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A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency - Paperback | Diverse Reads

A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency

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“This is the roadmap out of climate crisis that Canadians have been waiting for.” — Naomi Klein, activist and New York Times bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

  • One of Canada’s top policy analysts provides the first full-scale blueprint for meeting our climate change commitments
  • Contains the results of a national poll on Canadians’ attitudes to the climate crisis
  • Shows that radical transformative climate action can be done, while producing jobs and reducing inequality as we retool how we live and work.
  • Deeply researched and targeted specifically to Canada and Canadians while providing a model that other countries could follow

Canada needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% to prevent a catastrophic 1.5 degree increase in the earth’s average temperature — assumed by many scientists to be a critical “danger line” for the planet and human life as we know it.

It’s 2020, and Canada is not on track to meet our targets. To do so, we’ll need radical systemic change to how we live and work—and fast. How can we ever achieve this?

Top policy analyst and author Seth Klein reveals we can do it now because we’ve done it before. During the Second World War, Canadian citizens and government remade the economy by retooling factories, transforming their workforce, and making the war effort a common cause for all Canadians to contribute to.

Klein demonstrates how wartime thinking and community efforts can be repurposed today for Canada’s own Green New Deal. He shares how we can create jobs and reduce inequality while tackling our climate obligations for a climate neutral—or even climate zero—future. From enlisting broad public support for new economic models, to job creation through investment in green infrastructure, Klein shows us a bold, practical policy plan for Canada’s sustainable future. More than this: A Good War offers a remarkably hopeful message for how we can meet the defining challenge of our lives.

COVID-19 has brought a previously unthinkable pace of change to the world—one which demonstrates our ability to adapt rapidly when we’re at risk. Many recent changes are what Klein proposes in these very pages. The world can, actually, turn on a dime if necessary. This is the blueprint for how to do it. 

ISBN-13: 9781770415454

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: ECW Press

Publication Date: 09-01-2020

Pages: 464

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.03(d)

Seth Klein was the founding British Columbia director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives for over two decades and has been immersed in climate change and inequality issues for his working life. He is currently an adjunct professor in urban studies at Simon Fraser University and remains a research associate with the CCPA. He lives in Vancouver, B.C.

Read an Excerpt

This is not a book about climate science. It takes the urgent science and the impacts of climate breakdown as a given. Rather, it is a book about politics, history and policy innovation. It takes as inspiration Canada’s Second World War experience and also finds encouragement from a few other countries that, unlike Canada, are starting to treat this crisis as the emergency that it is. I also draw heavily upon interviews conducted with politicians, academics, activists, Indigenous leaders, labour leaders and others.

I spend some time in the early chapters surveying the principal barriers to transformative climate action. But by and large, I choose to focus on what can be done to overcome these barriers. I believe you will find this an unusually hopeful book, given the subject matter.

Effectively tackling the climate crisis is not a technical or policy problem — we know what is needed to transition to a zero-carbon society, and the technology required is largely ready to go. Rather, the challenge we face is a political one. Climate solutions persistently encounter a political wall; the prevailing assumption within the leadership of our dominant political parties appears to be that if our political leaders were to articulate (let alone undertake) what the climate science tells us is necessary, it would be political suicide. And so they don’t.

This book explores whether we can successfully align our politics with climate science, and the conditions under which it may be possible to practise such a bold politics that is well-received by the public. It outlines what a truly meaningful and hopeful climate program can look like in Canada and makes the case for why our political leaders should embrace this generational mission.

Our sense of what is possible is contained by what we know. Hopefully this exploration of what we did the last time we faced an existential threat can serve to blow open our sense of political and transformative possibility.

Like many of you, as I read the latest scientific warnings, I’m afraid. In particular, I feel deep anxiety for my children, and about the state of the world we are leaving to those who will live throughout most of this century and beyond. All of us who take seriously these scientific realities wrestle with despair. The truth is that we don’t know if we will win this fight — if we will rise to this challenge in time. But it is worth appreciating that those who rallied in the face of fascism 80 years ago likewise didn’t know if they would win. We often forget that there was a good chunk of the war’s early years during which the outcome was far from certain. Yet that generation rallied regardless, and in the process surprised themselves by what they were capable of achieving. That’s the spirit we need today.

Table of Contents

Preface xv

Part 1 Again at the Crossroads Of History 1

Chapter 1 Introduction: Confronting Existential Threats, Then and Now 3

Chapter 2 What We're Up Against: The New Climate Denialism in Canada 25

Part 2 Galvanizing Public Support and Social Solidarity 57

Chapter 3 Ready to Rally: Marshalling Public Opinion, Then and Now 59

Chapter 4 Making Common Cause: Inequality, Then and Now 59

Chapter 5 Confederation Quagmire: Regional Differences, Then and Now 117

Part 3 Mobilizing All Our Resources 141

Chapter 6 Remaking the Economy, Then and Now 143

Chapter 7 Mobilizing Labour: Just Transition, Then and Now 207

Chapter 8 Paying for Mobilization, Then and Now 243

Part 4 Bold Leadership - From the Grassroots and in Our Politics 265

Chapter 9 Indigenous Leadership 267

Chapter 10 Civil Society Leadership 295

Chapter 11 Cautionary Tales: What Not to Do 311

Chapter 12 Transforming Our Politics: Bold Leadership, Then, There and Now 333

Conclusion: Forward to Victory! Or Making Peace With Our Planet 361

Epilogue: The Covid-19 Pandemic and How a Recognized Emergency Makes the Impossible Possible 375

Endnotes 383

Acknowledgements 409

Index 413

Online Appendices

Appendix I Climate Attacks on Canadian Soil

Appendix II How the Oil and Gas Industry in Canada Practices the New Climate Denialism