Since 1995 there have been 25 global conferences on climate change. At every one our so-called political leaders have kicked the can down the road and sung from a bright green hymnbook.

Greta Thunberg has disparaged the refrain as nothing more than “blah, blah, blah.”

She is right of course. Blah, blah blah has kept emissions rising, along with energy spending and its twin sibling unbridled economic growth.

Blah, blah blah has become the standard substitute for the conversation that needs to occur at global conferences and in every public venue: how to shrink the economy and beat a sustainable retreat?

And how do we do that without unhinging a highly complex society that is already teetering on the verge of collapse due to overconsumption of everything?

The notion of shrinking the economy isn’t as medieval as you might think, given the enormous waste of our high-tech and high energy civilization. The existing system contains so much slack and fat that we could easily reduce our energy spending to levels common in the 1960s and 1970s. That wasn’t exactly the Dark Ages. (More on why this is possible, what stands in the way, and how to get there, in a second piece tomorrow.)

Of course such a conversation is considered impossible by our leaders who are ruled by the mantra of growth and short-term election hurdles.

So in Canada, the world’s fourth largest oil exporting nation, the blah blah blah refrain gets louder by the day. We want our emissions and our green cake, too.

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