GOLDSTEIN: Stop blaming climate change for political incompetence – Toronto Sun

Politicians today love to blame the damage caused by every extreme weather event on “climate change” because it masks the crisis governments are responsible for — Canada’s fragile and aging public infrastructure.

From Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to provincial premiers, to municipal mayors, they pontificate endlessly about “climate change” as if there were never storms, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, heat waves and wildfires before we started burning fossil fuels for energy.

In the real world, of course, natural climate change has always caused bad weather.

The theory of human-induced climate change is that it makes extreme weather events more frequent and severe than would otherwise have occurred.

One of the few public officials to make this key distinction is Ontario’s financial accountability officer.

In a report last year, Peter Weltman, using a credible formula, estimated the cost of maintaining Ontario’s $254-billion portfolio of provincial and municipal buildings and other facilities in a state of good repair in a so-called “stable” climate would be $799 billion from now until 2100.

Factoring in the added costs of severe weather events attributed to human induced climate change, he said, would add $66 billion to the cost in a medium greenhouse gas emissions scenario, and $116 billion in a high-emissions scenario.

In other words, taxpayers are already on the hook for $799 billion to maintain public infrastructure, regardless of future efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Given that reality, there are two ways to address climate change — adaptation and mitigation.

Adapting to climate change is far more significant when it comes to affecting the daily lives of Canadians.

That’s because mitigation, which means reducing emissions, will take decades, if not centuries, to have any discernible impact on climate, even if it’s successful and the jury is still out on that.

Adaptation means pursuing policies that make public infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of severe weather, regardless of how it is caused.

It’s nothing new — humans have been adapting to the weather for centuries.

Upgrading and separating storm and sanitary sewers, tougher building codes, planting trees, preserving wetlands, banning urban development on coastlines, flood plains and in heavily forested areas and keeping roads, bridges, public transit, dams, dikes, berms and spillways in a state of good repair, are all forms of adaptation to climate change.

Done properly, it can be very successful.

The Red River Floodway that surrounds Winnipeg, for example, was built from 1962 to 1968 at a cost of $63 million and since then has saved billions of dollars in flood damage.

By contrast, the severe flooding in B.C. last year, which politicians blamed on “climate change” was actually the result of the province’s dike system failing because it was not properly maintained despite years of warnings about the risk of catastrophic failure.

Given these realities, one would think that adapting to climate change is a no-brainer.

But as Robert Henson writes in The Rough Guide to Climate Change: The Symptoms, The Science, The Solutions:

“What might seem like a straightforward response to climate change — adapting to it — is actually fraught with politics … There’s a tension between adaptation and mitigation: to some, the former implies a disregard of the latter, as if society were giving up on trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

According to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, responsible for 60% of Canada’s core public infrastructure (the rest is owned by the federal and provincial governments) we already have what can be described as a national climate adaptation deficit of $150 billion, with 35% of all municipal infrastructure (45% in Ontario) in fair, poor or very poor condition.

That’s the estimate of the amount of money it would take — along with an additional $5.3 billion annually going forward — to make municipal public infrastructure alone more resilient to climate change.

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It’s the result of decades of governments at all levels building infrastructure and then not properly maintaining it.

As to whether they’ve learned anything from decades of failure on this file, the outlook isn’t promising.

The Trudeau government, for example, recently earmarked $12 billion to fund large public infrastructure projects, including public transit, based on their ability to withstand the severe weather impacts of climate change.

But in a report last month, federal environment commissioner Jerry DeMarco concluded the government subsequently watered down the conditions for qualifying for the funding to such an extent, that it no longer has any idea of whether these projects will be more resilient to climate change than in the past.