Where is the Climate Change Agenda?

As world leaders meet in Toronto for the G20, nobody is talking about the biggest threat the world faces.

Recent meetings among world leaders make me question whether some of these people even deserve to be called “leaders.” The climate talks in Copenhagen were a colossal disappointment, and climate change almost didn’t make it to the agenda of the G8/G20 summits in Ontario this month.

Climate change is the biggest threat the world faces. The 20 countries whose leaders are meeting in Toronto are responsible for 85 per cent of the world’s global warming pollution, and represent 83 per cent of the world’s economic output. And yet the summit’s host, Prime Minister Harper, argued that the meetings must focus almost entirely on the economy and that issues such as climate change and the environment are just “sideshows.”

Someone should remind Harper that the health of national and global economies depends on resolving these serious environmental issues. The G8 and G20 summits provide an opportunity to finally move on commitments wealthy nations have already made and to make serious progress toward dealing with climate change, an issue that will increasingly overshadow the problems created by our economic systems. The longer world leaders take to come to an agreement on climate change, the harder it will be to solve the problems associated with it.

At the very least, G8 leaders should agree to come up with the exact amounts they will provide toward the $30 billion they promised in Copenhagen to help developing nations with short-term climate change adaptation. As stated in the Copenhagen Accord, these funds must be new and additional. The G8 and other developed countries should be clear that they will not raid their foreign aid budgets for climate financing. Doing so would mean countries suffering from both poverty and the impacts of climate change would be no further ahead.

At the G20 meeting, leaders must come up with timelines and strategies to phase out subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, as they promised to do at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh last September. Canada’s subsidies have been estimated at $2 billion a year, mostly to the oil and gas sector, including the tar sands. If the G20 countries were to agree on a concrete near-term timeline for phasing out these subsidies, it would be a tangible step in a necessary shift away from polluting forms of energy that lead to climate change and local air pollution.

Finally, G20 countries could agree to implement a very small financial transaction tax on the sale of currency, stocks, bonds, and derivatives. Such a tax has been proposed to generate funds that could be used for bank bailouts and stimulus money in case there is another global financial crisis, but a portion of these funds should also be available to solve global problems that require significant resources. Climate change is one of those problems.

A small tax of just .05 per cent on all financial transactions could generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year and help curb short-term financial speculation.

For Canada in particular, the G8 and G20 summits present an opportunity to begin rehabilitating its international reputation by taking concrete action on climate change and making firm commitments, both domestically and internationally, to resolve this most serious problem.