David Suzuki has stirred
a minor controversy, recently, by some remarks he made in a speech to
600 students at McGill University. A report in the McGill Daily tells
us "he urged today's youth to speak out against politicians complicit
in climate change."
"Complicit" is the damning word there.
People are complicit only in dark and pernicious undertakings. He went
on to suggest the students "look for a legal way to throw our current
political leaders in jail for ignoring science," those comments drawing
rounds of cheering and applause.
Well, this is a turnaround of
some proportions. In the old days, the really old days, it was the foes
of science, the enemies of what we have come to call the Enlightenment,
who used to call for the rack, the stake and the dungeon to treat those
who challenged religion's pre-eminent authority to both speak and know
the truth.
We generally look upon it as a backward moment when
the Catholic Church put the bridle on Galileo, subjected him to house
arrest and the tender rebukes of the Inquisition. So it's at least
mildly disconcerting to hear of a celebrated son of the Enlightenment,
in the person of one of Canada's star communicators, urging a
university audience, no less, to seek to "jail" those whom he perceives
as "ignoring science." I think it's fairly clear he doesn't really mean
science in general here, but rather a very particular subset of that
great endeavour, the contentious and agenda-riven field of global
warming.
I am under no illusion about the force of the global
warming consensus. It is the grand orthodoxy of our day. Among
right-thinking people, the idea of expressing any doubts on some of its
more cataclysmic projections, to speak in tones other than those of
veneration about its high priests, such as David Suzuki or Al Gore, is
to stir a response uncomfortably close to what, in previous and less
rational times, was reserved for blasphemers, heretics and atheists.
But
wherever we are on global warming, and on the models and theories
supporting it, it is not yet the Truth, nor is it yet Science (with a
capital S) as such. And to put a stay on our full consent to its more
clamorous and particular alarms is not, pace Dr. Suzuki, either
"ignoring science" or "complicity" in criminal endeavour. Nor is
reasoned dissent or dispute on some or all of the policy
recommendations that global warming advocates insist flow, as night
follows day, from their science.
It's worth pausing on this
point. What global warming is, what portion of it is man-made, is one
set of questions properly within the circle of rational inquiry we call
science. What to do about it -- shut down the oil sands, impose a
carbon tax, sign on to Kyoto, mandate efficient light bulbs or hybrid
cars -- are choices within a range of public policy options that have
to be made outside any laboratory whatsoever.
Global warming's
more fulminating spokespeople are apt to finesse that great chasm
between the science and the politics. They are further apt to imply a
continuum between the unassailable authority of real and neutral
science and their own particular policy prescriptions. (I notice late
in the week that something called Environmental Defence has hailed the
Alberta oil sands as "the most destructive project on Earth." It goes
on to say that "your desire to tackle global warming is being held
hostage by the Tar Sands." I'm not sure how they latched on to that
"your" there. Is Environmental Defence elected? But let that pass; it
is the tactic that is familiar.)
Global warming is the truth.
So, shutting down the oil sands is also the truth. If global warming is
primarily a "man-made" phenomenon, then what to do about it is a
political discussion before it is anything else at all. If
Environmental Defence or Dr. Suzuki thinks shutting down the oil sands
is not a political choice, I advise both the group and the man to visit
Alberta and acquaint themselves, while they are at it, with the history
of the National Energy Program, and what its consequences were for the
West and Confederation. Shutting down the oil sands would make the
storm over the NEP feel like a soft rain on a sultry day by comparison.
It would break the Confederation.
So, far from jailing our
politicians if they continue to debate what should be done, I'm in
favour of leaving them where they are for now. If that's a soft stance,
all I can say is that I favour discussion over imprisonment. Dr. Suzuki
will surely agree that truth, like science, is not under the ownership
of either any one group or any one man. To argue that those who
question a prevailing orthodoxy should, even metaphorically, be tossed
in jail is radically inconsistent with the essence and spirit of
science itself, the essence and spirit that Dr. Suzuki, in his better
moments, so clearly reveres.
