Martin Regg Cohn: Never mind the UN, here`s why Doug Ford can safely ignore climate change
(The Star Toronto Raptors)

Here’s an inconvenient truism: Timing is everything in our political environment. And time is running out on global warming.Don’t take my word for it. But don’t take Doug Ford’s word games at face value.At the very time our premier was travelling the country whipping up opposition to carbon pricing, a United Nations scientific alert flashed across the world warning of carbon’s unavoidable costs.The timing wasn’t merely inconvenient, but incongruous. That our premier could be so tone deaf is hardly surprising, because it flows from our own collective ability to tune out distant alarm bells.Canadians routinely tell pollsters that environmental protection is a top priority — in the abstract. But when provincial politicians promise to save them pennies at the gas pump — and accuse Ottawa of picking their pockets — voters are easily tempted to shift priorities.That’s what makes the latest UN report by the world’s top climate scientists so eerily empirical, for it blends both environmental and political science. Beyond their conclusion that we face trillions of dollars in future costs, their premise is that political inertia is our greatest burden.Climate change has become climate disruption at the precise time that political disruption is upon us. Unless we limit global warming by a further half-a-degree Celsius beyond current targets, we face incalculable human dislocation to homes, livelihoods and lives.Responding to the future peril by establishing a high price on carbon requires the kind of economic mettle and political will that has “no documented historic precedent,” the UN report notes dryly. Don’t we know it.The fight against climate change was the first casualty of Ontario’s “change” election on June 7, when Ford proudly announced the demise of the cap-and-trade system that put a price on carbon to “cap” and discourage greenhouse gas emissions. N ...