News media have long played a critical role in the functioning of democratic societies. They help us understand what is happening in our neighborhood, country and the world. When they do their job well, they hold the powerful, particularly in governments and business, accountable for their actions or inactions. That is why the continuing cutbacks in traditional journalism in Canada and many other countries is important to the future of our economy, environment and the health of our society.

A seismic shift in how we get our news is underway. Since the early 2000s, more and more people get their news digitally, and expect it to be free. This shift is sapping the advertising dollars from traditional media, and shifting it to new media giants, such as Google and Facebook. Newspapers are struggling to move online while maintaining their long-existing formats. Larger papers seem to be holding on so far, but the small and medium-sized ones are having a hard time surviving financially. In late 2017, 36 small Canadian newspapers shut down, the largest mass closure of newspapers ever in this country. In the past nine years, 234 local Canadian news outlets have closed. Remaining papers are often getting smaller and reducing staff. Some print only a few days a week. Some have stopped the presses forever and gone digital. Even two decades ago a handful of major outlets – big papers, magazines, TV chains, and news services – set much of the public agenda by their decisions about what to print and broadcast. Now, many younger people ignore the traditional media and rely on electronic news feeds. The result has been a fragmentation of news and information sources.

According to Beth Parke, founding director of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the U.S. environmental reporting scene varies by region, often depending on local demand. Famously, the New York Times disbanded its environmental team a few years ago, but has since created a climate and environment page. In other cases, public outcry has helped maintain environmental coverage. The SEJ also provides funding and brokers grants from other organizations to support environmental reporting in the United States and Canada.

What does the shift to digital mean for sustainability? On the plus side, there are many more voices being heard. Some of them are experts, who can now broadcast to a world-wide audience with a few clicks, bringing attention to important environment issues. Others on the web are simply skimming off stories from major media and reposting them. And still others are used the Internet as a way to try to cast doubt on established scientific information about issues such as climate change and toxic chemicals. They use media tools in an attempt to stall or delay actions such as a switch away from fossil fuels. When people get news from a traditional outlet, there is some guarantee of professional quality. When they click on a link from a social media alert, there is no guarantee of quality or accuracy.

A classic newsroom. Note the amount of research material.

A good media organization employs trained and experienced journalists, overseen by professional editors who check for fairness and accuracy. It has the resources to fund long-term, in-depth reporting. A healthy media organization can resist outside pressures by people who want to suppress some stories, or have them slanted in their favour. In the 1980s, when I was environment reporter for The Globe and Mail, I would get days, weeks, even months to do major series on environmental issues, such as acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, climate change, forestry, toxic substances and water, especially the state of the Great Lakes. I had voluminous files that allowed me to track promises and performance by governments and industries. A steady stream of stories by me and other environment reporters on issues such as acid rain helped push change. It was a time when many if not most large newspapers had an environment reporter. Now, the title “environmental reporter” has almost disappeared from Canadian news media. In a recent Internet search, I could only find eight people in Canada with this title. In addition, there are some freelancer environment writers, and some science reporters, who cover environment as part of their beat. The Society of Environmental Journalists has about 60 Canadian members. The lack of full-time environment reporters doesn’t mean the environment is not being covered. There are stories by general assignment, business and political reporters, but these journalists do not have the time to build up detailed files and sources that allow them to track issues, and give a broad view of what is happening. At a time for critical decisions about how to become more sustainable, there is less clarity and professional analysis in much that is disseminated online.

It was over a long Christmas dinner that I got an insight into some of the challenges of moving toward sustainability. We started talking about recycling, and the host said people were having a hard time figuring out what to put in Toronto’s three bins: garbage, recycling and compost. He talked of buying food in a package that had a clear top [recyclable] and a black bottom [not recyclable because of the recycling machinery]. It’s too confusing for most people he added, asking why companies are allowed to mix recyclable and non-recyclable materials in the same package. I can sympathize. After some 40 years of writing about the environment, it’s hard work to keep up with the changing rules. I have my own cheat sheet taped inside a cupboard door to help with such choices as which containers get recycled, and which go with caps or without.

We’re in a period of great transition. In the past, people invented things, and consumers bought them based on their needs, tastes and desires. Now we need to factor in the environmental impact. There is a growing discussion about how much meat to eat, or whether to go vegetarian, given the amount of natural resources it takes to feed an animal and bring it to your dinner plate. Cars are another big choice. It looks as if the gas burning engine will go the way of the buggy whip, but when? Should one spend extra for a hybrid? Should it be a plug-in hybrid? Where does one put the recharging plug, especially if parking some distance from the house? How about a pure electric car? It’s probably the greenest choice, but you don’t want to get stuck in a snowstorm without a very long extension cord. We’ve hard rumblings of a need to stop burning fossil fuels to heat our homes, offices, schools, hospitals recreation centres and factories. When is it going to happen? What kind of heating system should I put in a new building?

There is a growing list of questions. The answers are not always clear, but we need to spend more time looking at choices and looking ahead.

The world’s greatest challenge is whether we can make the transition to a sustainable lifestyle fast enough to avoid environmental catastrophe. The signal issue is climate change. Earlier this week, on the second anniversary of the historic Paris climate accord, French President Emmanuel Macron held the One Planet Summit. It brought more than 50 world leaders, as well as CEOs, celebrities, philanthropists and investment fund managers to Paris. President Macron had a sobering message, saying the world is “losing the battle” against climate change.

The meeting sought to mobilize billions of dollars in financing to help poor countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and there were encouraging signs. More than 200 institutional investors managing $26 trillion said they would increase pressure on the biggest corporate greenhouse gas emitters to fight climate change. The World Bank said it will virtually stop financing upstream oil and gas projects after 2019. Norwegian pension fund Storebrand will issue a $1.9-billion bond that will exclude investments in fossil fuel companies. Dutch bank ING said that by end of 2025 it will stop funding any utility that relies on coal for more than five per cent of its energy.

At a green economy forum in Toronto later in the week, Green Party leader Elizabeth May said Canada has been regularly missing targets for greenhouse gas reductions, and this is “a failure of leadership…the problem has always been a lack of political will.” She said one of the biggest problems facing government is a long-term shift in influence in which corporate power trumps political power.

The world is still going to hell in a handbasket. That’s the message from some 15,000 scientists from 184 countries in an open letter called World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. It harks back to the November 1992 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity in which 1,700 scientists from 49 countries warned, “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course,” and we had to change our destructive ways “ if vast human misery is to be avoided.” The ‘second notice’ tracks nine key indicators of planetary health over the intervening 25 years, finding declines in forests, wildlife and freshwater availability, and increases in greenhouse gases, ocean dead zones and human population. The only good news is the stabilization of the stratospheric ozone layer following the first global atmospheric treaty.

The new report comes at a time of great transition. There are dramatic increases in renewable energy projects, and forests are increasing in some parts of the world, But, there are forecasts of another rise in emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industries this year and next, driving even more climate change. A recent report found three-quarters of flying insects had vanished from nature reserves in Germany in 25 years, a trend that may be more widespread. Another report said that globally one in six deaths was linked to pollution, mainly air pollution in poor nations.

The second notice report blames problems on excessive material consumption, and calls for cuts to greenhouse gases and the destruction of nature. It asks people to limit reproduction to replacement levels, and to drastically cut individual consumption of fossil fuels, meat and other resources. If we do not act, it says, “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out.” The second notice project was led by Oregon State University ecologist William Ripple, and has led to a new organization, the Alliance of World Scientists, aimed at providing a science-based perspective on issues affecting the well-being of people and the planet.

You may know more about environmental problems, but that does not mean you will have a much lower environmental impact. A study comparing the environmental footprints of 734 conservationists, economists and biomedical workers in the United Kingdom and the United States found the conservationists had only marginally lower environmental impacts. They took fewer flights, lowered energy use and ate less meat than the other participants in the study, but the differences were not that great. They appear linked more to values than profession. People in the study who said they cared a lot about the environment tended to have smaller environmental footprints, no matter what their work. “I don’t think conservationists are hypocrites; I think that we are human – meaning that some decisions are rational, and others, we rationalize,” said study co-author Brendan Fisher of the University of Vermont.

Anyone who looks carefully at their own environmental performance will agree. We may know about our impacts, but it is very hard to change many habits unilaterally when most people around us do not change. Study lead author, Andrew Balmford of Cambridge University said: “While it may be hard to accept, we have to start acknowledging that increased education alone is perhaps not the panacea we would hope.” The four authors call for more government measures targeting higher-impact behaviors such as meat consumption and flying. They suggested changes such as providing more affordable public transport, and removing subsidies for beef and lamb production.

It was 30 years ago that Our Common Future, one of the most influential books of the twentieth century was published. Known as the Brundtland report, this book has changed how we think about living on Earth. It said the world needed both better environmental protection and more development to lift millions out of dire poverty. What the world needs is sustainable development, that “…meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” To put it simply, this means living within nature’s limits.

This message came at a time of great environmental turmoil and conflict. Pollution spewed from smokestacks and industrial sewers or was dumped into pits that often leaked. Toxic materials killed wildlife, and made people sick and brought premature death. Forests were being levelled, farmlands degraded, water sources overused, fisheries depleted and many species pushed toward extinction. The world had narrowly averted a catastrophic decline in the protective ozone layer. Acid rain was eating away at buildings and forests, harming our lungs and sterilizing lakes. Climate change was starting to be recognized as the greatest environmental problem. There were more environmental laws, but they always seemed to be trying to catch up with problems.

Credit: cherwell.org

While many environment reports had laid out the problems, the World Commission on Environment and Development, often called the Brundtland commission, said the only way to stop the destruction was to change the way we do development and live our lives. It was the right message for the time. Governments, businesses and environmental groups had been fighting for years about what to protect and how to do it. Many seized on the concept of sustainability as a way to start a discussion about not only business impacts on the environment but how personal consumption needed to change. Sustainable development became a bridge builder and a rallying cry.

The Brundtland story began in 1984 when the United Nations, at the urging of a number of nations, including Canada, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, created an independent commission. Its mandate was “to propose long-term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by the year 2000 and beyond.” UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar appointed Norwegian medical doctor and politician Gro Harlem Brundtland to lead the new group. Dr. Brundtland assembled 22 economic, political, scientific and environmental experts from 21 countries, representing the major political and ideological groups of the time. In their report, delivered to the United Nations in October 1987, the commissioners surprised most people by calling for more development. They said that with so many living in poverty the world needed enough development so everyone could achieve decent living standards. While calling for “a new era of economic growth” in the poor nations, they said that future development in all countries must be cleaner and less wasteful than that of the past. The report said we needed to build a world that is, “more prosperous, more just and more secure because it rests upon policies and practices that serve to expand and sustain the ecological basis of development.” It said we needed to produce more with less to create a global economy that is bigger but also cleaner and more economical. This was a defining moment in world history. The linking of more development with environmental protection opened to business to find ways to deliver goods and services without destroying the environment in the process.

Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland

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Since the start of the industrial revolution, the world has become richer, and the majority of people better off. But we built this progress on the back of the environment, and that back, which supports our economies and lifestyles, is creaking and cracking with the strain. In 1987, the Brundtland report Our Common Future said we had to start redesigning the modern industrial world to live within nature’s limits. The report made a big ask: drastically cut pollution and stop using up the biosphere. It said we had to change many business practices and personal consumption patterns. We need to move to sustainable forms of energy, transportation, farming, forestry, fisheries, mining, smelting and chemical manufacture. It means lower consumption of most if not all raw materials, much more reuse and recycling, and a virtual end to throwaway products.

What has happened in the 30 years since the Brundtland report was published?

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According to the World Happiness Report 2017, it’s the Norwegians, followed closely by the Danes, Icelanders and Swiss. The happiest countries included Finland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden. The United States, the world’s richest nation, placed 14^th. Highly developed France came in at 31, behind countries such as Guatemala and Panama, while Russia ranked 49, Japan came in at 51 and China at 79.

The happiness ranking, the fourth since 2012, covered 155 countries, and was based on how citizens felt they stood on a scale ranking from the best to the worst possible life. The report’s authors said six key variables determine how happy people feel. They are income (measured as GDP per capita), healthy years of life expectancy, social support (having someone to count on in times of trouble), trust (a perceived absence of corruption in government and business), a feeling of freedom to make life decisions, and generosity (as measured by recent donations).

In richer countries the differences in perceived happiness were due more to mental health, physical health and personal relationships than income inequality. In poorer countries differences in income ranked higher, but mental health still ranked high as an indicator of happiness.

Measurement of happiness is being taken more seriously in recent years. In 2016, the OECD, long focused on economic growth, committed itself “to redefine the growth narrative to put people’s well-being at the center of governments’ efforts.”

The World Happiness Report is produced annually by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, created in 2012 by the UN Secretary-General to encourage practical problem solving for sustainable development.

When I was a child, quite a long time ago, my mother, like many others, used to say “finish your dinner, think of the starving children in China.” That country had been through European occupations, warlords, the Japanese occupation and a civil war. Many were starving. Now, China has the world’s second-largest economy, produces or buys the food it needs and is a global power. Smaller but similar developments have happened in a number of countries in Asia, South America and Africa. Their citizens make more money and eat better food. Much of their wealth comes from selling products to richer nations. At a global level, this is a good trend. People are lifted out of poverty, and can live longer, healthier lives. This is a key part of sustainable development. But, the flip side is that many of the goods they produce are no longer made in the industrialized countries with their higher wages and production costs. Their citizens are unemployed or have lower-paying jobs.

The result is growing pushback in developed nations. It started with the one per cent movement and Occupy Wall Street in 2011. This year, it is the rejection of established politicians in different industrialized countries by citizens who feel that freer trade is costing them jobs and reducing their standard of living. One of the greatest challenges to politics in the richer nations is to find a level of free trade that will be acceptable to their citizens. Throwing up trade barriers risks driving poorer nations back towards more poverty. It will also launch a global trade war that will hurt every country, rich or poor, as happened when tariffs were raised during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Canadians need new ways to measure how the nation is progressing according to a study by the respected International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) in Winnipeg. Gross Domestic Product, which measures national income, is still too often cited as a measure of how we are doing. But GDP misses a whole range of critical modern issues, such as climate change, global trade tensions, income inequality and the fast growth of information technologies.

The IISD called on governments to use a measure of Comprehensive Wealth, which includes natural, human and social capital.

• natural capital is the nation’s land, water, forests, fauna, minerals and fossil fuels;
• human capital is the skills and capabilities of the workforce;
• social capital is the trust and cooperation among people that result from shared norms.

It is a rapidly changing world, with challenges ranging from climate change to global trade tensions, income inequality and the fast growth of information technologies. The report says the country cannot sustain another 30 years of natural capital depletion, and needs to diversify its economy to ensure that its development remains sustainable.

Canadians are living longer on average but are enjoying that life less according to a just-released study by the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW). “There is a massive gap between Canadians’ well-being and GDP, and it has continued to grow since the 2008 recession. While the recession dealt a short-term blow to the economy, it stole our leisure time, our volunteer time, our living standards, even our sleep – and we never got these things we value, back.”

“When Canadians go to bed at night, they are not worried about GDP. They are worried about stringing together enough hours of part-time jobs, rising tuition fees, and affordable housing. They are thinking about the last time they got together with friends or the next time they can take a vacation. Maybe that’s why we are getting less sleep than 21 years ago.”

The CIW, based at the University of Waterloo, tracked 64 indicators from 1994 to 2014 to provide a comprehensive analysis of what Canadians said matters to their quality of life. It reports on economic data to capture changes in living standards. It also tracks fluctuations in community vitality, democratic engagement, leisure and culture, education, environment, healthy populations and time use.

The third national report: How are Canadians really doing? found:

• Life expectancy is up, and ratings for mental health are slightly better, but Canadians’ overall health ratings are worse.
• Living standards rose 23 per cent from 1994 until the 2008 recession, then plummeted almost 11 per cent. Overall since 2008, incomes have risen and there is less poverty, but more Canadians experience food and housing insecurity and employment is more precarious.
• Leisure and culture are down more than nine per cent. Canadians are spending less time away on vacation and participating or volunteering in leisure and cultural activities.
• Time crunch remains an ongoing challenge. We are spending almost 30 per cent less time with our friends. Commute times are longer, and only 35 per cent get enough sleep.
• Education is the only domain to keep pace with GDP. Nine out of 10 students now complete high school, but tuition fees and access to regulated child care spaces remain important challenges.
• Community vitality is strong, but volunteering fell by 15 per cent after the recession.
• Although voter turnout increased recently, barely one-third of Canadians in 2014 expressed a high degree of confidence in Parliament, down 14 per cent since 2003.
• The environment domain declined by 2.9 per cent. Canada’s ecological footprint remains among the largest in the world, smog is still a problem and we are nowhere near meeting our greenhouse gas emissions targets.

Sustainability has been described as more a journey than a destination. The pathway is often twisted and torturous. Sometimes it seems like two steps forward and one step back. That is the case now with climate change, perhaps the defining sustainability issue of our time. Last December, world leaders reached an unprecedented agreement to fight climate change by reducing huge amounts of pollution, most of it from the fossil fuels that power our economies. The United States was a leader in hammering out the Paris agreement. The recent election of Donald Trump as U.S. president has cast a pall over that agreement, because he claims climate change is a hoax and says he will pull the United States out of global efforts to slow it down. He even wants to increase the use of more fossil fuels, including coal, which will worsen the climate problems.

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, his anti-environment views led to great concern in Canada and the United States. Then the big issue for Canada was controls on acid rain. Much of the acidic fallout on southern parts of Canada blew north from U.S. power plants. Mr. Reagan told Ohio coal miners during that election campaign that he would do away with many environmental regulations because they were crippling the economy. Mr. Reagan promised he would “see to it that the Environmental Protection Agency has leaders who understand what coal is to the nation’s economy.” It took seven years, but President Reagan, nearing the end of his final term in office, said he would consider a clean air accord along the lines of two earlier agreements to clean up Great Lakes pollution. It was his successor, George H. W. Bush, who, in 1990, got new legislation in the United States to reduce air pollution, including acid rain, and in 1991 signed Canada-United States Air Quality Accord.

It’s not often we look to Hollywood for messages about sustainability. But, two current films bring very different, powerful messages about the unsustainability crisis facing us. Leonardo DiCaprio does it with a high-quality documentary on climate change, called Before the Flood. As an Oscar-winning movie star and a United Nations Messenger of Peace, DiCaprio got to travel the world, and interview such leaders as US President Barack Obama and Pope Francis. Tom Hanks, another A-list actor, stars in Inferno, film about a mad scientist who sees the world going to hell in a handbasket. His response is to create a plague that will reset the clock by wiping out at least of humans. Hanks is out to foil the plot. Interestingly, both films hark back to mediaeval paintings to reinforce their messages about the unpalatable future we face if humanity does not curb its environmental excesses. Inferno uses the Map of Hell done in the late 15^th century by Italian master painter Sandro Botticelli. DiCaprio uses Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, which hung above his crib in poster form. This three-panel painting, from the same period as Botticelli’s, includes surreal depiction of hell.

Today nearly 200 countries put more specifics on promises to stop climate change by agreeing to reduce use of one of the more powerful greenhouse gases. In Kigali, Rwanda, they reached a deal to reduce emissions of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), something that could prevent up to 0.5 degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of this century. HFCs are commonly used in refrigeration and air conditioning. The United Nations says they are currently the world’s fastest growing greenhouse gases, with emissions increasing by up to 10 per cent a year. The phase out does not start until 2019, and is expected to take several decades.

Ironically, the HFCs were seen as a “safer” substitute for the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were destroying the planet’s protective ozone layer. As a reporter, I covered the 1987 conference that resulted in the Montreal Protocol to phase out use of CFCs and the related HCFCs. As part of the deal, the world was allowed to use HFCs. This was at a time when climate change was still an emerging issue, and did not dominate the environmental agenda. As a result, the world missed an opportunity to slay two dragons at a time. With the growing use of refrigeration and air conditioning in the world, especially in warmer countries, the use of HFCs has grown dramatically. This has pushed off the date by which they can realistically be replaced.

A recent conference on the Great Lakes showed how difficult it is to neatly sum up the state of a vast and complex ecosystem. The Great Lakes Public Forum in Toronto was a triennial meeting where Canada and the United States report and receive public comments on the state of the Lakes, and on priorities for science and action. I have been covering the Great Lakes for decades, and each time I try to get a sense of how they are doing. The lakes cover more than 240,000 square kilometres. They span a distance of 1,200 kilometres. They include some of the most industrialized parts of the continent, and areas that are still wilderness. They are one of the world’s greatest freshwater systems, so they are an important barometer of our sustainability.

This year there was lots of good news and, as always some bad news. On the good side, many toxic chemicals are in decline as a result of years of controls. Controls on ballast water of visiting overseas ships appears to have stopped them from bring in more invasive species. Highly polluted “hotspots” around the lakes are slowly being cleaned up. Many fish are now safer to eat than they were a generation ago. Drinking water from the lakes is safe, and most beaches are swimmable most of the time. However, previous invasive species are causing havoc in parts of the ecosystem. New chemicals are being found in the lakes. Many species are still at risk. Lake Erie is again at risk from phosphorus pollution, largely from the runoff of fertilizers in both countries. However, the countries have set targets to reduce that pollution. There is no easy way to sum up this mosaic, but the two countries have been producing ever better reports on the lakes, and are becoming ever more open to questions and ideas from citizens. For a full progress report on the lakes check out the website operated by the two countries.

Humans have always had a difficult relationship with other predators. When I was a boy reading adventure books in the mid 20^th century the theme was often that we needed hunters to protect us from the dangers of big, bad animals that wanted to eat us. Since then, there have been two major changes. Big predators, such as lions, tigers, wolves and bears have become endangered species in much of the world. They have been hunted, trapped and poisoned to near extinction in many regions. The other change is a growing recognition of the importance of predators in maintaining healthy ecosystems. In a recent post David Suzuki takes a hard look at the role we humans play as top predators, and the ways we are disrupting the natural evolution of life in the world. It’s a well-reasoned piece.

A recent article in the scientific journal, Current Biology, found one-tenth of the world’s wilderness has been lost since the 1990s, an area twice the size of Alaska. South America lost 29.6 per cent and Africa lost 14 per cent. The majority of the world’s remaining wilderness, about 30 million square kilometres (some 20 per cent of the world’s land), is found in North America, North Asia, North Africa and Australia. National Geographic has an excellent in-depth article.

By Eric Hellman

This is the seventh in a series of articles on how we can create change more effectively, by my associate Eric Hellman, co-founder of the first Blue box recycling program and creator of a new initiative called “conscious change.”

In my previous article, I wrote about shifting from a “should or have to” attitude to an “I want to” approach towards sustainability. That means helping people find internal motivations that they want to act on. In this article, I’ll explore a practical situation of behaviour change and how our best intentions can create problems, if we leave out people’s thoughts, feelings and experiences.

A Major Goal to go Green

Six months ago, I moved from one major Canadian city to another. My new community deeply values nature and the environment, so much so that its goal is to become the greenest city in the world by 2020. To accomplish this, the city has taken many initiatives, including promoting LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) buildings, district heating, installing electric vehicle charging areas in city parks, expanding bike lanes and acting on climate change. It is moving towards zero waste, local food, a green economy and 100 per cent renewable energy. In order to “drive up the regional recycling rate” the city banned a number of waste materials, including paper and organic/food materials, from the landfill. And that is where my story begins…

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The Brexit vote in Great Britain sent a message about the need to maintain social stability along with economic development. There was xenophobia and racism before and after the vote, but that can always surface during a period of instability. The most important message is that people were very unhappy with the way economic development was going, and with social changes brought by greater European integration. That unhappiness is not limited to Britain. In the United States, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the presidential race this year, is also reaching out to the growing number of unemployed and underemployed who saw good manufacturing jobs move to lower wage countries following free trade agreements. He adds an anti-immigrant message as well. There is similar dissatisfaction with the results of freer trade and unemployment in a number of industrialized countries.

In many industrialized nations, middle class income has been virtually stagnant in recent decades. Meanwhile the rich are getting much richer. In the United States, income inequality, or the gap between the rich and the rest, has been growing for some 30 years. Inequality is greater now than it has been since the 1920s. In a June 29 speech to Canadian Parliament, U.S. President Barack Obama said, “we also see a rise in inequality and wage stagnation across the advanced economies, leaving too many workers and communities fearful of diminishing prospects not just for themselves, but more importantly, for their children.” He continued, “If the benefits of globalization accrue only to those at the very top, if our democracies seem incapable of assuring broad-based growth and opportunity for everyone, then people will push back out of anger or out of fear.”

Much of this pushback is blamed on freer trade, which has allowed corporations to close factories in higher wage countries and move production to lower wage nations. On the environmental side, there are many complaints that companies are allowed to sue governments that enact some environmental laws if those laws reduce corporate profits. If governments do not build in more protections and income equality for their citizens they risk even more reactions against freer trade, which has brought many benefits.

Two new reports bring encouraging news about the badly needed shift to a low-carbon world. They show an increase last year in wind, solar, hydro power and increased energy efficiency, and a drop in coal burning.

According to REN21, renewables are now established around the world as mainstream sources of energy. REN21, the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, is a Paris-based global renewable energy policy network. It said 2015 saw the largest ever annual increase in renewable power capacity. This came from technological advances and reductions in cost, as well as policies, better access to financing, energy security and environmental concerns. There were more large banks active in the renewables sector, and an increase in loan size, with major new commitments from international investment firms to renewables and energy efficiency.

Wind turbines

The latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy also paints an encouraging picture. It said that last year carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption essentially remained flat, with a slight growth in energy consumption offset by a major fall in coal use and greater renewable and nuclear energy. Renewable energy used in power generation grew by 15.2 per cent with nearly a 21 per cent increase in China. That country is now the world’s largest generator of solar energy. Where renewables were once an insignificant source, they now account for 6.7 per cent of global power generation, with just over half of that from wind energy.

It’s been nearly 30 years since the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland) delivered its report, Our Common Future, calling for a great transition to sustainable development. I’ll bet that very few people in most countries, including Canada, have anything but a vague idea of what a sustainable society might look like.

We need to paint a clearer picture because of climate change. Last December in Paris, world leaders promised to dramatically cut emissions of greenhouse gases. There have been lots of general statements about phasing out fossil fuels, reducing deforestation and changing agriculture, all major sources of greenhouse gases. But what would a low carbon society actually look like? We got a preview in the recently released Ontario Climate Change Action Plan. Two of the biggest changes individuals will see are new power systems for their cars and homes. The Ontario document talks of moving buildings onto renewable energy and heating, such as geothermal and solar power, over a period of decades. Since three-quarters of the province’s homes are heated by natural gas, this would be a huge shift. The plan talks of major renovations to make buildings more energy efficient. What will our homes look and feel like in the future? Do we have examples now?

Hybrid electric vehicles have been on the road for more than 15 years. Pure electric cars are slowly gaining market share as their range improves. Ontario, like many governments, has been subsidizing these vehicles for years. Hybrid buses are being used by some cities. For some time there have been promises to switch commuter trains from diesel to electric. The Ontario plan talks about more renewable fuels and liquid natural gas for heavy trucks. We can easily imagine much quieter cities with electric vehicles whirring by, and much less air pollution in our lungs and settling on our homes. Will the roar of the diesel bus engine fade into history? We will likely see more wind turbines and solar panels. There may be more biogas created from composting wastes. This can replace some fossil fuels. Hydrogen has long been promoted as a clean fuel. Is this likely? We are moving to denser cities with more people living in apartments because fewer can afford to buy houses. How are cities likely to look in a low-carbon world? What about towns?

Political leaders need to spend a lot more time helping people understand what life may look like in a decade or two. They should not be too prescriptive, because no one can predict the economic, social and technological changes that will shape decisions. The process should be a dialogue with people and businesses. It is time to put a more human face on the transformation we must make.