeeze out of the environment. In fact, the recognition of limits has often been used as the key distinction between the Green party and other political parties. In 2004 David Suzuki was the keynote speaker at a federal Green party convention in Bragg Creek, Alberta where he told us that the Green party was the only party that understood limits to growth.

Contrary to popular belief, and despite the party’s own messaging and positioning, most Greens I know have been very concerned about an impending economic collapse for years, and have been focused on it as the core challenge we should be addressing. We have recognized that the environmental, economic and energy crises are interrelated and must be dealt with in a coordinated fashion.

The response from most people to these realities, including our political leaders, has first been one of denial (“we have no limits”) then one of inconvenience (“we have limits but we can’t afford to know them”). The first goal of the green movement was to convince people that it was better to understand our limits and discover them on our own terms rather than encounter them unexpectedly in a way that would have disastrous consequences.

By many measures, that objective was not met. I don’t mean to say I’ve lost hope for a better future, because I have not. But realistically, many of the things we should and could have prevented will now come to pass. There were limits to how far we could push destructive economic growth, and we have learned (some of) them. There are limits to how much we can abuse and take for granted our environment, and we are beginning to learn them. There are limits to how long we can continue to exploit our current sources of energy at current rates, and we are rushing towards them. We are stumbling towards the triple E crisis instead of meeting it on our own terms.

The day has arrived where we can now say “I told you so.” And on this day, we don’t want to. Nor should we waste our breath. The fact that we’ve allowed the great challenges of our time to become even greater only means that we must focus more than ever, and work harder than ever, on solving them. Every time we miss the mark, we will redouble our efforts and start anew.

What was, with the AIG bailout, a mere crack in the economic firmament is now a gaping fissure. The result of the financial coup d’etat is a Great Divergence: we we have two economies running in parallel: capitalism for the poor, and socialism for the rich. The former essentially subsidizes the latter endlessly and perpetually.”

In the years leading up to the present economic collapse, economist Peter Schiff made numerous appearances on American news networks foretelling the coming maelstrom with uncomfortable accuracy. His prescience was roundly rewarded with mockery, not just from the other guests but also from the network hosts themselves. (Torontoist can’t help but feel a certain amount of empathy with Schiff. In last year’s Heroes and Villains, we wrote that “the subprime mortgage crisis, which began late last year but really picked up steam in the last few months, is not going away. In fact, it is a trigger incident that will continue to unravel the American economy into 2008, almost certainly leading to a recession and likely a depression.” That entry, for what it’s worth, received only 1.1% of the villain votes. It’s fine. We’re over it.)

Now that some of the worst-case economic predictions are playing out, smugly saying “I told you so”—while satisfying—isn’t particularly helpful. Many of the economic myths we’ve grown up with are being systematically dispelled, so simply rebuilding the economy as it was before this collapse is inadequate. Instead, we must re-imagine how our economy functions and what we expect it to do for us.

Enter Peter Victor, an economist at York University. For the last several years, Victor has been pursuing, in his words, “a topic which is anathema to most members” of his profession. Specifically, the idea that “people in rich countries can and should manage without economic growth,” not just because “it is implausible that the biosphere can support the nine billion people…who are expected to be on the Earth by mid-century at a standard of living remotely like that of current day North Americans,” and not just so that “people living in poorer countries can enjoy the benefits of economic growth where it really makes a difference,” but because “there is plenty of evidence to show that economic growth is doing very little to increase the happiness of most of us in rich countries.”

Victor’s timely new book Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster argues that government should shift its focus away from economic growth as its pre-eminent policy objective towards more effective measures of well being, and offers specific ideas on how to get there within a Canadian context.

Like Peter Schiff, Peter Victor will likely face strong opposition from some. Proposing to overhaul some of our most basic assumptions about how economies should function is no easy task. But that’s part of what makes it courageous, and perhaps just a little bit heroic.

Thank you for placing a carbon tax estimator on the Progressive Conservative Nova Scotia Caucus website. As someone like you who is engaged in our democracy, I always appreciate it when our elected officials make an effort to educate the public about their various policy choices and what the impacts of those choices could be.

It’s in that spirit that I draw to your attention a critical missing component of your carbon tax estimator. As you know, the Liberal Green Shift plan, as well as the more detailed and aggressive Green Party “green tax shift” on which  it is based, both hinge on a carbon tax being offset by reductions in other taxes, primarily payroll and income. Your carbon tax estimator attempts to tell people how much they would pay in carbon taxes, but does not also allow them to calculate how much they’ll save in reduced income and payroll taxes (what someone more clever than I has called a “tax cut on everything”).

This oversight, which I’m sure is innocent and accidental, inadvertently gives Nova Scotians a very inaccurate impression of what a green tax shift would actually mean for them. I trust that you’ll address this error promptly now that it has been brought to your attention.

Best,

Chris

And yet, you’d think that with environmentalists, the banks, economists, and others on board, there would be at least one opposition party that was able to creditably take the government to task for so quickly throwing out this report, right? Unfortunately, for reasons I’m not quite able to grasp, not a single party in the House of Commons had the (wisdom? courage? political foresight?) to call for what is increasingly acknowledged as necessary and urgent.

Only the Green Party supports a carbon tax, which we would use to reduce taxes on income and investment. It’s incorporated in our detailed climate plan released last summer, and has been a core policy position for longer than I’ve been involved. Like so much of our vision for Canada, it is an idea whose time has come.

It’s reasons like this (not to mention this) that not only must Elizabeth May be in the leaders’ debate during the next general election, but we need Green MPs in Parliament as soon as possible. According to a poll released two days ago, most Canadians agree, and would like to see a Parliament with 25 Green MPs. (Not surprising, since under a fair voting system that’s around what our current level of support would produce.)

The Toronto Centre by-election represents an opportunity to realize that desire. A strong finish will (hopefully) scare the other parties into smartening up. A win would be historic, and break the old-line monopoly in Ottawa. It would mean ideas whose time has come would finally be taken seriously and begin to be implemented. And it wouldn’t be a moment too soon.

GNH is a variation on a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) that I’ve argued for previously in some detail, and is an attempt to address the problem of our current worship utilization of the GDP as if it was an indicator of increased quality of life, which, after a certain point, it isn’t. Even one of the initial architects of the GDP warned against its use in that way. Just because the overall size of the economy has increased doesn’t mean we’re better off or getting more out of life.

Instead, a GPI takes into account all the things we value as a society—volunteerism, health, peace, meaningful employment, equal opportunity, economic strength, and yes, happiness—and quantifies them so that we can have an accurate measure of if we’re headed in the right direction or not. Implementing a national GPI would be one of the smartest things our government could do to help us all start to understand not only what’s good about what we’ve got, but how much better things could be.

Further Reading:
Reporting Back: Green Party of Canada Policy Conference, Halifax
Dr. Ron Colman – “A Sobering Place to Begin”
Dr. Peter Victor – Managing Without Growth
Our Economic Pyramid Scheme

What will an all-retail economy look like, when that day arrives? My stretch of College Street in Toronto is pretty much restaurants and cafés, rarely broken by even a futon store or 7-Eleven. Can a society survive by serving each other lattes? People rise in the morning, go to their posts and start feeding the customers. But everyone does it, so they’re all running in and out, serving and being served. I have to finish this croissant so I can rush back and make you a falafel. I extend the metaphor to those who serve information or entertainment. That’s the shell of an economy left when you produce almost nothing for basic need. Not to mention the small matter of dignity involved in making things you need and use each day.

I like the wording of this question, since I do believe it’s a bit disingenuous for political parties to say “we created X number of jobs,” or, “they lost Y number of jobs” over a short timeline. That being said, in the long run, there is much that government can do to create the right conditions for a healthy, thriving economy, including manufacturing and related industries.

I think, on a macro level, that the loss of manufacturing jobs in Ontario is a symptom of a shifting global economy. These industries are being squeezed by higher operating costs and increased international competition on the one hand, and the fact that value-added jobs are too often the exclusive domain of other jurisdictions on the other.

The Ontario government does not have the power to single-handedly reverse these global economic realities. Therefore, fighting against them (trying to artificially maintain the status quo at all costs) is a failing proposition. We do, however, have the ability to create new opportunities in the manufacturing sector and in the North, and to smartly adapt to global change, both economic and climate (which will disproportionately affect the North).

The Green party’s election platform explains that, realistically, “the North must diversify its economy to retain its workforce and standard of living. It could do so through an aggressive pursuit of secondary and tertiary manufacturing opportunities to create ‘value added’ products, and by capitalizing on the tourism opportunities that lie in its inherent natural beauty.”

Specifically, the Green Party of Ontario would:

• Establish a sustainable business development program for northern and rural communities by investing $1 billion over four years to encourage green business investment and job creation
• Invest $11.5 million over four years to alleviate labour shortages, especially in the skilled trades
• Inject $180 million into economic development initiatives [for the North]

There are, of course, more details and specifics in the platform [pdf], specifically pages 6-9 (according to the printed numbering, not the PDF’s numbering).

As residential customers we already pay less than the true cost of energy, and large industrial users pay even less than that. This is perhaps the worst kind of corporate welfare, because it encourages waste and inefficiency while harming competitiveness and contributing to pollution and a distorted market economy. Lowering hydro rates would not only be an environmental disaster, but in the long run would harm these sectors more than it would help. To the contrary, we should raise them.

Am I under any illusion that pledging to raise electricity rates to their true cost will be an instantly popular idea? Of course not. But it’s the right decision, and it must be done. As long as we keep the price of energy artificially low (not factoring in real “externalized” costs caused by air pollution, climate change, nuclear disaster insurance, etc.) we’ll be unable to fully realize what policies (investments in renewable energy, efficiency, decentralized generation, etc.) are actually the most economically responsible and ecologically sane.

At the same time, however, we must ensure that lower-income people, who could be the most vulnerable to higher energy prices, are not left in the dark. Increasing the price of energy must be done within the context of a tax “shift” which reduces income tax. A Green government would also provide targeted financial supports for energy retrofits and other cost-saving measures, which can reduce energy consumption (and, therefore, energy bills) by up to 80%.

We must also ensure there are other kinds of supports made available to Ontario industries, including the forestry sector and manufacturing sector. There are huge opportunities in those areas for the creation of more “green-collar” jobs and more internationally competitive businesses. We should learn from the lessons of American car manufacturers who complained inexplicably that increasing their efficiency would hurt them, only to be left in the dust by their Japanese counterparts. By subsidizing the price of energy and keeping it artificially low, we are discouraging innovation and positive progress. Good, responsible government would do precisely the opposite.

First, the American economy is in serious trouble. The events triggered by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage Ponzi scheme have not yet played out in full. The housing boom was a key driver of US economic growth, but now over one million Americans risk losing their homes. In order to keep the market from collapsing, the Fed has injected more money than they did in the wake of 9/11. The other key to US economic strength, consumer spending, is also quite vulnerable thanks to a negative savings rate, declining consumer confidence, an average credit card debt of $9000 per person, and an average national debt of $29,500 per person. Oh, and then there’s the little matter of the $3,000,000,000.00 per week war in Iraq. The fact that our dollar is doing so well compared to the greenback isn’t necessarily something to brag about. You’d look like a supermodel too if you were standing next to an ogre.

The second reason the loonie’s gone loony is that our dollar has generally come to be considered a “petrocurrency,” in the sense that it has a close and direct relationship with the price of oil. The fact that oil is now hanging-out above $80 a barrel and is projected to continue to rise is an indication that we’ve used up all of the easily-accessible supply. The stuff that’s left in the ground is dirtier, more expensive, and more energy-intensive to extract (reducing the Energy Return On Energy Invested), meaning that until we shift from a paradigm of perpetual consumption and growth to one of conservation and efficiency, our energy crisis will only get worse.

In other words, the “high” dollar is hardly cause for celebration. Add to that the fact that our economy is already starting to feel the effects of what is likely to be a US recession, and the fact that the Conservative budget left us absolutely no wiggle-room for dealing with this eventuality.

And then that word, parity, starts to take on another, more sinister and dangerous meaning. An alignment with the US economy so tightly integrated that we can’t escape the increasingly powerful gravitational pull of its implosion. An alignment with the US military so close that we can’t say no to American-led wars. An alignment with US energy policy so one-sided that our own citizens freeze in the dark.

Wait, isn’t that just the worst-case scenario? Yes. It’s also where we’re heading.